Shampoo: Washing away the natural oils in our hair, causing the body to produce them in higher volume, causing our hair to get greasy, creating a need for shampoo.

Recycling: Only about 10% of plastic is actually recycled, the rest is sold to countries without environmental laws, and they are dumped irresponsibly. Composting is simple, effective, and would reduce landfill use by about 30%, not to mention creating a useful end product. Yet it is rarely promoted.

Mattresses and box springs: They are worse on our spines and end up causing neck and back issues. Sleeping on a firmer surface, even a thin mattress or pad on the ground, alleviates these issues.

Lawns: Turning a useful piece of land on which we can grow food into a barren wasteland and making it into a chore that requires expensive equipment and encourages chemical use.

Sales tax on food: Some countries and US states have them. It's a tax on existence. Also, taxes on gym memberships and personal protective equipment. The government simultaneously claims it wants healthy, safe citizens, and charges them when they try to be healthy and safe.

Car centric cities. Cities can and should be designed for people, keeping cars mostly out. The result is beautiful cities designed for people that make governments lots of money but the car companies will be earning a little less, ooffff

Make cities walkable, create actual safe roads for bikes, create 15 minute cities.

Look at the Netherlands, it damn works awesome

The "Covid is over" propaganda. Covid is not over. It is still killing people, still disabling people, still giving people lifelong autoimmune conditions and other long-term health problems. "Covid is over" Is code for "Go back to work so the capitalist class can reap the rewards of your labor, no matter how dead or disabled you become in the process."

The notion that capitalism is the end-all be-all of how society functions/works.

Printers

Private insurance

In-game shops

DLCs: Games are expected to have DLCs nowadays, so game devs purposefully hold back some ideas for potential DLCs, often crippling the main game as a result.

Subscription services: For pretty much anything, but especially those automated monthly payments, which you won't bother cancelling, even if you feel like you're not using the service to its fullest.

Giving money to politicians.

Capitalism

capitalism

Lemmy just made a suggestion

Rent

Herbalife, fucking herbalife.

This weekend, I went into what looked like an indie smoothie shop and dropped an ungodly amount of money on a delicious sounding shake... only to watch the lady drop a scoops of powder and ONE freeze-dried strawberry into a cup with ice. Tasted like ass.

Yet they do have regulars to that shit, and nobody is taking them out of business. I want my fucking $11 back. So anyone reading this doing a class action against Herbalife, I want in...

But I doubt it, since it's a scam that's so normalized we don't realize it's a scam anymore.

"Disposable" electronics

In the past few years I've seen "turns out printer ink is a scam" videos trending at least three times on YouTube, so I'm assuming printer ink.

Chiropractic.

I'd wager fewer than 25% of Americans know that it's quackery invented in the 1890s.

Video games having microtransactions and "chests" or otherwise with random rewards.

I'll try to list things that aren't in the typical internet echo chamber. Bring on the controversy. These are just my opinions.

50% of the shelf space at the grocery store is just different forms of corn syrup, sometimes with some trans fat mixed in, generationally twisting our idea of what food is in a race to the cheapest, most addictive product.

The only way it's profitable for someone to knock on your door to sell ANYTHING is if they are obscenely inflating the price (think 100-600% markup)

Most supplements, especially expensive ones with TV ads

Dr Scholl's and the goodfeet store

Genuine leather is just about the opposite of what you'd think

Bamboo fabric which is pretty much just a different way to say rayon but is pitched as a revolutionary and environmentally friendly cloth

Most bladeless fans just hide fan blades in the base

Many cleaning products don't do better than diluted soap and water (even for sanitizing) especially the ones with TV ads

Financial planners who are actually financial product salespeople

Most single-purpose kitchen gadgets, especially as-seen-on-TV

The realtors racket: I just paid $30k for an internet posting and mediocre advice

Many personal hygiene products are just repackaging the same two or three active ingredients by the same one or two megacorporations

Essential oils (even ignoring mystical claims) big names charge an order of magnitude higher than they should

Full time work.

Retirement savings connected to the stockk market. Gives a perverse incentive for everyone to continue the wealth transfer upwards, since the stock market is largely based on the vibes of a handful of very rich people.

Land speculation

In 2021 I would have said Crypto. Now everyone but the most dense people see it for the scam it is.

Asking this question every single week.

Land enclosure. Screwed everything up for everyone stg

Microtransactions in video games. Remember when everyone got pissed over horse armor?

Trading Card Games. The whole trading card thing is about psychologically manipulating you into buying shit you don't need, shoulda been stamped out as soon as cigarette companies started doing it, but if you think about it the ideal capitalist institution sells you literally nothing and selling people heavy paper with little pictures on it is damn close to that ideal.

Software. Should be free, isn't. Blame Bill Gates.

Advertising. We all know about propaganda (even though we might disagree on what is and isn't propaganda at times) and we all know it's bad, but we literally let rich people propagandize us every single day in every single orifice.

Car dealerships.

The internet.

And no I don't mean every single part of it. But somewhere along the line there became an expectation that the internet be free. That continued for sites that rapidly grew well beyond the point where it was reasonable for them to be maintained for free, but instead of a natural progression where we pay for things we use, we simply became the product of the internet at large in the form of data about every aspect of our lives.

We now live and exist in a world where very little of what we do is private in any way, our preferences and relationships and tendencies are digitized and correlated and used against us largely without our active, conscious knowledge. And it's all so Gmail, Facebook, and YouTube can be free. Or rather..."free".

It has always felt like the biggest scam ever to me, that everything I do and think online should be bought and sold without me really ever having much of a chance to have a say in that.

The gop

Social media

Most security on consumer hardware

Let's take android for example. There are legitimate security implementations like SELinux, full disk encryption but something like samsung's knox is useless outside of enterprise use and kills OS level modifications

Block chain - there's still no legitimate practical use for it

Health insurance. Actually that probably doesn't really count since most of us know it's a scam.

Religion.

Health insurance.

Would be far easier to name things that are not a scam and assume the rest is just a scam in waiting.

Libraries, Pets, Sunrises/sets, Nigerian princes needing loans, Mr. Rogers

Everything else is probably looking to take money from you in some fashion.

The United States of America