[rlucas]

There are an awful lot of businesses that charge huge margins and use that extra cash flow, plus their scale, to essentially fence out new entrants by a mix of sales/marketing, channel spiffery/bribery, and regulatory capture.

It's often a fairly "bad for you"/"predatory" product, too, but the problem is that it's very hard to create a new entrant doing it the "good for you" way, because all that extra margin the bad guys make can be used to squeeze you out of the market. Legacy industry examples would include whole life insurance, title insurance, payday lending, and whatever it was that "Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp" was selling (not the historical D&B) a few years back.

I consider it enough of a pattern of "bad money chases out good" that I identify it regularly among pitches I receive.

[matthewdgreen]

Premium credit cards, for example. The ones that give customers sweet points or cash-back deals, but then charge huge (invisible to the customer) merchant fees on the back end. https://thepointsguy.com/guide/guide-to-credit-card-merchant...

[rwmurrayVT]

This really hurts those of us that are unable to access these types of reward points. It pushes additional costs onto us all, but especially onto those without exceptional credit.

[hinkley]

Someone taught me long ago that if you're using a debit card in a store you actually like, you should chose the debit option rather than the credit option, as the fees are lower.

I sometimes do the reverse when I'm in a shop that I don't have good things to say about, especially if I think they just cheated me in some legally defensible way. Like Captain Ahab trying to kill the whale with his pocket knife. Fuck you, I'm taking 1.5% of your life away!