How Companies Get You To Spend More Money Than You Need To

I'm not sure this post fits in with this blog, but I wanted to tell this story...

Recently I was looking for a new utensil holder that goes in a kitchen drawer. I wanted one of the plain old Rubbermaid kind I've been buying for decades. While I was at Walmart, I checked the kitchen aisle. They had only one kind of holder and it was around sixteen dollars. I didn't like it anyway.

Sometime later, still in need of a utensil holder, I checked the Bed Bath & Beyond internet site. They didn't have anything like the plain Rubbermaid one, and the utensil holders they did have were priced way too high.  I was started to feel a bit shell-shocked and miffed as well.

I hunted around on the internet and finally found the Rubbermaid holders, selling for from $3 to $6.

It seems to me that stores are deliberately carrying higher-priced items now instead of the ("regular old") low-cost items they used to keep on hand for people on a budget. When you need to buy something, you look over the selection that is in the store where you happen to be shopping. If all the utensil  holders in a store cost fifteen dollars or more, you say to yourself, "Well, that's just what they cost."

You might wonder later on what happened to those old Rubbermaid holders. They're still around actually. They are being sold to internet companies for resale.

If the stores we walk around in (some of which are supposed to sell low cost items!) decided to sell the basic Rubbermaid utensil holder, how many people would still buy that? Some of you may be thinking, well, it's plastic, do we want to use that? Plastic is more hygenic than wood, so in this respect is probably a better choice. Even if this product did contain some amount of BPA (which it doesn't, I called the company), you aren't drinking out of it or storing food in it.

It isn't fun (at all) to have to scarf around all over the internet to find a utensil holder and then to look at paying shipping charges for it. I lumped this purchase in with chew sticks for my dog and a book, and got free shipping from Amazon.

What's going on? We have less money than ever these days with the price of gas and groceries and to top it off stores we  trust to give us low cost goods are stocking their shelves with higher-priced items, when they could offer you a comparable product for less than half the price. Buyer Beware!