Random Flux

Apple is the latest major company to get into nickel and dime crime, which is safe, legal and fantastically profitable. Their new iPhone ringtones function gets people to pay 99 cents for something they already own, and money for nothing is always the best best profit margin you can have. It used to be called theft.

Robbers used to hang out in the woods and collect loot from unwary travellers by threatening to insert sharp instruments into their soft parts or banging them over the head with a heavy stick. This is no longer necessary, there are much better ways to boil a frog nowadays.

Boil a frog? According to urban legend, a frog dropped into boiling water is smart enough to jump out right away. But put a frog in a pot of cold water and heat it up slowly and it will boil to death. That’s how nickel and dime crime works and we’re being boiled to death because we’re just too dumb to jump out of the pot.

The trick is to sell very small things at exorbitantly over-inflated prices. A telephone ringtone essentially has zero value. Apple is charging users 99 cents to cut up to 30 seconds out of a song they already own and turn it into a ringtone for their iPhone. But since it’s convenient and it’s “only” 99 cents people will do it. Lots of people will do it. Looks like we don’t mind being robbed…just a little bit.

This is probably even more profitable than selling inkjet ink at the same kind of prices as hard drugs. But it’s the same principle: Nobody would ever pay $560 for a pint of ink, but lots of people seem happy to buy ink in cartridges at a price of $1 per milliliter, which comes to the same thing.