As a woman, I have personally experienced salespeople trying to sell me unnecessary products or services because they think I am naive.
This has mainly happened to me at the car dealership. I have noticed that when my husband has been with me, the salespeople do not have the same conversations with me as they do when I am there alone. It is unfortunate that people try to take advantage of others to make more money, but that is how the world works. This recently happened to a friend of mine. Instead of this happening at a car dealership, this happened in her own home with an HVAC company. My friend purchased her first home ever, so there was a learning curve when it came to services and products she needed. Her central air conditioning started giving her issues the first summer that she lived in her house. Her thermostat would read one temperature, but warm air was blowing out of the vents instead of cool air. She did some research and found a local HVAC company that seemed to be within her budget. The reviews were not as high as other local HVAC companies, but she had to go with what she could afford at the time. When the HVAC technician came out to fix the issue, he tried to convince her to buy hundreds of dollars of services that she truly did not need. Her gut was telling her that something was off, so she called her boyfriend. Her boyfriend has a decent knowledge of heating and cooling, and he immediately realized that she was being taken advantage of by her local HVAC company.