I was recently talking to Rebeca Cardenas of Pure Spa Direct fame about the beauty industry. What became apparent to me is that this industry is not about making people better looking, but about providing people hope in our troubling times.   I always believed that the beauty industry was focused on addressing people's flaws as opposed to selling snake oil.

So is this one of the great scams of all time?

Bottled Water would definitely be on the top list of scams. Acquafina selling us bottled tap water.

The scam that I despise most is the rebate offer. Under this scam, you need to fill out a form on a product that you purchase and return it to some rebate company in the Midwest.  From what I have heard, nearly 65% to 75% of these rebates are never returned so in effect most of us are purchasing the products at the retail prices.

Another crazy scam is software sales.  Many software publishers ship products that are not ready for prime time but they charge us full price for these products.  Microsoft has been a notorious player in shipping products with defects.  A general rule with their products is to wait until the second or third generation of each product to that they can fix bugs that should have been dealt with in their beta release.

So what can we do about it other than avoid these scams and try to live the clean life?

My suggestion is to grin and bear it and live by these two thoughts:

Don't worry be happy, and

Don't sweat the small stuff