by Kelsey Rowlson
Guest Writer
Are you tired of paying a ridiculous amount for products? I sure as hell am. It’s painful enough to pay over $3.50 for gas, but when it comes to paying for other things that are so blatantly jacked up in price, it just seems like a slap in the face to the consumer.
If you’re actually paying for your music, you’ve probably noticed that ITunes has continually jacked up their prices. Forget paying 99 cents for a song, that’s a way of the past! Consumers are now being charged $1.29 per song, and did ITunes forget to mention that they’re now attaching 11 cents in taxes to that price? Whoops, their bad.
When I was little, the price of a candy bar used to be around 50 cents. Now it can be found in ranging prices from 80 cents to up. I was outraged when I went to buy a mid-day, please-decrease-my-stress, 3 Musketeers bar from Whatcom’s Dockside Cafe. The same candy bar, 98 cents the year before, had gone up to $1.03! I was outraged. You should never have to bring more than a dollar bill with you in order to pay for a candy bar.
Cell phone bills can cause many people stress and anger. With all of the hidden fees, your $80 plan can end up costing you over $100. “They charge you for the most mundane things,” said Emily Huntington, 23. She added, “I used to have T-Mobile, and my blackberry went through the wash, and to replace it wasn’t covered on my insurance. I got a cheap phone and they still made me pay for the data plan of the blackberry even though I explained my situation to them. This phone couldn’t even take pictures (or accept them, for that matter). Every month there was a new charge, and then we cancelled our plan. That was an extra $200.”
David Weber, a 19 year-old Western student, has noticed the price hike at Mt. Baker. Saying that the day passes are $51 a day now and he believes they used to be $42 when he started four or five years ago. Weber added that “Although the raise in price won’t make me stop snowboarding, it has caused me to either cut back how many times I go or sacrifice something else I could have done with the money.”
Maybe I do have something in common with the Occupy protesters; corporations are taking too much of my money and it isn’t fair.
