Everything in life has a cycle right? Like the home electronics industry, you wouldn’t know it, but they already have the technology that will be introduced in ten years, but they hold on to it and lock it up with patents and such until a time comes when it will benefit them the most. I mean look at it from a business stand point, lets say you have products A through E that are already completely developed and ready to go. Each product starting with A gets better and better than the previous product, yet they are all the same thing, would you begin selling them each at one time? Heck no!

You would start selling product A first and after about six months you would release product B as a newer and better version of product A, and then several more months later you would release product C and so on and so forth, all the while still developing, testing, and refining products F through Z for future release. The reason is because as a consumer you would walk into a store and see product A, and as long as product B hasn’t been released yet, it is the best available product on the market, so an inflated price for the “new” technology would be justified because there is nothing better. Right?

However, if you found products A, B, and C all sitting pretty on the store shelves, you would have a choice in what you bought, and that choice is costly for the industry if it happens before they want it to. Take the first Playstation game console that came out in 1997, it was $300 the first two weeks it was out, right before Christmas mind you, but in the beginning of the next year there was a $50 drop in the price. The price was inflated because of the higher demand for the holidays, but as soon as the demand fell off a bit, the price went down to entice buyers to continue opening their wallets. That’s Economics 101 though, but what they don’t teach you is what they have locked away in a very secret and secure place.

With all three products you could choose A if you wanted to be thrifty, or you could go with B if you wanted to save a few bucks but still feel trendy and up to date with technology, and for those who didn’t care about the cost you could choose product C and have bragging rights. That little scenario has some value in itself simply because eventually all products become product A, and on it’s way down they have to hit product B status first. I hope everyone understands that when manufacturers are developing new products and setting prices that this life cycle is very carefully calculated for maximum profit, and as we all know from the recent earnings reports from certain companies that set records, the money isn’t all earmarked for research and development as they say it is.

So lets say that consumer debt is a multi-billion dollar a year industry, because after all, it is, isn’t that one hell of a motive to manipulate things a bit to earn a slightly larger piece of the pie? I think it is, so much so in fact that I’m going to tell you about it. I will be brief though, lets think about logically, not morally or ethically because I can assure you those two items are not in the vocabulary of a good businessman. If you have a business that could easily profit from another’s debt, wouldn’t be in your company’s best interest to try to cause as much debt as possible? It certainly would, but there are so many laws to help protect the voting public from such things, right? Well yes, but how many unsolved murders have their been in the last ten years alone? If people can get away with murder so often, you can bet your last buck that big and powerful corporations can get away with something so small as hiring a bored computer technician to create some kind of nasty little toy that will cause debt for someone else.

It’s just one of the dirty little secrets that our governments and businesses do not want spread around, and while they cannot control it, they can make sure that articles like this one you’re reading right now will be brushed aside as just speculation, even with good points, they’re counting on the public being skeptical, their counting on it right to the bank.

I for one believe the best way to make your opinion count is to cut them off where it hurts the most, it’s your money and these days it is next to impossible to find a company that truly is the only one to offer a service, so take your money else where if they do not do business in a way that makes you proud to be a customer. And yes pride is another thing that businesses like to use to lure people away from competitors, but they can only predict such a thing as American pride, you can change the forecast.