Why limit this to live-event and lodging industries? Why not all the fees tacked on by cell carriers?
For example, AT&T charges a fee to "recover certain aggregate expenses AT&T incurs, including, but not limited to, charges AT&T or its agents pay to interconnect with other carriers to deliver calls from AT&T customers to their customers and charges associated with cell site rents and maintenance" [1]
Regulations like this are written in consultation with the industries being regulated. There is a ton of wrangling and nailing down details. It's usually hundreds of pages long and specific to the industry.
So they can't just write a single thing that rights all wrongs. And their staffing is extremely limited.
>they can't just write a single thing that writes all wrongs.
Found the attorney! Nobody asked for "a single thing that writes all wrongs."
Simple, broad laws can absolutely be written, they are especially easy to write, and they are usually the best laws for decent average citizens, but decent average citizens are not who laws are written for in the United States. Most people already know this.
Simple, broad laws have another term that you can often use to describe them: “sweeping”.
Those kinds of changes are better left to legislators, who are responsive to political pressure and subject to elections.
I’m all for regulatory rulemaking by executives, but it should generally be careful narrow rulemaking. Simple, broad, sweeping changes should generally be left to the legislature.
> I’m all for regulatory rulemaking by executives, but it should generally be careful narrow rulemaking. Simple, broad, sweeping changes should generally be left to the legislature.
I would agree, if not for the empirical evidence showing us that legislators rarely make the changes that the people want. If they're not going to do it, somebody else has to.
Narrower changes would be nice, but they require a correspondingly short feedback loop of decide-act-adjust, which does not currently exist for legislators or most government administrators. If one desires narrower changes, I encourage them to first ensure the government moves and responds to customer (citizen) needs, faster than it currently does.
Either way, government structure and action should be what meets the needs of the people.
Isn’t it kind of helpful to have an attorney’s opinion on law?
Anyways, it’s very easy to complain there isn’t a law which eliminates whatever fees you think are ridiculous across a large swathe of industries. What specific implementation would you suggest, though? I’ve not heard of these apparently simple approaches.
I don't exactly want a law that eliminates the fees, just that displayed prices are the "out the door" price that can be broken down however you like internally.
Without it it's much more work to comparison shop because you have to actually try and purchase from everyone to see the real price.
> What specific implementation would you suggest, though? I’ve not heard of these apparently simple approaches.
Good question! Thank you for asking, I will do my best to help provide the answer:
One common implementation is to require that all marketing show the final price most prominently, which seems reasonable to me.
"But wait," some may interject, "That final price may vary depending on jurisdiction!"
Yes, that is true, and entirely possible to deal with, and requiring advertisers to account for that is a better solution than requiring all customers to deal with the alternative. Besides, nobody is forcing the company to vary the price. They can just charge a flat price that accounts for the average of all local fees, and/or eat the fees, which was the intent of the legislation in the first place.
Thanks for answering! So you’re saying the solution is basically more clarity? I think I could agree with that. Probably effects similar to when we added calorie counts to menus here in America.
Broad laws and regulations have obvious problems that should be evident to anyone who works with code for a living. There’s a reason lawyers are cautious and precise.
The UK requires that all advertised prices include all extras and charges a typical customer will pay.
Ie. If you charge £100 for a hotel room, but have a £5 fee for using the lights, you have to advertise it as £105 because nearly every customer will be needing the lights.
I'm in the US, so you'll have to forgive my ignorance, here, but isn't the UK's tax law pretty tightly unified at the federal level? I once got into an argument with the county (Travis, Texas) over how to account for a penny difference in the calculation of sales tax. The resulting form involved (like) 6 govt entities and 7 pages of calculations.
EDIT: if I'd been in Burnet, it'd be almost completely different forms & calculations.
In this case, it isn't "writing a single things that rights all wrongs"
Its "Write something that helps consumers know what they'll be paying"
It wouldn't even be changing the billing at all, but changing how they advertise pricing. Fees such as the example would need to be included in advertised total price of your bill. You wouldn't even need to change the bills. The companies have enough staff to do this in advertising. Government agencies' staffing would be stretched with or without such a rule.
Cellular and cable providers are the reasons that you (entirely reasonably) can’t call a fee a tax unless it is actually remitted to a government agency. They used to quite happily mislead customers into thinking line items were actually taxes and not arbitrary charges.
Typically the will be advertised as BIG MONTHLY PRICE $50/mo
Then an asterisk and tiny, tiny print somewhere below stating "plus taxes and fees"
So it depends on how you define "fees not included in the advertised price" but the last time I had a postpaid plan, I couldn't even know how much those added taxes and fees were until my first bill arrived.
it's really never as bad as it is for hotels. I once booked a hotel stay in san francisco which looked like $300 on the website, but after I was done I was charged an extra $200 for various fees which was mostly a san francisco hotel tax.. I never saw it until I checked out. It doesn't even matter if every hotel in SF gets that tax, I don't care, I want to see it before I book the place. Ideally at the "price map" screen.
As an aside, I don't know why AirBnB can't get their shit together and push all the fees to the map. My guess is that most of those fees are not per night? Well make the front matter say "$120/night + fees" and when you select your dates you know what the total cost is.
> As an aside, I don't know why AirBnB can't get their shit together and push all the fees to the map. My guess is that most of those fees are not per night? Well make the front matter say "$120/night + fees" and when you select your dates you know what the total cost is.
The problem is that everyone says we want this then votes with our wallet that we don’t.
Stubhub once tried to be upfront honest about fees. Bookings dropped like a stone. People just didn’t want concerts at those prices. But an extra $20 when you’re already paying $80, ehhh sure okay I’ve already come this far and feel pretty committed to going.
> As the study found, “Overall, the StubHub users who weren't shown fees until checkout spent about 21 percent more on tickets and were 14 percent more likely to complete a purchase compared with those who saw all-inclusive prices from the start.“
The StubHub example is the abuse that is being banned. Yes, you can bait and switch people and take more of their money than they are otherwise willing to spend if you deceive, manipulate, and withold disclosures. It is (arguably) wrong/bad, but profitable.
Except that legislation is also not in their favor because companies will just find new ways to make money [as they should - I just wish they were more creative in providing value rather than just the "added fee shortcut"]
In the end it's on consumers: People should just reward better service instead of picking the seemingly cheapest option and then cry that the world is unfair and someone has to fix it for them..
> People should just reward better service instead of picking the seemingly cheapest option
This is easy for us hackernews types with disposable income to say and very hard for the average person to implement. 57% of Americans can’t afford an unexpected $500 expense [1]
Always keep in mind the boots theory of economic unfairness:
> A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet
True but that lies in the nature of choices people make. Apart from mortgage (or in general credit on appreciable assets) I would not recommend the on-credit lifestyle that is ad-suggested as the American Dream™ (that's different for businesses, I'm not against credits in general). As an individual carry insurance, pay the year ahead. Yes it hurts, but not as much as that unexpected 500$ expense...
The boot theory works pretty well with credit though ;)
> In the end it's on consumers: People should just reward better service instead of picking the seemingly cheapest option and then cry that the world is unfair and someone has to fix it for them..
They probably should, but people just don't work this way. We aren't machines that strictly go by the best economical output. Unless you find a way to make people do that (and I don't think this exists, since we'll always be partially driven by emotions) we have two options:
a) let people be exploited by companies
b) legislate against exploitation by companies
I for sure think the latter is the better option, especially since it forces companies to compete on value instead of just extraction.
Ticketmaster. There is no way to obtain a ticket that isn’t couched in a convenience fee: email delivery, venue pick up, snail mail, all “convenient” and chargeable.
Isn't it proof that legislation doesn't work? That people can't get simple, common sense laws passed? The past 15-20 years we've had plenty of time to do so, while the fees and surcharges have grown. That timeframe is enough to control for political parties and include a mix of all voter ages and incomes.
Well, people vote with their wallets that they like being scammed (I'm talking actual scams, not scammy business behavior) so does that mean that scamming should be allowed or made legal, or at least not made illegal?
> The problem is that everyone says we want this then votes with our wallet that we don’t.
I don’t see that as a problem whatsoever.
i see this idea of “i need to manipulate people for them to give me money” as the problem.
“if i don’t manipulate and obfuscate, no one wants my product” should make one reconsider their business model to one where they can be upfront and people still want the product.
> For fucks sakes even car dealers are pulling this shit, listing EVs with tax rebates
Following Teslas lead, who for a long time showed monthly prices that included “estimated gas purchase savings” by default (you could see the actual number but you had to flip a switch to do so. At least now they have to have the sensible default).
The fees can be calculated in advance. Taxes, I'll admit that given the inanity of how the US does sales taxes, I'm fine with leaving these out of advertising, but at the time where you filled out the forms and make the final confirmation, the taxes should be shown.
In politics you always need to do a first small step, and then expand on it. Attempting to pass a big paradigm shift in one-go is a receipt for failure.
For example, AT&T charges a fee to "recover certain aggregate expenses AT&T incurs, including, but not limited to, charges AT&T or its agents pay to interconnect with other carriers to deliver calls from AT&T customers to their customers and charges associated with cell site rents and maintenance" [1]
[1] https://www.att.com/legal/terms.otherWirelessFeeSchedule.htm...