If the seller wants a full-blown contract where I obligate myself [...]
But the seller does, and that is in fact what you are being offered, in both the cases we're talking about[1]. When you buy a ticket for air travel there's a big long list of terms&conditions that you have to say you've read and agree to before you can actually buy the ticket. When you "buy" a piece of software there's again a big long licence that (among other things) clarifies that you do not in any useful sense own the software -- you haven't bought it, you've bought a licence to use it in particular ways -- and again there are lots of conditions on it.
And yes, no doubt these obligations impact the price you're ready to pay -- just as they impact the price the seller is ready to accept.
[1] Though probably not with the cucumber.
In the intellectual property case that's basically irrelevant -- I can download a piece of software or, say, a movie without agreeing to any contract, but it still will be illegal for me to redistribute it.
With the air ticket you do agree to a contract, but here you need to dig a bit deeper.
Not all contracts are created equal. There are basically two kinds. The first kind is a contract you actually negotiate and fully understand, one where what lawyers call "the meeting of the minds" occurred. Let's call it a negotiated contract. The other kind i...
I was going to wait to post this for reasons, but realized that was pretty dumb when the difference of a few weeks could literally save people hundreds, if not thousands of collective dollars.
If you fly regularly (or at all), you may already know about this method of saving money. The method is quite simple: instead of buying a round-trip ticket from the airline or reseller, you hunt down much cheaper one-way flights with layovers at your destination and/or your point of origin. Skiplagged is a service that will do this automatically for you, and has been in the news recently because the creator was sued by United Airlines and Orbitz. While Skiplagged will allow you to click-through to purchase the one-way ticket to your destination, they have broken or disabled the functionality of the redirect to the one-way ticket back (possibly in order to raise more funds for their legal defense). However, finding the return flight manually is fairly easy as the provide all the information to filter for it on other websites (time, airline, etc). I personally have benefited from this - I am flying to Texas from Southern California soon, and instead of a round-trip ticket which would cost me about $450, I spent ~$180 on two one-way tickets (with the return flight being the "layover" at my point-of-origin). These are, perhaps, larger than usual savings; I think 20-25% is more common, but even then it's a fairly significant amount of money.
Relevant warnings by gwillen:
Additionally, you should do all of your airline/hotel/etc shopping using whatever private browsing mode your web browser has. This will often let you purchase the exact same product for a cheaper price.
That is all.