It’s been a long time since I’ve been ripped off.
Recently, I must admit, I got ripped off. But, it lit a fire under me.
Last Thursday, my AC went out. As you may know, I live in Florida in the so this was the worse time for that to occur. On top of that, it went out at 7pm as the workday was over.
I quickly made an appointment with a company I had used the year before, when one of my properties was struck by lightning. I was able to book online, and I went to bed knowing they’d be there Friday morning between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m.
The next day, at almost 10 a.m., with no confirmation in sight, I called to check on the status. I was told that their technician was stuck at another project, but I’d be getting one of their top technicians. This gave me even more hope that they’d fix the AC expeditiously.
In hindsight, I’m wondering if that was priming, perhaps, but I’ll circle back here.
Not too long after the call, the technician arrived. Not one, but two, in fact.
I explained the situation and what had already been done, including how the AC had been dry-vac’ed out, or at least attempted, with no resolve. They reassured me that this was normal. In the Florida summer heat, many people were experiencing issues due to ACs working extra hard. They’d check it out and, if it was simple enough, have it fixed in no time.
We had a gentleman’s handshake, and they went to work.
After about an hour, they came back with their results. It looked like the drain line was indeed backed up, and it was a significant blockage.
Based on how the AC unit was positioned, the drain went underground, which explained why a normal dry vac wouldn’t cut it. They also mentioned that the AC unit was over a decade old, so it had some wear and tear, but it was still kicking and fortunately they could fix it.
I had two options: they could fix the immediate problem relatively quickly with a Band-Aid option, or they could do more comprehensive work.
This all made sense. Sure, let’s keep going, I responded. I asked for the prices for both options, and they came back with two different quotes.
To do the comprehensive work, clean the AC from top to bottom, and perform the additional work they said was needed would cost close to $3,000. Makes sense for an older unit.
Now, the main issue, the issue they had just told me everyone was experiencing in this Florida heat, was simply clearing the drain line. That would cost me $700.
During those few seconds of staring at the price, several things went through my head:
Seven hundred dollars was obviously less than $3,000, although $700 still seemed pretty steep.
I had family coming into town that weekend for a wedding, and as the host house, I wanted my guests to be comfortable.
I wanted my kids and wife comfortable as well. We could probably tough it out, but I didn’t want my guests doing that.
Then there was the biggest question: would I even be able to find another AC company on a Friday before weekend rates kicked in? Probably not.
So, reluctantly, I paid the $700 for a drain flush.
Later that evening, sitting underneath the breeze of the cool AC, I reflected on the day, and I felt some type of way about paying $700 for a drain flush. Mind you, they added a “nitrogen blast” as well.
As I reflected on it, my wife softly brought up that $700 seemed kinda high, which I agreed with. But it was Friday night. Family was coming into town the next day, we had a wedding to attend, Church on Sunday, kids’ drop-off and pick-up, and everything else that comes with life. I’d revisit the AC issue Monday morning.
During that weekend, however, whenever time made itself available, I began to realize just how much I had been ripped off.
Recently, my wife has repeatedly been telling me about how much prices have gone up.
For example, she’ll go to one store and something we normally buy might cost roughly $8. Then she’ll go somewhere else and see what appears to be the same thing for $12 or $15, almost double.
Sometimes we’ll go to one of the bigger wholesale stores where they sell the same type of item in a larger size. When you break everything down per unit, you realize that the smaller store charging $12 might effectively be charging 2-3x more than the wholesale store selling the larger product for $20. She always laments to m: what exactly is going on with these prices?
The AC experience finally made something click.
There is the actual inflation occurring within the economy — which has been fueled by the belief in inflation — but then, there’s the greed that can take advantage of that belief.
That second component is what I experienced firsthand.
Why the same drain flush can cost $150 at one company and $700 at another—and what that gap actually reveals
The two hidden components of inflation that let corporations rob you in broad daylight
How a “new sales model” is engineered to strip away your ability to shop around
The exact move that got me a $500 refund the very next day
Why deflation — not more spending — is the courageous act that built the American middle class
To accurately move throughout the world, you must understand some socioeconomic concepts, and this is something I write about often on Unorthodoxy.
You have to understand how propaganda works. You have to understand belief, because from a population control perspective, these ideas matter. If millions of people can be convinced to expect something, that expectation begins influencing how they behave when that thing occurs.
In 2022, Jerome Powell famously warned that fighting inflation would bring “some pain” to American households and businesses. One of the most important things about inflation is the role belief plays. If people believe inflation will remain high and prices will increase, that belief itself influences behavior.
Eventually, a price that would have made you say, “Absolutely not,” five years ago can suddenly make you shrug and say, “Well, inflation.”
This is literally the principle of faith being used in a negative direction. You believe something is going to happen, you expect it, and then your behavior begins accommodating that expectation.
As we’ve seen, even though we’ve gone from one political party to another, the issue of higher prices has not simply disappeared. It merely takes different forms and receives different explanations, tariffs being one of the more recent ones.
One thing I’ve consistently argued in my work is that what we casually call inflation begins looking a lot more like robbery. The AC situation helped me understand exactly how that can happen, because once everybody believes things are expensive, what stops somebody from making them even more expensive?
The more inflation rose, the more people came to expect it to remain high, and they built that belief into wage and pricing decisions. — Jerome Powell, Federal Reserve Chair, Aug 26th, 2022.
Once corporations and businesses understand that the population already expects higher prices, what is stopping them from raising prices beyond what is actually necessary?
If everybody already believes everything is expensive, the higher price comes pre-explained. You don’t necessarily have to convince someone that $700 is reasonable. They may convince themselves.
Everything is expensive now. Labor costs more. It’s Florida. It’s summertime. It’s an emergency. It’s inflation.
Before you know it, you’re handing somebody $700 to clear an AC drain.
And here is where we come into greedflation.
Greedflation describes what happens when “companies increase prices beyond what rising costs alone would seem to justify, allowing profit growth to become part of the inflationary story.”
Research and reporting during the inflationary period found situations where company profits increased considerably alongside those costs.
Analysts have typically laid the blame on supply-chain bottlenecks created by excess demand during the COVID-19 pandemic and exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The war also increased energy prices, leading to further rises in inflation as suppliers factored in higher transport and running costs.
While this obviously contributed to rising prices, the report finds that company profits increased at a much faster rate than costs did, in a process often dubbed “greedflation.”
Profits for companies in some of the world’s largest economies rose by 30% between 2019 and 2022, significantly outpacing inflation, according to the group’s research of 1,350 firms across the U.S., the U.K., Europe, Brazil, and South Africa.
In the U.K., the research found that 90% of profit increases occurred among just 11% of publicly listed firms. Profiteering was more broad in the U.S., where a third of publicly listed firms were responsible for most of the increase in profits.
In April, Société Générale economist Albert Edwards released a scathing note saying he hadn’t seen anything like the current levels of corporate greed in his four decades working in finance. He said companies were using the war in Ukraine as an excuse to hike prices in search of profits.
That is the darker side of the psychology being applied on the population.
People still have to eat. People still need electricity. People still need housing. People still need transportation. Spending on necessities does not simply disappear because prices become unreasonable.
Unfortunately, neither does greed.
This is exactly what I experienced with this AC company.
Throughout that weekend, I started researching what exactly should I have paid to get work done. How much should an AC drain flush actually cost?
I started calling around. I called three other companies asking what they would charge for similar work. One person told me roughly $150. Another said a technician would have to come out before giving an exact quote. I wasn’t able to connect with the third.
While researching, I discovered something else that made this entire experience more interesting. A lot of home-service companies operate under a model where they don’t give you the price until a technician gets to your house and diagnoses the problem.
On the surface, this makes sense. How can they know what something costs if they don’t know what’s wrong? But think about what that model also creates.
By the time the price is given to you, the technician is already standing inside your house. The problem has already been diagnosed. You may have already paid a service fee. You probably called them because something needs to be fixed. Depending on what broke, you may be uncomfortable, stressed, desperate, rushed, or simply tired of dealing with it.
Then the quote comes, and now you have to make a decision. Do you tell the technician to leave, start calling companies again, schedule another appointment, potentially pay another diagnostic fee, and wait another day? Or do you just pay?
That was exactly my situation. I had family coming into town. I wanted everybody comfortable. It was Friday. I wanted the AC fixed. I had just been told I had one of their “top technicians.” All of these little factors began pulling me toward one decision: pay the $700.
These were sales tactics being deployed without me fully understanding them.
With hindsight being 20/20, I could have waited. My family survived Hurricane Milton and went three days without AC. We could have thugged this one out. But in that moment, under those circumstances, I was coerced into one corner.
Fortunately, my brother had also recently experienced something very similar in Florida, and he paid around $200. Then I looked at my own previous records. I had similar work done the year before for $189.
Everything I was finding kept pointing toward the same conclusion: $700 was extremely high compared with the other prices I could find.
Now I started getting irate. I had been ripped off, and it hurt. It stung. I got mad.
This was Saturday and Sunday while I was doing the research, and that righteous indignation of, “How could you do this to me?” started rising. I put it on my books to call the AC company first thing Monday morning, and that’s exactly what I did.
Monday morning, I called the company.
After working my way through the AI prompts, I finally got somebody on the phone and told them I would like a refund. They responded surprisingly calmly and said they would patch me over to their manager.
My first thought was: wow, you’re just going to let me go straight to somebody handling refunds? Then another thought came to me. How often do you receive refund calls that you already have a process ready for this? Maybe that’s normal, but I still found it interesting.
Eventually, I got the manager on the phone and explained the situation. “I got charged $700 for a drain flush.”
He told me he had been doing this for quite some time and that this was around the prevailing price. I said, “Absolutely not,” and then I listed my receipts.
My brother had just had virtually the same thing done in Florida for around $200. The research I had done showed me something closer to $250. Most importantly, I had gotten similar work done myself the previous year for $189. There was simply no way I was accepting that $700 was a normal price.
Then something interesting happened. The manager said something along the lines of, “Yeah, $700 is a little steep.”
Sir, you just told me two seconds ago that you’ve been in this industry for quite some time and $700 was a normal prevailing price. Now $700 is a little steep?
He asked what kind of refund I wanted. I told him, I want all of it. He said he couldn’t do that because they had performed the work, so he had to charge something. Fair enough. I told him I wanted $500 back — which was my original intent to begin with.
Ladies and gentlemen, lo and behold, the next day I had a $500 refund sitting in my bank account.
I ended up paying $200, which was almost exactly what everything had been telling me the work should cost.
What did this whole exercise teach me?
First, greed is real prevailing force in our society.
I’ve talked about this throughout my work as I’ve written about greed as one of the great corrupting forces in our society. Check out my work on the deadening where I discuss how greed has shaped and damaged our world.
This experience allowed me to see the process at the smallest possible level. Not in Washington, not on Wall Street, not inside some multinational corporation, but in my house.
Second, the spirit of inflation is real. There is a psychology surrounding inflation. Once we collectively accept that everything is supposed to cost more, higher prices stop shocking us. Unless you stop and investigate, you may not know which one you’re dealing with.
Third, the only way you fight back is by doing something very simple and increasingly unorthodox: you say no.
Deflation, economically speaking, refers to prices falling rather than continuously rising. I’ve discussed periods of deflation and their relationship to American economic history in my previous work, including my article That Which Should Not Be Named.
In our current world, where the average citizen is repeatedly told that prices will rise, everything will become more expensive, and we simply have to accept it, perhaps what needs to return is the courage to say no.
I’m going to shop around. I’m going to research. I’m going to ask what somebody else charges. I’m going to call you out when your price is unreasonable, and I’m going to demand a fair price.
That is the consumer side of deflation.
Prices cannot rise forever if enough people eventually refuse to pay them. We’re seeing elements of this in housing. When buyers stop accepting increasingly inflated prices, sellers eventually have to respond. The market works in both directions, but it requires people willing to say no.
It’s been a while since I’ve been ripped off, but in hindsight, this was an educating and wonderful experience. My AC got fixed, my family was comfortable, I learned something about how modern service pricing works, and I got the $500 refund I asked for.
The biggest takeaway goes far beyond one AC company. Inflation does something psychologically that doesn’t get discussed enough: it conditions us to expect higher prices.
And when that happens, somebody can charge you $700 for something that costs $200 and depend on you saying to yourself, “Well, I guess that’s just what things cost now.”
Don’t do this.
Guard yourself, guard your heart, guard your mind. Do your research, ask questions, shop around, and sometimes have the courage to simply say no.
Inflation has two engines, not one. There’s the belief of inflation—manufactured through media and official statements until you expect high prices—and the greed that rides on top of it, where corporations raise prices simply because they know you’ll pay.
The “self-fulfilling prophecy” is by design. When Powell says inflation becomes self-fulfilling if people believe in it, that’s the ruling class telling you the play before they run it. Belief is the mechanism.
Modern sales models are built to remove your leverage. No price until the work is assessed, then a high-pressure decision under circumstances that make shopping around feel impossible.
Righteous anger is useful when it moves you to act. The $500 refund didn’t come from accepting the “prevailing price”—it came from research, receipts, and refusing the premise.
Deflation is a posture, not just an economic term. It’s the courage to say no, shop around, and pay a fair price. It’s what built the middle class, and it’s what breaks the spell.
Before any emergency service call, get one comparison quote—even a 5-minute one. The pressure to decide “right now” is the product. A single competing number breaks the spell.
Keep your own receipts. Franklin won his refund with hard numbers: his brother’s $200, last year’s $189, the $150 quote, the $250 research ceiling. Save what you’ve paid for recurring services so you have leverage when a price feels wrong.
When a price feels off, say so—out loud, to the manager. Name a specific number you’ll accept. Franklin asked for $500 and got it the next day.
Practice “deflation” this week. Pick one recurring purchase and shop it around. Refuse the first price on principle at least once.
Read the companion pieces. Revisit Franklin’s work on inflation and robbery, “The Spiritual Force of Greed,” and “That Which Should Not Be Named” to connect this incident to the larger framework.
As always, thanks for the time and attention. Have a great and wonderful day.
— Ashe,
Franklin O’Kanu
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