Consumer Exploitation Quotes

I don't think the government is out to get me or help someone else get me but it wouldn't surprise me if they were out to sell me something or help someone else sell me something. I mean, why else would the Census Bureau want to know my telephone number?

Banks were already seen as greedy and arrogant. They have now reached the depths of humiliation in the wake of the LIBOR manipulation, PPI mis-selling, and bank swaps mis-selling.

The American people fear there is some gouging going on.

The consumer knows that his prices are made for him by those who control the avenues of trade and the highways of commerce.

The marketing of anything is full of exploitation and lies and hype.

If one individual, or one class, can call in the aid of authority to ward off the effects of competition, it acquires a privilege and at the cost of the whole community; it can make sure of profits not altogether due to the productive services rendered, but composed in part of an actual tax upon consumers for its private profit' which tax it commonly shares with the authority that thus unjustly lent its support.

Advertising is tax deductible, so we all pay for the privilege of being manipulated and controlled.

Marketing is the devil.

The successful companies try to keep the new entrants down. Now that's great for a company like ours. We make more money that way because we have less competition and less innovation. But for the country as a whole, it's horrible.

With less competition, corporations can use their power to raise prices, limit choice for consumers, cut wages for workers, crowd out start-ups and small businesses.

Regulators all too often encourage or approve unreasonably high prices, inadequate service, and anti-competitive behavior. The cost of this regulation is always passed on to the consumer. And that cost is astronomical.

The houses were built to sell. That they killed the tenants was no concern of the builder’s.

The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.

The oil companies are gouging the American citizenry aggressively, relentlessly, and without any sense of conscience whatsoever.

We as Americans assume that big companies are bad, and big power companies are even worse.

It's clear price gouging... The oil companies are gouging the American citizenry aggressively, relentlessly, and without any sense of conscience whatsoever.

Middle men are paying farmers less, charging consumers more and pocketing the difference.... For the first time in history consumers have gotten soaked by a drought.

Regulation has gone astray. . . . Either because they have become captives of regulated industries or captains of outmoded administrative agencies, regulators all too often encourage or approve unreasonably high prices, inadequate service, and anticompetitive behavior. The cost of this regulation is always passed on to the consumer. And that cost is astronomical.

This is an especially good time for you vacationers who plan to fly, because the Reagan administration, as part of the same policy under which it recently sold Yellowstone National Park to Wayne Newton, has "deregulated" the airline industry. What this means for you, the consumer, is that the airlines are no longer required to follow any rules whatsoever. They can show snuff movies. They can charge for oxygen. They can hire pilots right out of Vending Machine Refill Person School.

Capitalism is supposedly free enterprise. Supposedly about the free individual. But capitalism itself is so massive that the guy on the street gets caught in paying rent, taxes, and he doesn't own himself at all.

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.

People have been paying their premiums for years and the insurance companies just raped them.

In a way, advertising, for all its shallowness, its love of design, its modishness and its self-justification, is curiously innocent. The idea of the hidden persuader or the manipulator is largely absurd.

People have been upset in the past about pay-per-view fights because they got sold a lie or an illusion that was not real.

Some big pharmaceutical companies have engaged in dirty tricks to extend their patents, holding monopolies on certain drugs to pad their profits at consumers' expense.