Dear Mel,
My folks and relatives bought me this TV set from commissery. It cost more than 400 bucks and it don’t work from the time I got it, like you couldn’t change channels and there was no sound. I tried writing to the company named on the label but it was returned addressee unknown. So I sent a kite to commisery and now they say I got to pay 50 bucks to fix it. This don’t seem right. Like, it never worked, see, so why should I pay more to fix it? I mean, my folks live on minimum wage and could’a bought a name brand one that worked for 40 bucks but we got to buy what the commisary sells and it sucks. And other dudes here that bought these same tv’s have the same problems like some don’t even have plugs. What can we do?
Frustrated Life-Timer
Dear Frustrated,
Your frustration is understandable, but this is how it works in our great country. The prison industry, you will be proud to know, is now a greater source of profit than the defense establishment. And the most profitable segments of that industry are the suppliers of food, clothing and merchandise to the prisons. These enterprising companies buy freight-car lots of outdated food products, “seconds” or manufacturing rejects of clothing and other items, and damaged or otherwise un-sellable merchandise at extremely low prices.
They repackage these goods and sell them in “secure packages” to prisons at a greatly inflated “wholesale” price; the prisons not only receive a kickback from exclusive contracts with these companies, but then they sell the stuff to prisoners at double or triple or even quadruple the price they paid, and most often the administrators pocket most of the profit. So your TV was probably constructed of faulty parts to begin with, and as you discovered, the company that made it no longer exists, if it ever did; some of these “companies,” in fact, are no more than post office boxes in obscure towns in backwoods Missouri.
This is capitalism and we’re still fighting wars to keep this profitable system going.
Yours,
Mel