1. Pay at the end- In today’s online lifestyle you will see this a lot. You play a game online or do an online IQ test, etc. Answer all the questions, click all the right tabs and finally get to the “last” page only to discover that you must subscribe to a pay service to view results or request a minimum number of products/services from their sponsors.

2. Hidden fees- This somewhat alludes to what CGC said about U-HAUL. Buy a product online at a great price, fill in all required fields such as credit card number, e-mail, physical address, etc. Then find out that after shipping/handling and many other services you will be charged twice or more what you initially expected to pay.

These tricks are legitimate but immoral and dishonest.

Here are a few more:

1. We ran out — buy something similar.

They try to get you buy to a product they’d rather you buy by regularly running out of the product/brand that you went there looking for.

2. Wah! I gotta have it!

They offer you something then take it away. (Web sites do this all the time.) Most people would rather not get something in the first place than have it taken away.

3. Don’t list the price. (Sears does this on Land’s End clothes.)

It forces you think about how much you want it, before you know what it costs. Once you’ve decided, you’re usually willing to pay more than you otherwise would. BTW, this trick is illegal.

4. Discount only with a store credit card.

This is just a way to get your SSN, which is 100 times worse than a normal loyalty cards. They can gather information about customers across multiple businesses and use it to figure out how to raise prices.

In the “sneaky and borderline sketchy” department, rebates are right up there with MLM. I just hate rebates…they’re a nuisance and half the time you never get the money back after you’ve jumped through their hoops, anyway. It’s just another way to take your money.

I often tell sales reps who trot out a rebate as a sales gimmick that if their company could afford to give me a rebate, they can afford to sell me the product at a lower price in the store.

A big discriminator I always use to evaluate the “goodness” of a product being pushed via MLM is to ask if said product is selling outside the network? If not (i.e., the product/service(s) are really only being sold among folks within the network) then stay far far away!

Best,

Len
Len Penzo dot Com

These are pretty sneaky methods, that’s for sure. The charity one in particular always gets me; unless you are planning to buy that product anyway, it’s much more efficient and helpful to the charity to give directly and cut out the middle man.

So don’t take my use of sneaky as illegitimate. I specifically mentioned in the first paragraph that businesses can learn from these tricks… and that I even used one for my Valentine’s Day post.

I wish I had remembered to add this one.

Agree on that 401k article. I critiqued his article here: Kiyosaki is the Ann Coulter of Personal Finance.

I give Robert Kiyosaki credit for helping me think of my finances in a different way (assets vs. liabilities), but it pretty much ends there. In fact, it can often be a good idea to just do the opposite of what he says… for instance with 401k plans (http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/article/richricher/205569).

I don’t think Donald Trump has ever built a successful multi-level marketing business without using the Trump brand… (and I’m not sure he’s built one with the Trump brand).

I’d like to see more details as to what is being taught at Harvard.

As for the Taco Bell thing – I just throw these away. A pizza place where I used to live would randomly spit out requests to participate in their surveys. It must have been something in the neighborhood of 1:25 or 1:50 receipts. Participate in the survey, and you got a free small pizza, salad (topped with lots of french dressing), and a drink. That was awesome.