[HN Gopher] FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices
___________________________________________________________________
FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices
Author : LordAtlas
Score : 535 points
Date : 2024-12-17 20:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| gnabgib wrote:
| From the FTC (9 points, 1 comment)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42441347
| munk-a wrote:
| An excellent change. It's unfortunate that stewardship of the
| committee will soon change hands as Khan has been a great
| advocate for fair contracts between companies and consumers
| during her tenure.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Indeed, Khan has been the first real pro-public steward of the
| FTC for decades.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| As a free market fan, Khan seems to have been pretty terrible.
|
| But _this_ looks genuinely good! It 's basically banning fraud.
|
| ---[EDIT], since everyone is asking for reasons here are two
| libertarian/conservative critiques:
|
| * https://reason.com/2024/11/07/good-riddance-lina-khan/
|
| * https://archive.ph/IjNmZ
| m_ke wrote:
| Please name some of the terrible parts
|
| EDIT: to make it easier here's a list of actions from
| perplexity:
|
| Here are more explicit actions taken by the FTC under Lina
| Khan's leadership:
|
| Lawsuit against Amazon (2023): The FTC filed a landmark
| antitrust case accusing Amazon of monopolistic practices in
| its online marketplace and Prime subscription service.
|
| Meta (Facebook) lawsuit (2023): The FTC sued Meta to block
| its acquisition of virtual reality app maker Within
| Unlimited, citing concerns about monopolization in the VR
| market.
|
| Microsoft-Activision merger challenge (2023): The FTC
| attempted to block Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of
| Activision Blizzard, though it ultimately failed.
|
| Kroger-Albertsons merger: A U.S. district court judge ruled
| in favor of the FTC to block the proposed $25 billion merger
| between these two major supermarket chains
|
| Nvidia's acquisition of Arm: The FTC sued to block this
| merger, though it's not explicitly mentioned in the search
| results
|
| Amazon's acquisition of iRobot: While not explicitly
| mentioned in the search results, this is another high-profile
| merger that the FTC has challenged under Khan's leadership.
|
| Enforcement against data brokers (2022-2023): The FTC took
| action against several data brokers for selling precise
| geolocation data that could be used to track people's
| movements.
|
| Zoom settlement (2021): The FTC finalized a settlement with
| Zoom over allegations of deceptive security practices.
|
| Right to Repair initiative (2021): Khan's FTC unanimously
| voted to ramp up law enforcement against repair restrictions
| that prevent small businesses, workers, and consumers from
| fixing their own products.
|
| Made in USA labeling rule (2021): The FTC finalized a new
| rule cracking down on marketers who make false, unqualified
| claims that their products are Made in the USA.
|
| Penalties for fake reviews (2022): The FTC imposed multi-
| million dollar penalties on companies for using fake reviews
| and suppressing negative reviews.
|
| Action against "dark patterns" (2021-2023): The FTC has taken
| action against companies using deceptive design practices
| known as "dark patterns" to trick consumers.
|
| Increased use of Penalty Offense Authority: The FTC has
| revived its Penalty Offense Authority to seek civil penalties
| for violations of FTC administrative orders.
|
| Ban on hidden junk fees: The FTC announced a rule requiring
| companies to show full prices for items like hotel rooms,
| concert tickets, and sporting events upfront, rather than
| hiding fees until the end of the checkout process
|
| Changes to merger review process: The FTC has altered
| principles, practices, and policies of merger review that had
| been in place for decades
|
| Expanded scope of enforcement: The FTC has taken a more
| holistic approach to identifying harms affecting workers,
| independent businesses, and consumers, with a focus on
| addressing power asymmetries and unlawful practices
|
| Rulemaking changes: Chair Khan has orchestrated wholesale
| changes in FTC rulemaking practices and policies
|
| Proposed ban on noncompete clauses: The FTC has proposed
| banning noncompete clauses in employer agreements
|
| Increased focus on data privacy: The FTC has sued multiple
| companies for allegedly sharing customer data and warned
| about the "hidden impacts" of advertising tools like third-
| party tracking pixels
| chrisweekly wrote:
| That's a pretty good list of things the FTC deserves credit
| for, in my book.
| m_ke wrote:
| Literally the best government person we have had for
| competitive markets in decades
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| What do you mean? Minimising monopolies is how you keep the
| free market competitive.
| diob wrote:
| I hope they reply. This is the first FTC in a while to try
| and get the free market "free" again, rather than captured.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Free competition should mean that you don't get punished
| for winning. There is no sport that punishes a competitor
| who is constantly winning, as long as they are competing
| fairly. Imagine Schwarzenegger being banned from Mr Olympia
| or Gretzky being banned for life from minor league ice
| hockey. So that the other competitors are given a fair
| chance of winning.
|
| But every sport punishes competitors who are cheating or
| being unsportsmanlike. As it should be in the marketplace.
| But hackers and the EU and US bureaucrats think that being
| a leader in a market has to be punished for being a
| "monopoly". While always turning a blind eye to rampant
| fraud and scams that are in the marketplace everywhere
| online and offline.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| That's because business isn't an abstract activity that
| doesn't affect anyone's real life.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Okay, what about art? Should we punish and limit the most
| successful artists to give other people a chance?
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| No, because see above.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Art affects people's real life profoundly. For example TV
| shows alter the behaviour of entire generations of
| people.
| ewb wrote:
| Most sports have a salary cap to prevent being able to
| buy your way to success. They recognize that having more
| money than your opponent gives you an unfair advantage
| and destroys competition.
| kettro wrote:
| > There is no sport that punishes a competitor who is
| constantly winning, as long as they are competing fairly
|
| Almost all North American sports have a player entry
| draft, where the weighting is based on your success. The
| best teams (eg the Detroit Red Wings of the 90's and
| 00's) are given garbage draft picks, while the bottom-
| feeders (eg the Edmonton Oilers of the late 00's-early
| 10's) are given (the opportunity for) superstars. This is
| clearly a punishment for doing well, and a reward for
| being terrible.
| beart wrote:
| I'm not an expert on these things, so I'm asking in good
| faith; what significant anti monopoly policies have been
| enacted in the US in recent history?
| brandall10 wrote:
| It's funny you bring up Schwarzenegger, as his last
| Olympia win was mired in controversy for being almost
| certainly rigged.
|
| Did he cheat? No, everyone used a similar amount of
| steroids. But to anyone with eyes and a basic knowledge
| of the sport it's overwhelmingly obvious that the
| organizers and judges threw it in his favor because of
| the attention it would bring.
|
| Which is the issue when an entity becomes too big to
| fail. There is a power disparity that is virtually
| impossible to overcome as the leverage is so much that
| any opponent can be swat down with ease.
|
| Things such as:
|
| - leveraging economies of scale when dealing with
| suppliers and resources to the point of starving access
| to competition
|
| - using lobbyists to write legislation in their favor or
| blockade opponents
|
| - doing fuck all with no reservations, then pay out
| lawsuits and fines at an order of magnitude less than
| profit made and damage done
| acdha wrote:
| > But hackers and the EU and US bureaucrats think that
| being a leader in a market has to be punished for being a
| "monopoly".
|
| This is a provocative claim. Do you have any examples?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It is repeated on the level of gospel here on HN that
| Apple is "a monopoly", and nobody even flinches at the
| absurdity of that claim.
| acdha wrote:
| That's not in this thread, though, and it usually gets a
| lot of pushback.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _There is no sport that punishes a competitor who is
| constantly winning, as long as they are competing
| fairly._
|
| Constantly winning in a competitive environment with no
| runaway feedback loops[0] is evidence of cheating.
|
| See also, casinos: the "legitimate" ones don't rig the
| game - they know the odds; they expect you to win
| something here and then, but if they see you winning
| consistently, they'll rightfully assume you're cheating
| _somehow_ , and ban you from the venue.
|
| > _But every sport punishes competitors who are cheating
| or being unsportsmanlike. As it should be in the
| marketplace._
|
| Marketplace isn't like sportsball. It's like _war_. On
| the market like in war, anything goes. The only people
| who can afford living under delusion of market
| sportsmanship are people who are already so well-off and
| safe they can treat it as a game; for everyone else, it
| 's a matter of life and death.
|
| > _But hackers and the EU and US bureaucrats think that
| being a leader in a market has to be punished for being a
| "monopoly"._
|
| The market isn't some divine ball game, or a magic
| ritual. It's a feedback system, with known failure modes.
| Wrt. monopolies, in particular, any good profit-seeking
| actor will aim at becoming a monopolist in their market
| segment, because that's how they can maximize profits
| while minimizing effort. At the same time, the market
| serves a critical function in organizing human society -
| but that stops working when monopolies pop up.
|
| It's really very simple: all the goods and services and
| advancement we enjoy require market players to be
| actively putting in effort. To society, an entrepreneur
| is basically a donkey with a pole mounted to it, from
| which there hangs a carrot, just out of reach - the
| donkey just wants to grab the carrot, but the society
| only benefits when the donkey is chasing it. The donkey
| needs to believe they can win, so it keeps running, but
| it also can never be allowed to actually get their prize,
| because then it'll stop. That's why markets are regulated
| as to let people and companies grow and accumulate
| winnings, _until a point_ , past which they'd stop
| participating (or worse, just go screwing around breaking
| things).
|
| I.e. it's not about punishing someone for winning - it's
| about preventing them from complete victory, because then
| they become useless to society.
|
| > _While always turning a blind eye to rampant fraud and
| scams that are in the marketplace everywhere online and
| offline._
|
| Who's turning a blind eye to it? Fraud and scams are the
| base state of the market; it's what it decays to if left
| to its own devices. Regulations are there to counteract
| this tendency.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Feedback loops like compounding interest. In
| sports, unlike in the economy, you can't just reinvest
| your win to get more wins, and then reinvest them in
| turn, until you're winning so much so fast that no one
| can ever hope to catch up with you.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Constantly winning in a competitive environment with no
| runaway feedback loops[0] is evidence of cheating.
|
| Right. How did Usain Bolt cheat? How did Michael Phelps
| cheat? How did ABBA cheat?
|
| > any good profit-seeking actor will aim at becoming a
| monopolist in their market segment
|
| Of course. And then hackers redefine the market segment
| to encompass that businesses product and ta-da, you have
| a monopoly. Like Apple.
|
| If we're talking about real monopolies, then I couldn't
| agree more. But what hackers and the EU are doing is
| redefining monopoly in a dishonest way because they have
| personal grudges against a company.
|
| > The donkey needs to believe they can win, so it keeps
| running, but it also can never be allowed to actually get
| their prize, because then it'll stop.
|
| Here's something to blow your mind: The donkey enjoys
| running. Or let's take a real life example: sled dogs.
| They love pulling the sled. Entrepreneurs love working
| and love competing. Those who don't love it usually pull
| out of the game with their profits way before they have
| even national impact.
|
| This is a huge divide in attitude I've seen everywhere in
| the world in my life. You have category X of people who
| see all kind of work as an immense suffering. They
| complain endlessly, do the minimum effort, and never get
| anywhere. And you have category Y of people who love
| working, because it's doing something productive and
| learning. That doesn't mean that they're satisfied with
| being abused wage slaves. Rather it is the first category
| who never advances in life, because they think it's all a
| scam. People in the second category also fail a lot
| because they take chances. But they usually get up again.
|
| > Who's turning a blind eye to it? Fraud and scams are
| the base state of the market; it's what it decays to if
| left to its own devices. Regulations are there to
| counteract this tendency.
|
| All governments and law enforcement seem to be turning a
| blind eye to it. About 50% of advertisements on Facebook
| and Instagram are outright scams, ie physical products
| from brand names that are advertised at bargain prices
| and if you "buy" it you will not get delivery because it
| is an outright scam. US and EU governments should fine
| Meta billions of dollars for having their main source of
| income from organized crime and fraud. But they are
| focused on completely irrelevant crap like app stores.
| Talk about sieving mosquitoes and swallowing camels.
| dml2135 wrote:
| The economy is not a sport to be won. I think you are
| maybe prioritizing a some notion of fairness to those
| competing in the market, while to someone like Khan the
| thinking is more, how can we make the market function in
| a way that provides the biggest net-benefit to society?
| plagiarist wrote:
| Give us some examples of gigantic "winning" companies
| that haven't been engaging in cheating or unsportsmanlike
| behavior.
| nabla9 wrote:
| As a pro-market fan, Khan is great.
|
| Pro-market: pro-market advocates for policies that enhance
| competition and market efficiency. Understands that god
| markets are made. Pro-market advocates believe in creating
| conditions where businesses can compete fairly without undue
| advantages from government favoritism. Government regulation
| can be essential to correct market failures and promote a
| level playing field.
|
| Free market: and ideological stance where markets are without
| government intervention. Belief in ideal world where market
| failures don't exist and if they exists that's a good thing.
| nickff wrote:
| Why do you describe "free market" as being ideological, and
| "pro-market" without those terms? Both seem equally
| ideological (or not).
| qeternity wrote:
| Because they are against one and for the other. Pro
| markets means whatever policies they agree with, which is
| of course how all broken highly regulated markets begin
| their run.
| sdwr wrote:
| Idealist: "the free market is perfect!"
|
| Realist: "the free market has flaws, which can be
| addressed by..."
|
| Replace "free market" with anything you like
| meiraleal wrote:
| The realist might be an idealist that is seeing
| inexistent flaws tho
| hiatus wrote:
| Then that's not a realist, by definition.
|
| > accepting a situation as it is and being prepared to
| deal with it accordingly.
|
| or
|
| > representing a person or thing in a way that is
| accurate and true to life.
| meiraleal wrote:
| That's the point, a wrong realist.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| They most likely aren't idealist, as that isn't a
| requirement. Anyone who's smarter than a potato can
| notice some of the more glaring failures (even if they
| don't understand the mechanism behind it).
| sdwr wrote:
| Very true.
|
| The definition of realist has flaws...
| gizmo wrote:
| Everything is ideology to some extent, but not everything
| is ideological to the same degree. The beliefs that a
| level playing field is good and that winning by means of
| political favoritism is bad are almost universally agreed
| on. Almost all political philosophies, including various
| shades of socialism and communism, agree that markets are
| needed to some degree if only for price discovery.
| theossuary wrote:
| Republicans have made the term ideological a negative
| one. Sure, the dictionary definition is to relate to
| ideology; but in practice (especially when talking
| politics) it implies one is picking a worse option
| because it aligns with their ideology. So their claim
| above is one is picking free markets due to ideology,
| whereas another would pick pro markets because it's
| actually the best solution.
| LinXitoW wrote:
| I mean, I agree that Khan is the best possible option, but
| I disagree that pro-market isn't ideological.
|
| Where the free market fans see child slavery and sexual
| slavery and rejoice (free to make any contract you want to
| after all), the pro market people believe that if you just
| put enough guard rails on it, greed will magically turn
| into a force for good.
|
| Obviously I also have an ideology, but at least I'm honest
| enough to not pretend that capitalism (or
| communism/anarchy) are naturally occuring, instead of
| simply a choice we make.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Free market: and ideological stance where markets are
| without government intervention_
|
| no, markets without government intervention are called
| "laissez-faire" markets. There would be no need for that
| term if that's what free market meant.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> There would be no need for that term if that 's what
| free market meant._
|
| I'm not following here: are you suggesting that given any
| two different words, it is impossible for them to refer
| to the same thing or mean the same thing?
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| There was a time, long ago, when libertarians opposed
| initiation of violence _and fraud_.
|
| That was probably before the internet was invented. These
| days, a typical online libertarian opposes all government
| action as violence, but when you mention fraud, it's like:
| "but who decides what is or isn't fraud? if the customer
| signed a contract, it was their revealed preference to get
| scammed..."
| kylecazar wrote:
| Personally, I think she's for the free market. She is
| progressive, which is controversial, but I don't really see
| why non-billionaires run to the defense of big tech when
| their monopolistic status is scrutinized.
|
| I totally understand why billionaires do, on the other hand.
| Worth watching Reid Hoffman embarrass himself on Jake Tapper
| on the subject of Khan recently for those interested
| Gigachad wrote:
| HN is full of people who think they will one day be the
| billionaires scamming people.
| websap wrote:
| Because people have been conditioned through the media to
| believe that once the Billionares get taxed, you're next.
|
| We're at an unprecedented levels of wealth inequality in
| America. Billion dollar businesses built on tax payer
| money, should contribute to the system. Instead we've
| designed a system where these companies would rather pay
| millions of dollars in campaign contributions and to
| lobbyists.
| r00fus wrote:
| Free markets - you know freedom isn't free right? You have to
| enforce it - and you do this by regulation.
| websap wrote:
| Khan has been absolutely spectacular for the free markets.
| Transparency in pricing (with this law), transparency in
| cancellation of subscriptions, blocking acquisitions where
| businesses should fail.
|
| The free market shouldn't allow monopolies, or duopolies to
| form. Bad businesses should fail, not absorb more capital and
| continue scaling.
| nxm wrote:
| Her policy changes have been countlessly shut
| down/overturned by courts since she's overstepped her
| authority.
| bdangubic wrote:
| that should tell you she is doing the absolute right
| things :)
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Her policy changes have been countlessly shut down
| /overturned by courts since she's overstepped her
| authority._
|
| We have a dysfunctional Congress that can't/won't
| legislate to fill gaps that emerge over time with new
| circumstances. _Someone_ will step in to fill those gaps.
| Sounds like you 'd prefer to have corporate execs do so,
| focused largely on their stock prices, bonuses, and
| promotion prospects -- cf. paperclip-maximizing AGIs [0]
| -- than to have a citizen-advocate do so.
|
| [0] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/squiggle-maximizer-
| formerly-pa... and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > Khan seems to have been pretty terrible
|
| to the contrary, she's great for free, competitive markets
|
| she's just not good for winner-take-all M&A investors, and
| _that_ is a good thing
|
| the average American - and even the average investor - will
| not benefit from her departure
| RajT88 wrote:
| Ah, Reason.
|
| The paragon of good and sensible arguments like, "Legalize
| Insider Trading".
|
| This author has not written one of those pieces, but she is
| in good company with the ones who did.
| TheGamerUncle wrote:
| I well mm used to like reason a while ago but this is
| laughable. The article does not show how or explain why or in
| which manner she affects consumers.
|
| It says that she has been bad for them but there is no proof
| of this.
|
| Instead it makes quite a comical attempt at trying to vaguely
| point at the sky and say she is evil or overreaching, but she
| is not and anyone whoa actually wants a free market can tell
| you that. I honestly just cannot understand what happened to
| Reason I checked some more or their side articles and wow the
| quality has dropped to a level that would make the NYT blush.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The article is pretty clear to me.
|
| The main complaint is that the Khan FTC by default is
| against all mergers and acquisitions.
|
| This is different from the previous standard that only
| mergers that harm consumers are bad. So now even mergers
| that benefit consumers are blocked.
| michael1999 wrote:
| That is an a-historical claim. That standard was THE
| standard from 1890-1980. The consumer-harm standard was
| the innovation of Bork under Regan in 1980.
| michael1999 wrote:
| Those are pretty weak sauce.
|
| The Reason piece is lazy drive-by snark. Calling the anti-
| trust standards of the 20c "hipster anti-trust" is just
| a-historical. Blocking consolidation of national chains is
| hardly some crazy innovation. In fact, it was Bork who was
| the rebel introducing the stricter "consumer harm" standard.
| People might argue which is the appropriate standard -- the
| one invented during the 1890s to break the most powerful
| trusts in history, or the one invented by a Regan appointee
| in 1980 to replace it. But the Reason snark does nothing
| except claim it.
|
| At least the WSJ makes an actual argument about consumer
| harm. Unfortunately, their argument is: there has been so
| much consolidation in distribution, we need to consolidate
| retail to increase their bargaining power to balance. Given
| the geographical nature of grocery shopping, consolidation is
| likely to reduce consumer bargaining power further. That the
| WSJ fails to acknowledge the obvious fact that the greater
| power of a merged entity would act on both sides of the
| market is bad-faith.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| I think she's done such great work on the administrative side
| of things with junk fee bans, etc., but I feel like she has
| also burned an enormous amount of taxpayer money on lawsuits
| that don't have value (like suing Meta for acquiring the tiny
| VR fitness company).
|
| It feels like she's just against any acquisitions by large
| companies, and I think that's both too broad of a stance for
| the FTC to take (as opposed to really looking on a case-by-case
| basis of whether consumers would be hurt by an acquisition) and
| also harmful to new companies being created, since suddenly an
| important option for exits is a whole lot less likely as large
| companies hesitate to be acquisitive.
| lobsterthief wrote:
| Lawsuits are one of the few enforcement mechanisms the FTC
| has.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Tangential, but I was looking into this yesterday and couldn't
| find the answer:
|
| How does her term work?
|
| Seats on the FTC are supposed to last for 7 years. She was
| nominated in 2021 and her term technically expired a couple
| months ago. Apparently she gets to remain in it until a
| replacement is appointed.
|
| Has she just been filling in the remainder of someone else's
| term, like Laphonza Butler as CA Senator?
| mentalgear wrote:
| Now waiting for a webapp that autoscans your bill for junk fees
| and can report them to the FTC.
| pianoben wrote:
| ...for the next four weeks, anyways. Good effort nonetheless!
| guidedlight wrote:
| They should ban hidden taxes too. The sticker price should be the
| final price.
| drdec wrote:
| Do you want to put in your shipping address to every website
| before you can shop?
| munk-a wrote:
| Yea, that'd be pretty swell. The only reason websites moved
| away from that was to "lower friction" - it's better for the
| consumers who end up buying the product if they know
| availability and pricing up front.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _The only reason websites moved away from that was to
| "lower friction"_
|
| It was never the norm that websites never asked for your
| shipping address or zipcode before allowing shopping.
| That's really silly.
| munk-a wrote:
| My statement was overly general and that's a fair
| criticism - however I do remember e-commerce in the early
| days of the web. That early web experience for me was
| that generally users were required to make an account
| (mostly to verify age and ability to pay) before they
| could interact with items or create a shopping cart. In
| that era the interaction of sales taxes and the internet
| were much more complicated and shipping times and costs
| much more variable. I know that when my father was buying
| train books he'd often need to go to conventions in other
| states to pick up items in person because sellers were
| afraid of getting scammed out of their shipping fees.
| perfectstorm wrote:
| a reverse IP lookup should give you a good estimate and you
| can always ask the user to enter their address for more
| accurate price.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Surely this is outdated advice in the world of "Protect
| your privacy with NordVPN" all over youtube.
| briandear wrote:
| Nope. I hate when website use IP for anything, especially
| language selection. I travel all the time as well as use
| VPNs for work, and the idea that my IP represents anything
| other than what network I'm connecting from is just lazy
| UX.
| Symbiote wrote:
| Do you often order things for delivery at home while
| you're travelling? Then the price will change when you
| provide the delivery address -- just like it does now.
|
| Meanwhile, 99% of people will see the price they can
| expect to pay.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, I see a lot of advice on here that websites should
| make some guesses and you can always correct them later
| if it turns out they're wrong.
|
| That seems like terrible advice. Oh, the price is $X. And
| once you've entered all your info "just kidding." I'd
| much rather know there are some things not included up-
| front if they're not reasonably factored in.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Yes let's keep a shitty UX for most users because of a
| few abnormal users. Be honest, frequent travel and
| shopping over VPN is an edge case here. The vast majority
| of users are shopping and buying from home with a VPN.
|
| Or better yet, give municipalities an incentive to stop
| layering a kinds of taxes. Just have a VAT and be done
| with it.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Be honest, frequent travel and shopping over VPN is an
| edge case here._
|
| Everyone is an edge case in some form. You, included.
|
| _Just have a VAT and be done with it._
|
| This just illustrates that you don't understand the that
| taxes have multiple purposes, and why taxes are the way
| they are. Attend a few city council meetings.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I understand why we levy taxes. I'm not a moron (or a
| jerk). Other countries manage with a much simpler tax
| scheme; we can try and do the same.
| reaperducer wrote:
| America doesn't want to be like other countries. You may
| remember there was a war or two about that.
| kstrauser wrote:
| > The vast majority of users are shopping and buying from
| home with a VPN.
|
| I bet that's wrong, and that a huge chunk of shopping is
| from cell phones that usually have an effectively random
| IP when they're not at their home location.
| alistairSH wrote:
| It would be interesting to see the numbers. I know for my
| wife and I, most shopping is done at home on phone or
| tablet and connected to our home wifi. And even shopping
| away from home is generally in the same county, so taxes
| are the same (or close enough for an up-front estimate).
| runako wrote:
| > Or better yet, give municipalities an incentive to stop
| layering a kinds of taxes. Just have a VAT and be done
| with it.
|
| Switching our tax regime to VATs, effectively flattening
| 13,000+ sales tax jurisdictions down to 50, would be a
| monumental undertaking involving rethinking and
| reorganizing financing of literally everything below the
| federal level. And in the end it would solve a problem
| that is at best a minor annoyance to most Americans.
|
| The juice ain't worth the squeeze.
| mr_toad wrote:
| My home ISP has an exit point in a different city from
| where I live, so even without a VPN the IP lookup is only
| accurate to country level.
| rascul wrote:
| > a reverse IP lookup should give you a good estimate
|
| Not really, no.
| perfectstorm wrote:
| care to elaborate on that? also, it's not that hard to
| ask users to enter their shipping zip code to get more
| accurate prices. some websites do that already nowadays.
| my point is reverse ip lookup is a good enough starting
| point for the first estimation.
| rascul wrote:
| IP addresses aren't related to locations. A third party
| database with voluntary contributions isn't exactly
| reliable and is frequently incorrect.
|
| Zip codes also aren't great either. A single zip code can
| cover many different tax jurisdictions, even different
| states.
| ghaff wrote:
| Amazon in particular probably did a lot to normalize free (in
| country) shipping in many cases. But it's silly that there
| should be a sticker price that is the final price under all
| circumstances.
|
| Mind you, I'm all for more up-front transparency in general,
| especially to the degree that comparison-shopping is
| inconsistent to the degree it displays or doesn't display
| often significant add-ons.
| poorlyknit wrote:
| A zipcode should be plenty and grocery websites do that
| already.
| itake wrote:
| Unfortunately, there are 13 zip codes that span across
| multiple states.
| mawif wrote:
| There are 41,000+ zip codes.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| And 13 of them do not uniquely identify which state
| you're in.
| kaonwarb wrote:
| Even within a state a single 5-digit ZIP can have multiple
| tax rates if it spans multiple cities; true where I live.
| runako wrote:
| ZIP codes are not specific enough.
|
| In some areas, sales tax is actual multiple taxes from
| different overlapping jurisdictions: state, county, city,
| and sometimes special tax district. ZIP codes don't align
| with any of these, so you need to know exactly where the
| buyer is in order to properly calculate sales tax.
|
| There are places where adjacent addresses in the same ZIP
| code have different sales tax rates.
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| The zip code I live in spans two different cities (as well
| as different counties in my state). It's stupid but also
| it's reality
| reaperducer wrote:
| _A zipcode should be plenty and grocery websites do that
| already._
|
| There's probably a Things Developers Believe About ZIP
| Codes list out there somewhere.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Very easy, we can get inspiration from the web shops 10 years
| ago (and still a majority of honest sites today) : the price
| of the item and somewhere close the base shipping price and a
| (legal minimum size) link "shipping price" redirecting to a
| shipping price table. We can even impose the table framework
| like the nutritional information on food to avoid volontary
| complexification of that page.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| At which point they'll just segment the market based on zip
| code and once the ecommerce platforms and big sites start
| doing it it'll become the norm
|
| Good for me, my zipcode is the Walmart of zip codes. No so
| good for people who's zip code is the Whole Foods of zip
| codes.
| jopsen wrote:
| When shopping physically that shouldn't be necessary. Should
| it?
|
| But I guess that would outside FTC jurisdiction?
|
| Most online shops have a good estimate of your location based
| on IP. And already use it to estimate shopping costs, right?
| indrora wrote:
| I suspect the answer is instead to establish two tax rate
| calculations:
|
| One for in-person shopping (like VAT) -- you pay the tax
| according to local rates, but it's factored in already.
|
| one for online shopping, ("E-VAT") -- you pay a national rate
| tax and the seller is responsible for paying gross sales
| based on that percentage to the state and the rest goes to
| the IRS.
|
| Problem comes with the Sin Taxes that have been established.
| For instance, in Seattle, sugared drinks MAY incur a tax
| depending on what kind of store you bought it from (e.g. the
| normal costco has to tax it but the business costco doesn't),
| but that doesn't affect _some_ folks and then there 's tax-
| exempt organizations like churches that can have their sales
| tax waived and then there's states where sales taxes are a
| majority of the income is from sales tax but only if you're
| local and
|
| oh god it gets bad.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's funny, because when I buy from China, their stores have
| little trouble estimating my country's import tax, and my
| state's selling tax. But US physical stores can't manage to
| put the final price on their tags.
| connicpu wrote:
| The new rule does have clarification that they at least have to
| show you the final price with taxes+shipping before they're
| allowed to take your credit card. Those ones I get, because
| they can't be calculated without knowing your billing zip code.
| yoyoyo1122 wrote:
| > The sticker price should be the final price.
|
| God I wish this applied to buying cars as well
| kstrauser wrote:
| If you're assertive enough, it is.
|
| "Oh, sorry, looks like we'd already applied the undercoat to
| your car."
|
| "Ah, thanks!"
|
| "That's an extra $400 charge."
|
| "I'm not paying for it. I didn't want it. You can have it
| back if you want."
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| "Darn, sorry we can't make a deal. Hey look at all the
| people who need cars that are waiting!"
|
| This is not as much of an upper hand as you think it is,
| often these shenanigans happen after sitting at the dealer
| for a couple hours while they do whatever it is they do. Do
| you value your time so little that you'll just walk out of
| a transaction over less than a 1% difference in cost?
|
| The dealer knows how to play this game way better than you,
| if you walk into a dealership without having a plan to
| score a deal then you already lost
| kstrauser wrote:
| Yes, I have literally done exactly that thing and ended
| up with the dealer eating the price. The dealer has time
| and effort sunk into closing the deal, too, and they'll
| almost always chose a bird in the hand.
|
| And also-freaking-lutely would I walk instead of eating a
| BS charge. Sometimes it really is the principle of the
| thing. My principle is I'm not paying a penny for
| something I didn't ask for. A dealership I'd be caught
| dead doing business with will eat the bogus charges
| instead of losing a customer forever. Conversely, next
| time I need a Toyota, I have the business card of the guy
| I'll buy it from and he doesn't even know it yet. He
| treated me well last time and his investment in that deal
| will keep paying him back.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. Last time I bought a car, at the last minute, it
| included "factory installed" extras that included a first
| aid kit for a car that wasn't built yet. I may or may not
| have actually walked (a couple of the options were
| actually useful) but I was "I'm not happy but I'll close
| the deal NOW if you add it to my trade-in" which they
| did.
| floxy wrote:
| Amazon Autos?
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Autos/b?node=10677469011
| bradgessler wrote:
| Rules for thee but not for me.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember shopping in Japan.
|
| The price on the tag, is _exactly_ what you pay (same with
| services, like hotels).
|
| Since this is Japan, it's a high price, but no surprises.
|
| Also, the service is _amazing_ , and they won't accept tips. If
| you leave money on the table, they will chase after you, to
| give it back.
| belfalas wrote:
| _> Also, the service is amazing, and they won 't accept tips.
| If you leave money on the table, they will chase after you,
| to give it back._
|
| I visited Japan some years back and loved this aspect of the
| culture as well. An Australian ski guide (this was a winter
| visit) explained it like so: "the Japanese attitude is to
| want to do a good job by default. Tipping implies that a good
| job is only done because of pay. The Japanese see quality
| service as intrinsically valuable in itself."
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I believe that servers are also paid quite well.
| spiderice wrote:
| Quick Google search says the average is $7.55 USD/hour
| (1,159 Yen). Seems like they're paid quite poorly.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Might be more to that story. Remember that Japan is a
| very socialized country, so CoL expenses are not what
| they are in the US.
|
| I have a friend that basically shops as part of her job.
| She has been power-shopping, mostly in Europe (dream job,
| I suppose), for decades.
|
| She tells me that she runs into the same sales
| associates, year after year, and has watched them "grow
| up" over years.
|
| So it seems to be possible, at least in Europe, for
| people to make lifelong careers in the service industry.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| That's fantasy. The same thing is true in China. All it
| means is that the local culture doesn't tip.
| belfalas wrote:
| This kind of reply is what makes me want to quit HN
| forever. There's always somebody out there smarter who
| knows better. Why bother to try and contribute anything?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Yes, contributing mythology is in fact worse than
| contributing nothing.
| wileydragonfly wrote:
| This is geek internet. Suggesting that anything about
| Japan is less than peak perfection is controversial.
| presentation wrote:
| Japan does have a well known "customer is god" cultural
| background; whether or not tipping has anything to do
| with that is here or there, though it is the expectation
| that if someone does a job, it is expected not to be half
| assed.
|
| One of the big differences between here in Japan and
| other parts of the world I've visited and lived in, is
| the near absence of service staff who actively make a
| point of looking like they hate their life and treat you
| like crap, though this is slowly changing here too.
| sofixa wrote:
| > The price on the tag, is exactly what you pay (same with
| services, like hotels).
|
| That's the norm, not the exception, in developed countries.
| Eisenstein wrote:
| Except for the one with the largest economy.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| And Canada!
| sofixa wrote:
| And that's not a point of pride now, is it. If you're the
| best but others are clearly beating you in a few
| categories, that's more reasons to improve to try to be
| the best everywhere, not put your hands in your ears and
| pretend nothing is wrong.
| floxy wrote:
| No sales tax in Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and
| Oregon.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Congratulations on living in a country where there are
| many people who are vastly richer than you.
| crazygringo wrote:
| No -- it's the norm in countries that have a single uniform
| VAT.
|
| It's obviously not the norm in countries that have sales
| taxes which vary by locality.
|
| Whether a country is "developed" or not has nothing to do
| with it. The vast majority of countries in Africa have a
| VAT, while the world's richest country has a sales tax.
| sofixa wrote:
| > It's obviously not the norm in countries that have
| sales taxes which vary by locality
|
| Why not? If each store or restaurant or theatre or
| whatever in each locality know what price to bill you,
| they know the applicable price to show you upfront.
|
| > Whether a country is "developed" or not has nothing to
| do with it. The vast majority of countries in Africa have
| a VAT, while the world's richest country has a sales tax.
|
| The relevance of developed or not is how much of the
| economy is informal or includes a part of negotiation.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Why not? If each store in each locality know what
| price to bill you, they know the applicable price to show
| you upfront._
|
| Because it makes state-level or national-level
| advertising of prices impossible. Or even local-level in
| many cases.
|
| > _The relevance of developed or not is how much of the
| economy is informal or includes a part of negotiation._
|
| No it doesn't, where are you getting that? Feel free to
| browse:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developed_country
|
| and Ctrl+F for "informal" or "negotiation". There are a
| lot of indicators of developing vs developed countries,
| but your idea is most assuredly not one of them. Also,
| sales tax vs VAT has nothing to do with an informal
| economy or price negotiation either.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Because it makes state-level or national-level
| advertising of prices impossible. Or even local-level in
| many cases
|
| Hardly impossible, just slightly less easy ("available
| for $X* (pre-tax)" / "starting at $X").
|
| And are seriously claiming that ease for advertisers
| takes precedence over ease of use and pricing
| transparency for consumers?
|
| > and Ctrl+F for "informal" or "negotiation". There are a
| lot of indicators of developing vs developed countries,
| but your idea is most assuredly not one of them. Also,
| sales tax vs VAT has nothing to do with an informal
| economy or price negotiation either.
|
| Thank you. What I meant was that the only reason it
| _might_ not be the standard in some developing countries
| is that they _might_ have more informal economies with
| more negotiations involved. Literally the only legitimate
| excuse. But when that 's not the case, from Morocco to
| Sri Lanka to Uzbekistan, price is shown upfront,
| everything included.
| II2II wrote:
| > Because it makes state-level or national-level
| advertising of prices impossible. Or even local-level in
| many cases.
|
| In large countries like Canada, and I would imagine the
| US, you probably don't want to advertise prices
| nationally. The cost of goods to will be different for a
| business in Vancouver and Southern Ontario compared to
| the Atlantic Provinces. Never mind small towns in remote
| communities connected to the road network, such as
| Northern Ontario. Especially never mind small towns in
| remote communities that are _not_ connected to the road
| network.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Same in UK.
|
| As a kid, having grown up in the UK I knew that if the price
| label said PS1.99 and I had PS2 in my pocket I could afford
| it, with PS0.01 change. First time I went to the USA as a
| young teenager I remember being quite embarrassed when the
| thing I thought I was getting for $1.99 was actually not
| $1.99 but $2.17 or whatever, and I had to leave without
| buying. Felt quite deceptive and totally incomprehensible.
| acuozzo wrote:
| > Felt quite deceptive and totally incomprehensible.
|
| In the case of sales tax, it's deliberate propaganda.
| "Here's what we would have charged you if it weren't for
| greedy old Uncle Sam."
| tradertef wrote:
| Propaganda? How is telling where your money is going is
| propaganda?
| xenospn wrote:
| The price part is essentially the same all over the world
| except for America, where you're not entirely sure how much
| more you'll have to add for taxes and tips.
| thenickdude wrote:
| Except 100 yen stores which are actually 110 yen stores.
| robotfelix wrote:
| I'm not sure Japan is the best example here. My experience is
| that most shops have the price excluding consumption tax
| printed very prominently in large numbers, and then price
| including consumption tax is printed in much smaller writing
| underneath.
|
| The price excluding tax is the only one you can read at a
| distance, that draws you in. As someone from the UK who is
| used to seeing price tags show the final price you pay at the
| till, I was constantly disappointed that items weren't quite
| such a bargain as I'd first hoped.
|
| On the whole there are still many things that are much
| cheaper than in the UK though :)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have a feeling that's optional. It may even be regional.
| My experience was almost exclusively Tokyo.
|
| I traveled to Tokyo for over 20 years, and always paid what
| was on the sticker.
|
| I was told that the tax was included in the price.
|
| I remember one of my bigger purchases, was a Y=75,000
| Oceanus watch, and that was exactly what I paid.
| verall wrote:
| If you go to a donqi the price tags list without the tax
| besides small text that either lists the full price or
| says "+10% consumption tax" or along those lines.
|
| As a tourist you don't always have to pay the consumption
| tax though.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have a feeling that you're right.
|
| I remember the saleswoman asking to see my passport, when
| I was buying the watch (it was that big department store
| in Akihabara).
| kalleboo wrote:
| There was a period of a few years where they raised the
| sales tax in steps 5%, 8%, 10%, and stores were allowed to
| show the price without tax during that period, which has
| left some practices a bit messy since.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| This is the norm in Europe.
|
| It's crazy to me that in the US I can never be sure how much
| I'll end up paying...
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Japan has the exact same sales tax rate(s) across the entire
| country, and it rarely changes. In the US, we have thousands
| of different rates and they change multiple times per year.
|
| Also, while it is the norm in Japan to include the tax, there
| are some exceptions.
|
| (Japan has 2 rates, 8% for certain items like food, and 10%
| for everything else).
| andreareina wrote:
| Brick and mortar stores know exactly how much tax they have
| to pay, yet they don't show an all-inclusive price. It's
| clearly not a case of online retailers just not showing the
| tax because it's difficult. If they wanted to they could
| let you give your post code before checking out, and query
| the same database to show the post-tax price for
| everything.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Really, you expect them to go through every item in the
| store, multiple times per year, and update the price
| tags?
| celegans25 wrote:
| With price increases over the last couple of years from
| inflation, retailers have shown they are more than
| capable of doing so already. So yes
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Price increases don't hit every item all at once.
| mazugrin2 wrote:
| Aside from silly "sales-tax-holidays" I've never heard of
| the sales tax rates changing so frequently. I'm curious
| to know where this is happening "multiple times per
| year". Here in MA it's been the same rate for 15 years.
| And for the sales-tax-holiday situation can't a shop just
| say something like "everything will have x% taken off at
| the register" just like they would during a typical "10%
| off all items" type of sale?
| ensignavenger wrote:
| If MA has a single rate across the entire state that
| hasn't changed in 15 users, they are very different from
| how most other states operate.
| asciimov wrote:
| Here in Texas you will nearly always be paying the
| maximum 8.25%, its been that way for 30+ years.
| asciimov wrote:
| Around me most stores change their price tags weekly, if
| not more often. They either have a sheet with new tags or
| a small printer and scanner and they swap out the tags on
| the shelf.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| What do you think all the people collecting a paycheck in
| a store _do_? Stand around and look pretty?
|
| Have you ever heard the term "Fronting"? In most stores,
| employees are required to individually ensure each and
| every item on the shelf is organized and pulled to the
| front for optimum display. They do this sometimes
| multiple times a day. In busier stores, you will have to
| restock high volume items multiple times per day.
|
| The technology for digital pricetags has been cheaply
| available since the first kindle in the late 2000s. Most
| companies have avoided spending the money on buying them
| because the cost of labor in America is cheap enough that
| you can just have the normal employees do it every day.
| Digital pricetags are only now becoming common. Mostly
| because store companies are trying to figure out a way to
| charge you a personalized price that takes as much of
| your money as possible.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > In the US, we have thousands of different rates and they
| change multiple times per year.
|
| Yet at any given moment, every proprietor is miraculously
| able calculate the taxes due at the point of sale. The
| variety of tax regimes, and the fact that the amounts
| change doesn't impact the ability to calculate the final
| amount due.
| rascul wrote:
| > In the US, we have thousands of different rates and they
| change multiple times per year.
|
| Where in the US do the sales tax rates change so
| frequently? I've never seen this.
| n144q wrote:
| My guess is that the comment means there is always some
| minor tweaks to tax laws, so that tax on certain products
| could change, and that may happen a few times a year. I
| don't think it means sales tax rate changes on all
| products a few times a year.
|
| There is a caveat -- if you count the "sales tax
| holidays" in various US states, it means in those places,
| tax rates for some products change at least twice a year
| -- from 7% to 0% then back to 7%, for example.
| mFixman wrote:
| That's a good reason to include the tax in the price in the
| US. How would consumers know how much they will pay
| otherwise?
| pedalpete wrote:
| I believe this is the default for most of the world. Some
| countries have some strange differences like Argentina having
| a table charge on your bill, but here in Australia, the price
| on the box is the price at the till, with the exception of
| the card surcharges which are currently being reviewed to be
| removed.
|
| The exception here is also the holiday surcharge (an extra
| fee on holidays and Sundays), which has to be "disclosed"
| before ordering. Usually there is a small sign somewhere that
| nobody pays attention to.
| WickyNilliams wrote:
| I have done a fair bit of travelling. The US is the only
| place I've been where the price shown is not the price paid.
| Adding on tips, and it becomes nigh on impossible to know how
| much something will cost you upfront. It's ridiculous tbh
| crazygringo wrote:
| If you're talking about sales taxes, they can't until you input
| your shipping address. Because they depend on where you live.
|
| Nobody's trying to fool you by not including sales taxes.
| There's just no way to show them in advance, unless you want to
| start typing your address and zip code into every shopping
| website before you even browse.
| Symbiote wrote:
| In the EU, the site guesses the location based on the IP,
| writes "Delivery to Denmark [Change?]" and shows prices with
| Danish VAT.
|
| If I'm signed in to the shop from making a previous purchase,
| they will use the location of the previous purchase.
| qeternity wrote:
| Yes bc in the EU there is national VAT. In the US there is
| state _and_ local sales tax. You can and will pay different
| sales tax between cities in a given state.
| emidln wrote:
| You can do this, albeit slightly less reliably, in the US
| as well. The geolocation isn't perfect, but you could
| easily put "With delivery to XXXXX [edit]" where XXXXX is
| a zip code you geolocate off an ip (or lookup in a user
| profile for a recurring user).
| kstrauser wrote:
| The zip code is not fine grained enough to identify tax
| jurisdictions in many places in the US.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| If Denmark has just one sales tax rate or VAT, then maybe
| that can work OK for Denmark.
|
| But this isn't about Denmark -- it is about the US.
|
| In the US, there are over 13,000 different sales tax
| jurisdictions, and each one of them may have a different
| tax rate.
|
| I wish the best to anyone who would ever be tasked with
| sorting that out with any semblance of accuracy using IP
| geolocation databases.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| Maybe not have 13000 different sales tax jurisdictions?
|
| Just a thought...
| ssl-3 wrote:
| It doesn't really work like that, though. Sales tax is up
| to the states to sort out how to deal with on their own,
| and there's 50 of them.
|
| Nationally (or as some may prefer, "federallly"), the
| sales tax rate is already zero -- and has always been
| zero.
| flutas wrote:
| > Sales tax is up to the states to sort out how to deal
| with on their own, and there's 50 of them.
|
| To add on for any else trying to figure out the 13k
| number from this statement.
|
| Counties can also apply their own additional taxes.
|
| Cities can also apply their own additional taxes.
|
| On top of just that, the cities and counties can set
| different taxes in the same area, such as a sugar tax or
| an alcohol tax or even a pre-prepared food tax vs
| groceries. It gets complicated fast.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| it can get really easy: just don't let this madness
| sprawl out of control? :)
|
| per state, I understand the tax. set it per state, and be
| done with it. maybe split it in some % with the city (I
| don't know if cities directly get a portion of it already
| or not?), so it's a win-win.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Maybe that works. I have concerns about IP geolocation
| databases being able to pin me down to a particular
| state, but maybe.
|
| But even assuming "good enough" IP geolocation exists: In
| order for this to be implemented both uniformly and
| nationally, we'd need a new constitutional amendment that
| would grant the federal government the ability to
| regulate how sales taxes work within states.
|
| Because right now, we have this: "The powers not
| delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
| prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the
| States respectively, or to the people."
| darknavi wrote:
| Take a good guess and let the user type in their zip
| code?
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Zip codes are for postal routing, not tax rates.
|
| Items I order at home are subject to a 7.25% sales tax
| rate.
|
| My neighbor across the street (our front doors are maybe
| 80 feet apart) pays 6.75%.
|
| We both live in the same zip code. We both live within
| the same city. We both live in the same school district.
| We each live in _two different counties_.
|
| (And up the road a bit, a third county is involved
| instead.)
| xandrius wrote:
| Enter your county then? Dunno enter something to
| differentiate.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| That seems simple, too.
|
| But some cities have their own sales taxes in addition to
| (or instead of) county sales taxes, so county alone isn't
| good enough.
|
| Besides, there's literally 30 different counties in the
| US named "Hancock".
|
| (If this were an easy problem to solve it'd have been
| solved a long time ago.)
|
| ---
|
| I think we're already back to where we started, wherein:
| In order to display an accurate sales tax, we need to
| know the address, city, and state of the buyer.
| turbojet1321 wrote:
| This seems less like a defense of pre-tax prices and more
| like an indictment of a thoroughly ridiculous tax system.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Not at all. I'm really not trying to defend anything
| here.
|
| It is my considered opinion that it is all quite
| resoundingly fucked.
| weberer wrote:
| A lot of sites, for example Amazon, don't update VAT until
| checkout, even if you set "Ship to [country]" when
| searching. Then the price suddenly jumps.
| websap wrote:
| Yes, because my IP address doesn't give them a way to
| calculate tentative taxes? My IP can be used to serve me ads,
| but not serve me actually relevant information?
|
| There's a very small % of traffic that actually uses VPNs
| crazygringo wrote:
| Correct, it doesn't. IP geolocation is nowhere near precise
| enough.
|
| Remember, sales tax isn't something big like state-level.
| It's literally _town_ -level, including tiny towns. Two
| sides of the same street can have a different sales tax.
|
| Not to mention all the extra rules, such as individual
| clothing items under $110 being exempt in New York.
| websap wrote:
| I will take the blurb which says taxes are an approximate
| calculation based on web browsing data available, vs, no
| taxes shown. We're gate keeping good features for large %
| of users over some edge cases.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Gate keeping what?
|
| You know where you live, you know what your local sales
| tax is. The current system works fine.
| lxgr wrote:
| It works ok-ish. It works significantly better in almost
| every other country in the world. Yay for status quo
| bias!
|
| > You know where you live, you know what your local sales
| tax is.
|
| No, I in fact don't know, because I have better things to
| do than to keep up with what my city and state have
| extended sales tax to this month, what carveouts exist
| ("no sales tax on unhealthy snacks except ice cream" and
| stuff like that) etc.
|
| And there is absolutely no excuse for in-person stores
| that do, in fact, have perfect a priori knowledge of all
| of this.
| Alupis wrote:
| Or, just get rid of sales tax anyway. It is the 2nd or
| 3rd time the same money has been taxed, depending on how
| you view it, and it's pretty ridiculous that a person
| with $100 in their bank account (post-taxes) still does
| not have the equivalent of $100 of purchasing power.
| mulmen wrote:
| It's the transaction that is taxed, not the money.
|
| By your logic I shouldn't have to pay income tax on sales
| because my customers already paid income tax. We could
| simply the whole thing by just making dollar bills worth
| $0.66.
| Alupis wrote:
| > By your logic I shouldn't have to pay income tax on
| sales because my customers already paid income tax.
|
| People often believe that because something has been for
| a while, it must always be so. Not too long ago we didn't
| have sales tax (introduced in the 1950's), and things
| were fine.
|
| You are taxed on your income, and you are taxed on your
| expenses. If you invest that money or do anything
| productive with it, it gets taxed again. That's such a
| ridiculous idea - pick one and stick with it. Make it
| whatever percentage it needs to be, and that's it.
|
| When someone looks at their bank account - that ought to
| be the final word on how much purchasing power that
| individual has. It shouldn't be handwavy minus 7-12%.
|
| Mind you, that's 7-12% _in addition to_ the 20-30% you
| already paid.
| mulmen wrote:
| Only the income on the investment is taxed though. The
| capital isn't double taxed.
|
| I'd love to abolish regressive sales taxes and return to
| 1950s level progressive income tax rates. You have my
| vote.
| Alupis wrote:
| Progressive income tax is also silly. Just because you
| earn more money than someone else doesn't mean you derive
| more benefits from the government.
|
| The idea of "Paying what you can afford" is BS everywhere
| it's been implemented - from school tuition to soccer
| camp to taxes. Everyone feels burned and like the
| "others" aren't paying what they should be.
|
| Federal taxes should be a flat percentage, no deductions,
| no credits, no so-called "loop holes"... nothing. Every
| citizen pays the same percentage (whatever it needs to
| be).
|
| The incumbent tax apparatus would never allow us to have
| something so simple, though.
|
| For a nation that got it's start in no small part due to
| being over-taxed, it's very interesting to see just how
| much tax shenanigans we tolerate today.
| mulmen wrote:
| Our philosophies differ.
|
| > Progressive income tax is also silly. Just because you
| earn more money than someone else doesn't mean you derive
| more benefits from the government.
|
| I think "pay what you can afford" is fair because the
| only way to make half a million dollars (or more) a year
| is to disproportionately reap the benefits of society.
| Marginal income tax is fair in the sense that everyone
| does pay the same. Your $11,001st dollar is taxed the
| same as everyone else, just like your $578,126th dollar.
| If you don't want to pay the highest rates then take
| advantage of deductions (aka incentives aka loopholes)
| and invest in creating jobs.
|
| > Everyone feels burned and like the "others" aren't
| paying what they should be.
|
| I definitely don't feel this way and I am happy to pay my
| marginal rates. I just don't think they go far enough.
|
| > Federal taxes should be a flat percentage, no
| deductions, no credits, no so-called "loop holes"...
| nothing. Every citizen pays the same percentage (whatever
| it needs to be).
|
| Do you propose a flat income tax or a flat wealth tax?
| Should capital gains be taxed as income?
|
| > For a nation that got it's start in no small part due
| to being over-taxed, it's very interesting to see just
| how much tax shenanigans we tolerate today.
|
| My understanding was that the issue was lack of
| representation or ability to levy local taxes but I admit
| my knowledge of that point in history is weak. The
| America of today is certainly different from
| revolutionary times. I would say it is better.
| Alupis wrote:
| > disproportionately reap the benefits of society
|
| This is where we fundamentally disagree.
|
| You buy products because you want/like them. The people
| who make them are not disproportionately reaping benefits
| of society - they are reaping benefits of creating
| productive and desirable products.
|
| This view flirts with the idea that people "extract"
| wealth from the public, and that people are taken
| advantage of and/or manipulated into buying things.
|
| > I definitely don't feel this way and I am happy to pay
| my marginal rates. I just don't think they go far enough.
|
| People universally feel the government (local, state,
| federal) overwhelmingly wastes their tax money - yet so
| many people demand _others_ pay more of their earned
| income to this uncaring ineffective machine. Tax receipts
| will never be enough for the government, and some people
| will continue to advocate plowing more of _other people
| 's_ money into the dark abyss. That's madness.
|
| > Do you propose a flat income tax or a flat wealth tax?
| Should capital gains be taxed as income?
|
| I propose a straight flat income tax percentage, without
| any deductions, credits, anything. While the percentage
| is fixed, the dollar amount obviously scales with income.
| Things like capital gains are solved this way by taxing
| the actual income you generated from the investments.
|
| I'm making up numbers, but say it's 20%. No matter if you
| earned $1 of income, or $1,000,000 - you pay 20%.
| mulmen wrote:
| I think a person who gains $10,000,000.00 a year should
| be paying a higher tax than someone gaining $20,000.00 a
| year because a person can't personally create
| $10,000,000.00 of value in a year. Or even $8,000,000.00
| of value. The only way to do that is to own a
| disproportionate slice of the American economy. When
| money moves value is created. The incentive should be to
| spread that wealth out, not to concentrate it.
|
| A flat tax of 20% would be ruinous to the poor and lower
| middle class. That can't be sustained without an enormous
| increase in income or some guarantees around living
| expenses.
|
| If I understand your definition of flat tax then capital
| gains would be untaxed as well so the wealthiest would
| pay even less.
|
| I understand the ideology. Taxes should be simple and
| equal. I just don't think that ideology is worth
| defending. The price is too high when the benefits are so
| unclear.
| tzs wrote:
| > Progressive income tax is also silly. Just because you
| earn more money than someone else doesn't mean you derive
| more benefits from the government
|
| Ok...
|
| > Federal taxes should be a flat percentage, no
| deductions, no credits, no so-called "loop holes"...
| nothing. Every citizen pays the same percentage (whatever
| it needs to be).
|
| Flat _percentage_? A flat percentage means that if you
| earn N times what someone else earns you pay N times as
| much tax as they do.
|
| But you just said a couple of paragraphs earlier that
| just because you earn more money that someone else
| doesn't mean you derive more benefits from the
| government. If that's going to be the basis of your tax
| policy shouldn't the tax be a flat _amount_?
| Alupis wrote:
| A flat percentage means exactly that - everyone pays the
| same percentage. Everyone derives the same value from the
| government, ie. the same percentage of their income.
| tzs wrote:
| Let's say the flat percentage is 10%.
|
| Alice makes $10 million/year, so her tax is $1
| million/year.
|
| Bob makes $20 000/year, so his tax is $2 000/year.
|
| Alice and Bob get the same benefits from the government
| so what is the justification for her tax being 500 times
| as much as Bob's?
| mulmen wrote:
| Doesn't this imply that the government provides our
| income?
| mulmen wrote:
| So currently they correctly advertise the pre-tax price
| but since that's not the correct total price your
| proposal is to display an approximate price which is also
| not the correct total price. I don't see how this reduces
| ambiguity.
| websap wrote:
| A higher price is more accurate than the pretax price
| mulmen wrote:
| > A higher price is more accurate than the pretax price
|
| Well, no, it isn't. Consider the Oregon/Washington
| border. An IP could bounce around there. Oregon has zero
| sales tax so the pre-tax price is literally correct for
| Oregon residents. Adding estimated tax will be less
| accurate.
|
| Similarly I could live in unincorporated King County such
| as White Center and not be subject to Seattle tax while
| still being subject to King County and Washington tax
| even though the other side of the street is Seattle.
|
| There's a sugary drink tax in Seattle. The border is
| Roxbury. There's a 7/11 on Roxbury in White Center.
| Should a 7/11 sandwich board on the Seattle side of the
| street across from that 7/11 advertise the price with or
| without that tax?
| lxgr wrote:
| It's gonna be a much better ballpark number than the
| before-tax number is in almost all practical scenarios.
| So yes, I do think that would be a massive win compared
| to the status quo.
| mulmen wrote:
| Unless you live on the border of Oregon or Montana. Or in
| a city.
| lxgr wrote:
| I live in a city, and I have no idea how much the total
| is going to be before going to checkout right now, so
| arguably that wouldn't be a change for the worse.
|
| This is at a merchant that, to say it lightly, has some
| prior knowledge of me and even has a drop-down menu to
| let me select the shipping destination out of my saved
| ones.
|
| So far, that's only used for determining shipping times
| and availabilities - so why not also display amounts
| post-tax?
| mulmen wrote:
| On an ecommerce site where you already selected your
| destination sure, the total can be displayed in some
| cases. How should volume discounts, coupons, and shipping
| incentives be handled?
|
| What about a grocery store on the Oregon/Idaho border?
| Idaho charges sales tax to _residents_ but that can be
| waived with an Oregon ID. Should this be reflected in the
| advertised price?
|
| And what about billboard or TV advertisements or even
| banner ads on a webpage?
| lxgr wrote:
| > How should volume discounts, coupons, and shipping
| incentives be handled?
|
| I don't care, to be honest. If the merchant knows I can
| definitely get the cheaper rate without jumping through
| extra hoops, I don't see a problem in showing the lower
| price.
|
| > What about a grocery store on the Oregon/Idaho border?
| Idaho charges sales tax to residents but that can be
| waived with an Oregon ID. Should this be reflected in the
| advertised price?
|
| Wow, really? Fascinating/frustrating! There's always one
| more layer, I guess. Maybe... show two prices then? (I've
| seen this in duty free stores: Sometimes there's a "with
| international boarding pass only" price.)
|
| > And what about billboard or TV advertisements or even
| banner ads on a webpage?
|
| That seems like a case where I'd be fine with the net
| price being displayed. And yeah, I realize that then all
| other stores would be screaming unfair discrimination
| because people will compare the competition's flyer price
| to the in-store label price and everything...
|
| Maybe the only solution really is to simplify the horror
| that is US sales tax, and that's obviously never
| happening. Think of all the jobs in tax preparation and
| software...
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| It somehow works almost anywhere outside of NA? It's
| really not a crazy concept - estimate it based on
| geolocation and say "more exact will be available once
| you enter your address". The problem is, that genuinely
| negatively affect the sales because people see the true
| price of things.
| mulmen wrote:
| > It somehow works almost anywhere outside of NA?
|
| Is North America unique in allowing local municipalities
| to set their own taxes?
|
| > It's really not a crazy concept - estimate it based on
| geolocation and say "more exact will be available once
| you enter your address".
|
| That's exactly what happens now, except the advertised
| price is actually correct instead of an "estimate". I
| have an intuitive sense for local tax. How can I know
| what method was used to compute this estimated price?
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Out of my head, if I recall correctly, Australia, Japan,
| Denmark do local municipal taxes as well (some are more
| flat than others).
|
| Anyways, all I was saying that it's a solved UX problem,
| and the reason why you're not getting full price is
| because A/B testing has shown that when customers see the
| complete price, they get a shock and less likely to buy
| the item. This doesn't have much to do with websites
| caring about some edge cases that they'll somehow won't
| be able to give out exact price to you. In the worst
| case, the shopping websites could ask you to enter your
| postal code and show all prices with the tax included
| price.
| mulmen wrote:
| So are estimated prices being advertised in Australia,
| Japan, or Denmark? Why is North America uniquely
| susceptible to A/B testing?
|
| Municipal taxes are not an edgecase in the United States
| at least. They're very much the norm, especially in
| telecommunications.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Because according to Japanese law, in most of the
| scenarios, the full price, to your best ability, has to
| be presented to the potential customer. Same goes for
| Australia, if I recall correctly. No clue about Denmark,
| I'm sorry. But assuming it's similar over there as well.
|
| It's not that NA is the only one susceptible to A/B
| testing. It's more of a - it's-grey-area-to-illegal to
| not show full prices outside of NA.
| mulmen wrote:
| Huh, I find that very surprising. Are the estimates gamed
| at all? Is there any rule around how accurate they have
| to be?
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| You just put your postal code and it shows all prices
| according to your municipality, it will be as exact as
| you can get. Just go to amazon.jp, it should have a text
| input somewhere for your postal code to calculate the
| tax.
|
| In terms of gaming, hmm... I guess, you could add wrong
| municipality's taxes when you show the original price,
| and switch over at the checkout. But my assumption is
| that would be deemed illegal, as you are knowingly
| misleading the customer. Some in person stores still try
| a bit to mislead you by putting the full price in smaller
| font (like including the consumption tax), and exclude it
| over it in the bigger font. But I can still accept that,
| as I am informed about the full price somehow.
| mulmen wrote:
| Ok well obviously if you have the address the correct
| calculation can be made. That's consistent with the
| behavior in the US.
|
| What is displayed for price _before_ you put in postal
| code? What price do generic banner or TV ads display?
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| My guess is approximate (average?) tax. I'm currently
| outside of Japan, by default Amazon shows me the price in
| Yen and says it can't deliver to me. When I put down the
| postal code in Tokyo, shows the same amount. Probably
| takes the biggest city's tax rate when it can't determine
| it through geolocation.
| mulmen wrote:
| What about billboards or banner ads? When an ISP in Japan
| wants to advertise their service do they include a price
| on the billboard?
|
| What you describe sounds like the same thing that happens
| in the US. So what's special about Australia, Japan, and
| Denmark as you stated earlier?
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Why wouldn't they? Major ones are electronic, and you
| know the areas you are putting up your ads in, so you
| include the tax in it. You go to the store, sales tax
| either included in the price, or written in smaller font
| with the tax included price.
|
| It actually happens in NA for specific industries as
| well! If you buy a flight from Google flights without
| making any additional purchases, you will get the sticker
| price because airfare display is regulated to a certain
| degree. Except in Japan and other countries, almost all
| display prices have to include local taxes. It's a solved
| problem, but there's no political appetite for it in
| US/Canada because it will hurt the sales.
| mulmen wrote:
| Not sure how telco taxes work in Japan but it would be
| impossible to advertise an accurate tax-included price in
| my city because not all the residents of the metro area
| have the same tax structure. Zip code isn't enough. The
| full address is required. So TV and print advertisements
| are pre-tax. I don't see how it could work any other way.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| > Because according to Japanese law, in most of the
| scenarios, the full price, to your best ability, has to
| be presented to the potential customer.
|
| Are you sure? When I shop in Japan, it seems like about
| 50/50 where they have sales tax included, or not.
| However, the price tag will be clear if the price
| includes sales tax or not.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Yes. Source: https://www.nta.go.jp/taxes/shiraberu/taxans
| wer/shohi/6902.h...
|
| I agree, there are a lot of cases where they don't show
| the full prices. Especially in the recent years when
| they've been changing the consumption tax rapidly, and
| allowing shops to have some leeway. But online prices,
| almost everywhere, include tax. Even Shopify forces JP
| merchants to display them while selling in the area.
| websap wrote:
| I've been working at FAANG for the past 10 years, so this
| made me absolutely chuckle!
|
| I can totally image a PM somewhere calculate the negative
| bps for this and call the experiment a failure!
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Yeah, I totally get you! I've done exactly this work for
| semi-B2B company where it clearly showed the sticker
| price effect and we ended up removing the taxes from it.
| Unless it's legislated, it's obvious the way the
| companies will go.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| > estimate it based on geolocation and say "more exact
| will be available once you enter your address".
|
| I appreciate this can be done and countries in Europe do
| it, I just don't see how this is any better at all than
| status quo:
|
| * Current State: we all know the quoted price doesn't
| include sales tax, which will be added to make the final
| price in checkout after we enter our address.
|
| * Final State: we all know the quoted price will likely
| change during checkout, when we see the final price after
| we enter our address.
|
| So we make things more complicated for vendors, and we
| make it not just acceptable but required that vendors use
| our IP addresses for geolocation, only to give us a
| maybe-right-maybe-wrong final price. Does anyone feel
| scammed by not having tax included on the price in the
| listings of Macy's online store?
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| The only reason why status quo is there because people
| are less likely to remove items from their online
| shopping carts once they've added it. There are
| techniques and shopping check out flows that have been
| perfected over the years to drive up the online sales.
| Realistically, it won't move the needle for the people
| who are on this forum because of the average salary (a
| few dollars are usually not a big deal for us), but it
| can be a make it or break it choice for a good chunk of
| customers.
|
| I'm not sure why one wouldn't want to know the real price
| before the checkout. It's a bit baffling to me. It could
| be a cultural thing as well, then I guess, there isn't
| really a right or wrong way of looking at it.
| mulmen wrote:
| > The only reason why status quo is there because people
| are less likely to remove items from their online
| shopping carts once they've added it.
|
| Sure, in a world where the actual sticker price is
| displayed. Do you believe this will remain true when
| customers have to add items to the cart to get the "real"
| price?
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| That's literally how it works everywhere else...? For
| example, when I go to amazon.jp, even without logging in,
| it will show you tax included prices once you enter your
| postal code.
| mulmen wrote:
| Ok I see what you mean now. On an ecommerce site this
| works but I don't see how it can be done in
| _advertising_.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _I 'm not sure why one wouldn't want to know the real
| price before the checkout. It's a bit baffling to me._
|
| It's just that, in the list of things I'd like fixed
| about the world, that's about dead last.
|
| When you're used to sales tax being added at the
| register, it's not an inconvenience. Who cares.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| Fair, I guess it's a cultural thing then. I absolutely
| have no idea what other municipality's taxes are the
| second I get out of mine. I wouldn't want to randomly
| predict whether it's 10, 12, or 15%.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| > I'm not sure why one wouldn't want to know the real
| price before the checkout.
|
| Because you'd never actually know if it's the final real
| price or not until you entered your address! That's the
| _entire_ premise of my objection, was that not clear?
| blitzar wrote:
| Apparently they can track you to the nearest 5m 24 hours
| a day, figure out that your teenage daughter is pregnant
| and replicate your likeness and voice perfectly - but
| when it comes to sales tax its an intractable problem.
| ewoodrich wrote:
| That's a non-sequitur unless the question being
| considered is specifically whether a data hoarder like
| Google should build in estimated sales tax in their store
| vs "a random shopping cart from a retailer I've never
| interacted with before".
| mulmen wrote:
| I believe you are referencing the famous Target case. As
| I understand the dad was angry that Target was sending
| baby-related coupons to his teenage daughter.
|
| Finding out your teenage daughter is pregnant based on
| her shopping is easy. It's actually harder not to notice.
| "Customers like you also bought" is an effective
| algorithm because people are mostly the same. Pregnancy
| has some very specific and unique needs which create a
| strong signal.
|
| Nobody is in a shady back room poring over chat logs and
| GPS coordinates looking for pregnant teenagers. It just
| falls out of the sysem.
| ewoodrich wrote:
| Yep, where I currently live based on IP geolocation I
| would be quoted incorrect state sales tax 100% of the
| time. Though it's sort of the perfect geography to be
| problematic (Vancouver, WA side of the greater Portland,
| OR metro area spanning a sales tax/no sales tax state
| boundary).
| rascul wrote:
| I live in Mississippi and my geo ip used to say New York
| City.
| trustinmenowpls wrote:
| Yup, I know what sales tax is in my state and can do the math
| in my head pretty easily to get the approx. amount. If you
| live in a state for any length of time you should be able to
| do this too. even if its something odd like 7.25% you can
| figure out what 10% is really quickly and know it'll be a
| little less than that.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure who these presumably tech-adjacent folks are
| who can't look at a posted price, know something about the
| tax/tipping/etc. conventions are, and know about what the
| final bill will be.
|
| That said, I DO agree that hidden facility/resort/etc. fees
| and the like should go. For years, there was a conference
| center restoration fee tacked onto hotels all over NYC even
| the project wasn't even approved. Rental cars at airports
| are also a nightmare. There is no reason for them.
| diehunde wrote:
| Right, but even when they do have your zipcode (because you
| added beforehand for checking stock for example) they don't
| update the prices. It would be nice to have the option
| rconti wrote:
| Every local store I walk into is trying to fool me by not
| including sales taxes, why would online stores be any
| different?
| drdaeman wrote:
| GP mentioned "sticker price", so I suspect they possibly
| meant physical goods or services. If you're in a retail
| store, there are no real obstacles (except for business
| unwillingness to be honest to the customer) to calculate and
| disclose the final price. A store knows where it's located,
| and that's where the sale happens.
| mr_toad wrote:
| Why do US states allow counties and cities to raise so many
| taxes?
|
| Usually (across the world and across history) the power of
| taxation is very jealously guarded, and local government is
| usually only allowed to gather a limited range of taxes.
| Historically sovereigns have treated attempts by subordinates
| to raise their own taxes as tantamount to treason.
| crazygringo wrote:
| ...why shouldn't they?
|
| You haven't given any reason why not.
|
| And sales tax _is_ one of a limited range of taxes.
| kaonwarb wrote:
| The one upside I'm aware of for taxes being added separately is
| high awareness of what the sales tax rate is.
| petsfed wrote:
| I'm more ok with "hidden" taxes, because the business is
| supposed to just hand that over. If they're putting something
| on the receipt that says "tax" and its not associated with an
| actual government-applied tax, that's just fraud., we don't
| need special rules to address that (yet). Its not hidden in an
| attempt to trick you into buying something at a higher cost.
| Its hidden because calculating the taxes requires additional
| information from the user.
| conductr wrote:
| Hidden and not yet calculated are different things. They should
| just make a broad and sweeping stances on these hidden fees.
| The fact they play whack-a-mole from implementing this from
| industry to industry as the 'need' arises seems silly. If a
| price is advertised or quoted, it should be inclusive all the
| things with tax being the one exception.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| You don't know what the sticker price is going to be until you
| know who is buying it from where for what.
|
| Until then, all you can do is quote a price.
|
| Welcome to reality, kid.
|
| If you're buying it for resale, you don't owe tax. How do you
| put that on a price tag?
|
| There's use tax. Depending on what you use a product you buy
| for, you might owe a different tax rate. How do you get a final
| price out of that?
|
| You don't. When you quote a price, it's a quote.
| weberer wrote:
| They should just ban sales tax. Many states already have 0%
| sales tax, like New Hampshire, and Delaware.
| skeletal88 wrote:
| In this thread: people claiming how exceptional the US is, to
| justify not having the final amount on price tags.
|
| You guys can think of lots of reasons to justify why you can't
| do things like the rest of the civilized world does, be it
| prices and taxes, medical insurance or something else. The US
| is not some sprcial snowflake country.
| legitster wrote:
| Seems like a no brainer. Can they tackle sales tax next?
| itake wrote:
| and service fees at restaurants. The price on the menu in
| Seattle or SF is ~25% lower than what the product actually
| costs.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| California was set to ban that, until Scott Weiner carved out
| an exception for restaurants.
| sedatk wrote:
| His name sounds exactly like someone who'd sabotage a
| public benefit.
| hnburnsy wrote:
| Yeah, I love that healthcare surcharge at SFO restaurants.
| itake wrote:
| Healthcare surcharge: 6%
|
| tip: 20%
|
| tax: 8.625%
|
| = total: 34.625%
| zten wrote:
| The healthcare surcharge is taxable, because it shouldn't
| exist, it should just be a 6% increase in the menu price.
| trustinmenowpls wrote:
| what is a healthcare surcharge?
| zten wrote:
| SF has something called Healthy SF where employers have
| to offer health insurance plans, or pay into a city-
| managed health account. I think the last time I looked,
| for a lot of businesses, it's basically a $2.25/hr raise
| for your employees.
|
| edit: The best part is, if your employees don't use the
| money (maybe they don't know about it or don't have any
| health care expenses), the business can eventually
| reclaim it...
|
| The restaurant association balked at this, and encouraged
| businesses to list out the increased cost as a separate
| line item on the receipt, instead of raising menu prices,
| basically raising a middle finger and saying "see what
| you idiots voted for, now you pay for it!" I don't know
| why I'd be mad that I have to pay for someone's health
| care. That's sort of how it works, doesn't it?
|
| Since then, it has taken on a life of its own. Some
| places call it a health care surcharge. Others call it a
| SF surcharge, or a cost adjustment, or inflation fee.
| It's not a tax, it's not a service charge, it's not
| anything but whatever arbitrary number the business wants
| to charge without raising their menu price. And thus,
| it's taxable.
| coldpie wrote:
| Minnesota banned these this year! It goes into effect Jan
| 1st. https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/05/20/governor-signs-
| junk...
| physhster wrote:
| Imagine if that guy became VP...
| coldpie wrote:
| We have a very nice little island of sanity up here :)
| kstrauser wrote:
| Count the service charge toward what you would've tipped.
|
| Wait staff reading this: bosses at restaurants like this are
| stealing from you if that doesn't go straight to you. I tip
| very well, but I'm not tipping twice. And yes, if it's a
| "service charge", that's the same as saying "tip" from the
| customer's perspective.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Would boycott get a chance? The honest restaurants bragging
| "NO FEES" would gather more customers and the others follow.
|
| Wondering, is there already US places that works without tips
| like in most other places ? (Owner pays a decent salary to
| its employees, include that in all products they sell and
| don't expect tips)
| FateOfNations wrote:
| Various restaurant operators have experimented with what
| you described but haven't succeeded. The big issue is that
| servers hate it specifically because owners use the
| additional revenue to "pay a decent salary to their
| employees. " This generally includes all the employees, not
| just the formerly tipped ones. The kitchen staff ends up
| getting a significant pay bump, and servers get what
| amounts to a cut in their take-home pay.
|
| At the higher end, the labor market for waitstaff is
| competitive, and restaurant operators who have experimented
| with this have had trouble keeping server positions filled
| (with the opposite effect in the kitchen).
| caseyohara wrote:
| Not likely; sales tax is extremely complicated in the US. There
| are 13,000 sales tax jurisdictions, and many of them have
| different and incompatible rules for things like sales tax
| nexus.
| cyberax wrote:
| A business already has to take care of the sales tax. So they
| can just show it on the price tag.
| bluGill wrote:
| No they cannot. Taxes are not uniform. Walmart probably
| won't deal with this, but in many states business (read
| farmers) do not pay sales tax on some items (read likely to
| be used on a farm) and so stores that want to sell to
| business will have the ability to verify you are a business
| to give that discount.
|
| It is worse for online where until you log in they have no
| clue what taxes will apply. If you are buying a gift for
| someone in a different area I don't know what tax rules
| apply but there is good odds they won't know until you get
| to the shipping information what the real taxes are.
| cyberax wrote:
| If you sell a widget in a store, you MUST be able to
| compute the sales tax. Otherwise, you can't sell it.
|
| And if you can do that, then you might as well print it
| on the price tag (along with pre-tax price if you want).
| No buts.
|
| Ditto for online, after you get the customer's ZIP code.
| bluGill wrote:
| You can't print the price on a price tag because
| different customer pay different prices.
| cyberax wrote:
| Bullshit. First, you absolutely CAN JUST PUT TWO PRICES
| on a price tag. Moreover, business customers (in a
| grocery shop, yeah right) can just get a discount at a
| point of sale.
| kstrauser wrote:
| My favorite example of this lunacy is the restaurant
| nearby that sells pies. If they box your pie for you to
| take home, it's a grocery item and not taxed. If they
| give you utensils to eat it in the store, it's a
| restaurant meal and therefore taxed.
|
| They literally can't know the price until you tell them
| whether you'd like a fork with it.
|
| Now, this restaurant works around it by having both
| prices listed, but I can imagine a million freaking
| variants of that for an online sale: "you have to pay our
| local taxes, but almost maybe yours, unless you check out
| on a Sunday between noon and 5PM, which is a tax holiday
| on your block (but not your neighbors' across the road),
| so understand that the price may change between when you
| add it to your cart and when you click the 'pay' button."
|
| I'm only a little bit exaggerating.
| cyberax wrote:
| Then put two freaking price tags: "pies to go" and "eat
| here". Problem solved.
|
| There are zero legitimate reasons not to show true
| prices.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Stopped reading after the first paragraph, huh.
| runako wrote:
| > And if you can do that, then you might as well print it
| on the price tag (along with pre-tax price if you want).
|
| Fun fact: sales tax rates are not stable. Our state
| publishes quarterly tax changes at the county level;
| city-level changes are presumably too numerous for the
| state to publish in the same format.
|
| Inclusive pricing can obviously be done in-store, but it
| also more or less ensures that some of the items in your
| store will have incorrect prices some of the time.
| FateOfNations wrote:
| At least here in California, the state collects the sales
| tax on behalf of all the local jurisdictions, so they
| publish and update them all simultaneously (twice a year)
| and in the same format.
| runako wrote:
| Interesting...there must be a state law that requires
| jurisdictions to synchronize any changes to sales tax
| rates to a single calendar.
| fn-mote wrote:
| The issue with online sales is real, but customers exempt
| from sales tax could just have their final price lowered.
| That would be the opposite of the current situation.
| Since there are many fewer tax-exempt sales, and tax-
| exempt buyers are presumably more sophisticated and less
| price-sensitive, this would be a net win for customers.
| maccard wrote:
| > but in many states business (read farmers) do not pay
| sales tax on some items (read likely to be used on a
| farm)
|
| The legislation in most of europe clearly handles this -
| the price displayed is for the intended customer. If you
| go into B&Q (home depot equivalent), you'll see prices
| including sales tax. If you go next door to a timber
| merchant none of the prices have sales tax included. If
| you're a business, you don't pay the sales tax. The
| businesses know what their taxes are, and are required to
| have accurate accounts anyway. For those that are maybe
| numerically challenged - they'll never pay more than they
| see on the sticker.
|
| > It is worse for online where until you log in they have
| no clue what taxes will apply.
|
| Enter your shipping address to see pricing. Exactly the
| same as it is now. Give an estimate based on IP. Exactly
| how it works in Europe, which has the same problem.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| I think legitster is suggesting that the sticker price on the
| product should be the price paid, rather than a uniform sales
| tax code. If the seller knows what to charge the buyer, then
| they know what they need to put on the sticker.
| runako wrote:
| Local retailers would oppose this in very strong terms as a
| thumb on the scale in favor of online retailers.
|
| Online retailers would presumably still be able to show
| pricing before knowing a shipping address, so their pricing
| would be pre-tax. That would make the apparent price
| differential even greater, and on every item.
|
| I think this would make the marketplace less clear for
| consumers.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| Online retailers could be required to use the best
| available estimate of the user's location to calculate
| the tax, like they do for ads.
|
| So if they are logged in with an address on file, it
| could be that. If not, they could use geolocation, with a
| note that the tax is estimated. And let the user input a
| location in a box to show the exact tax.
| runako wrote:
| > they could use geolocation, with a note that the tax is
| estimated
|
| So we'd go from the current regime where the displayed
| price is wrong to another regime where the displayed
| price is wrong? Allegedly, something like 40%+ of
| Americans use VPNs. They would pretty much always see the
| wrong price.
|
| In practice, the ramification of this would be that your
| local indie retailers (where we are much less likely to
| be persistently logged in) would be forced to incorrectly
| show higher prices to a set of people, while the giant
| retailers who already have your billing info can show you
| 100% accurate pricing all the time, regardless of VPN.
|
| I don't see any clear wins in that scenario.
| thehappypm wrote:
| 40% of Americans using VPNs cannot possibly be true.
| runako wrote:
| Sounded off to me, but I wasn't able to find a better
| number when I looked. Maybe it's counting work computers
| where the stack is maintained by IT staff?
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Oddly enough, the average EU consumer has no problem
| understanding that the label price is the full price of a
| purchase, while online prices might include extra stuff
| such as delivery.
|
| Maybe you're just less intelligent than the average
| consumer and need some more protection? Or is it
| something else?
| runako wrote:
| > Maybe you're just less intelligent than the average
| consumer
|
| I'm not one to police tone, but really? Did it make you
| feel better to say that?
|
| > is it something else?
|
| Yes, the something else is that you're missing the point
| that my comment was specifically about the disparity in
| the prices large online retailers would be able to
| display (e.g. without sales tax) versus what offline
| retailers would display (with sales tax).
|
| If Amazon and a local retailer are both aiming for the
| same $1,000 for an item net of tax, this would mean that
| Amazon could display $1,000 as the price while my local
| retailer would have to list it for (say) $1,100. I don't
| think local retailers would like that very much, even
| though the consumer would end up paying $1,100 either
| way. You may disagree.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Move to Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire or Oregon. No
| sales tax.
| m463 wrote:
| most states have some trick.
|
| I think you have to look at it wholistically:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Median_h.
| ..
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Not a trick, just they get their income from other sources
| / taxes. But we're specifically talking about knowing the
| final price you will pay, in advance, which requires
| knowing the sales tax.
| runako wrote:
| nitpick: "holistically"
| m463 wrote:
| Lol, I didn't even think when I wrote it that way. That
| said, it seems to be in the dictionary as an alternate
| spelling of holistic.
|
| I guess the english language lets this stuff happen a
| lot, but not alot. I definitely did it by accident (not
| "on accident"!)
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| That's a state matter so not really within the FTC's
| jurisdiction I think.
|
| Luckily some states (OR, AK, others) don't have a sales tax.
| nirav72 wrote:
| Wonder if this going to be permanent or will be reverted as soon
| as the new FTC head is in office.
| munk-a wrote:
| Time will tell - the change I'm really hoping will stick is the
| outlawing of non-competes without consideration.
| delecti wrote:
| I would not be hopeful. From AP news:
|
| > Four of the FTC's five commissioners voted to approve the
| rule. Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, - who is President-elect
| Donald Trump's choice to replace Khan, was the one dissenting
| vote.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/ftc-junk-fees-rule-hotels-
| tickets...
| hnburnsy wrote:
| One republican commissioner voted with the rule, and
| Ferguson dissented based on lame duck rule making, not the
| merits, while agreeing that the FTC rule making was valid
| for businesses like tickets and short term lodging.
| Cornbilly wrote:
| That's a moronic dissent. It's either valid or not, lame
| duck or no.
|
| Edit: The full decent reads like choosing fealty to Trump
| over good rule making.
| https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/ferguson-
| junk-f...
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of people probably weigh this too much. Forcing
| companies to have some skin in the game is good. But, in
| practice, if a company really wants to enforce a non-compete
| --even with consideration--it's probably not great unless
| you're in a position and want to take a sabbatical with
| substantially reduced compensation.
| munk-a wrote:
| This is absolutely true and when I read my first non-
| compete my dad calmly explained how unenforceable they are
| due to hardship exceptions and lack of specificity.
| However, I had a very business minded father to ask and
| most people don't. Non-competes have been abused to scare
| uninformed employees into staying in positions they want to
| leave or as revenge for someone leaving.
|
| The fact that they're so often unenforceable is probably a
| decent argument that they're an irrelevant complication of
| labor interactions that we don't need anyways. They only
| ever made sense with executives and those folks usually
| have large sums of money attached to their compliance.
| ghaff wrote:
| The few months when I actually had a non-compete in place
| it was quite specific and didn't apply to me.
|
| But, yeah, as a generic thing below the level of a CEO
| becoming the CEO of a direct competitor (in which case
| lawyers have presumably put specific contracts in place
| if they're competent), they don't make a lot of sense
| beyond NDAs in play. No properly-managed company was ever
| going to pay me a bunch of money to not work at a random
| company in the industry who was probably a partner
| anyway.
| dhosek wrote:
| Come January 21st, expect junk fees to explode. But don't
| worry, as long as you make at least $10,000,000 per year,
| you'll get a huge tax cut.
| spockz wrote:
| Im all for this. I'm worried though that now the junk fees will
| just be added to the normal price without ultimately changing
| anything.
| eterm wrote:
| That does change things though, it gives you a fair point of
| comparison.
| munk-a wrote:
| And that comparison is important - when junk fees are allowed
| more honest companies suffer because consumers might shop
| around and end up choosing the option that is actually more
| expensive. Those consumers might be on page 12/13 of a form
| and just accept the fee to avoid the hassle - or they may
| assume everyone (including what looked like a more expensive
| competitor) is baking the fees in late in the process and not
| bother investigating deeper.
|
| Hidden fees create market inequities.
| adra wrote:
| No, the reason they tack on the fee as a "tax" is literally to
| confuse and otherwise mislead the public to the true cost of
| the product they're buying, or mislead where the money is
| directed. they're buying from. If you believe in the Tennant's
| of capitalism at all, then you must have clear price
| representation.
| smaccona wrote:
| Nitpick: "tenets"
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Nitpick: Scottish lager only please
| morkalork wrote:
| Isn't Airbnb a good example of this? In some locations you
| have to open each listing to get the true price and it's a
| huge waste of time. In locations, what you see on the map is
| the real value, cleaning and other, fees included.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I mean, they will be, but that's the point. No more surprises.
| You can actually compare prices without going through checkout
| first.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Market actors are allowed to charge whatever they want. Price
| controls are super bad. It's not the role of the state to
| mandate a specific price. It is the role of the state to make
| sure prices are fair and transparent. Deception cannot be
| tolerated in an efficient market.
| bluGill wrote:
| I wish sales taxes would be added - some cities charge very
| large taxes on hotel rooms and so it might be worth staying in
| a hotel not far away with more reasonable taxes.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Official release: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-
| releases/2024/12/...
|
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42441347)
| arrowleaf wrote:
| Great! My wife was reading me ticket prices for an event on
| Ticketmaster yesterday, I kept telling her she needs to add them
| to the cart and start checkout to know the real price. She did
| just that and to my surprise the price didn't change at all!
| YaBa wrote:
| Now do the same with airline companies. WizzAir charges the crap
| out of you for everything they can. Do not fly with WizzAir!
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| A significant difference here is that the airline fees are
| ostensibly optional. You could, in theory, fly Spirit with
| nothing except the clothes on your back and they wouldn't
| charge you extra. But with event ticket sales and the like,
| there is often no possible way to avoid the fees. That means
| there's a much stronger argument for requiring that the fees be
| rolled into the price.
| FateOfNations wrote:
| Or they do something silly where there is an "Online
| Convenience Fee" when you buy online, but if you try to buy
| it at the box office, there's a different "Box Office
| Ticketing Fee." The event promoter should pay the cost of
| their ticketing service provider(s) out of the money they
| make, not have the purchaser pay it separately.
| Symbiote wrote:
| A recent WizzAir flight was advertised (when I searched for the
| route on their website) for EUR21. I rejected all optional
| extras, and that was the total price I paid.
|
| No checked luggage, probably only a small cabin bag that fitted
| under the seat in front, no priority boarding, no seat
| selection.
|
| It's a budget service, but the advertised prices aren't
| deceptive.
| YaBa wrote:
| Trust me, you got lucky, they "randomly" selected passengers
| with those kind of bags for inspection due to measures, 1mm
| above? charged! Emphasis on randomly, because the pattern was
| simple: foreigners? charged, locals? go on. We've saw a poor
| guy squeeze the hell out of his backpack to no avail, it
| fitted the measuring box, still, charged because "you had to
| squeeze it"; guess what, plenty of room under the seat, the
| guy could put two of them. On me? bag had wheels, foreigner,
| automatically selected for inspection, took the wheels away,
| still charged because "it had wheels first". I've flew a
| dozen companies, not even Ryanair, the low of the lowest
| treats passengers like this.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| That's not in the US so unaffected.
| dchichkov wrote:
| I wish that "Online Coupon Price Tags" in stores would also be
| banned. I'm talking about these yellow price tags that show lower
| than "Club" prices, which are only valid if you collect a coupon
| online.
|
| Like FTC, I estimate that banning these would save U.S. consumers
| millions of hours they currently spend searching and clicking on
| pointless coupons on their phones before making purchases. It
| would also increase happiness, as it's extremely annoying to pay
| $20 extra, knowing that a lower price is available if only you
| spent ten minutes struggling with a store's website on your
| phone.
|
| Whoever invented this is evil and is destroying happiness.
| floxy wrote:
| >I'm talking about these yellow price tags that show lower than
| "Club" prices, which are only valid if you collect a coupon
| online.
|
| Which store is that with the yellow price tags?
| dchichkov wrote:
| Safeway, Walgreens.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Kroger too
|
| You have to log in with an account and "clip" the imaginary
| coupons in their app for the price to apply when you scan
| your card
| Spivak wrote:
| I'm less mad about those since it's basically just price
| discrimination. If you are price sensitive enough that
| you're willing to clip the coupon then you get the
| cheaper price.
| dchichkov wrote:
| At the expense of other people's time.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| And feature phones (aka dumbphones) have been seeing a
| sales uptick. I wouldn't say they're _popular_ , but
| there are people without smartphones who are excluded
| from these types of coupons.
| Liquix wrote:
| those tags are working as intended - some people don't read the
| "online only" part, grab the item, assume the discount is
| applied at checkout, and end up paying full price. other people
| will download (and probably never uninstall) the spyware app
| and start feeding a juicy profitable data stream back to HQ.
|
| because how are you ever going to stay in business doing
| something as niche as selling groceries without leaning hard
| into surveillance capitalism
| dchichkov wrote:
| Whoever invented this is evil and is destroying happiness.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm glad (if it doesn't get reversed by the next administration).
|
| But I'm also baffled... how did this take _this long?_
|
| Why wasn't it done way back when they did it for airline tickets,
| in 2012?
| bluGill wrote:
| Because details matter and are hard. If you don't get the
| details just right a court will strike the whole thing down for
| good reason.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| It'd be a shame to ask hard work of our government that
| spends a trillion of our dollars every year
| bluGill wrote:
| They did do the hard work - it took many years.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Not sure about going all the way back to 2012, but maybe they
| were more worried about the Mayan calendar? /s
|
| But as far as under this administration, it seems like it took
| half the term to right the ship and get the leadership moving
| in the right direction. I think a second term would have been
| impressive.
| tzs wrote:
| The House passed a bill [1] earlier this year covering these
| fees for hotels.
|
| It passed 384 to 25 suggesting there is pretty good bipartisan
| support for ending such fees at least for hotels. Here was the
| vote breakdown: Yeas Nays Not
| Voting Republican 180 25 12
| Democrat 204 0 9 Total. 284 25
| 21
|
| [1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-
| bill/6543
| OptionOfT wrote:
| I'd be interested to see whether a movie theater is considered an
| event. Our local one charges a convenience fee when buying online
| because ... they can?
|
| I wish they banned all mandatory add-ons. If I don't have the
| choice it should be part of the base price.
|
| The touristic railroad near me advertises a price, and then slaps
| on a mandatory Fuel Surcharge and Historic Preservation Fee.
|
| Excuse me? How can I compare what I'm going to spend my money on
| if you're just allowed to lie to me?
|
| Sidenote on fuel cost:
|
| Fuel is almost back to pre-COVID costs
| https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=e...
|
| and once you add in inflation it's even cheaper.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > How can I compare what I'm going to spend my money on if
| you're just allowed to lie to me?
|
| You're not supposed to, that's the point. It's frankly shocking
| (and also not, but you know) how much businesses in America are
| allowed to bullshit you.
|
| I signed on with a telco for high speed internet when we bought
| our house for $65 a month and by the time we got fiber and I
| could finally tell them to kick rocks, the bill had soared to
| nearly $200 for the exact same service over the course of 4
| years. Why? Because they can, and go fuck yourself.
|
| A hotel stay for a vacation was supposed to cost $851, but they
| demanded a $300 pre-authorization on top of that. Why? Because
| they can. I wasn't notified ahead of time, absolutely nowhere
| was this information given to me. And I could take that on
| fine, but why is this allowed? What if I wasn't so fortunate
| and was traveling by air, do I just sleep in a box because the
| hotel can't guarantee I'll be able to pay for $300 worth of
| room service I have no intention of buying?
|
| I feel like this just happens everywhere now, I just expect it.
| I expect to get fucked over in one way or another, and on the
| one hand I'm sure it's my anxiety, but on the other hand there
| is so much expensive arbitrary nonsense that's just plunked
| down in front of me, and yeah, most of it I can handle fine,
| because I work in tech and make good wages. So I guess just
| fuck everyone who grew up at the income level I got, because I
| am fucking sure that my single mother trying her hardest as she
| was, wouldn't be able to get by if I was born like 15-20 years
| later than I was.
|
| Edit: Oh and FUCK every politician who has ever farted out
| words something like "responsible consumption of healthcare"
| because sweet Jesus, healthcare billing is an utter nightmare.
| I don't think I have EVER, EVER in my entire life had some kind
| of medical event where I knew the costs going in that were then
| reflected afterwards. It's just all made the fuck up on the fly
| with no respect for the patients, when they are already
| stressed out and scared.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > You're not supposed to, that's the point. It's frankly
| shocking (and also not, but you know) how much businesses in
| America are allowed to bullshit you.
|
| There's actually an administrative code in Washington that
| furniture (and maybe other) stores are only allowed to have a
| "Going out of business" sale _once a year_.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| We could use one of those where I live. There was a
| furniture store off the side of the highway that over a
| period of like 4 years had at least 12 of them, and then
| would just change it's name each time.
|
| Never bought anything from there since it seemed so
| incredibly sketchy. Then at last it went out of business
| properly and a U-Haul took over the space.
| currymj wrote:
| when you buy a ticket online, you are actually buying an option
| on the ticket, because you can go in and refund it at any time
| before the movie starts. the "convenience fee" is the option
| premium.
|
| it would be fairer if this were opt-in. Some e commerce sites
| now allow you to pay a few extra dollars to have free returns,
| something similar would work for movies.
| conductr wrote:
| No, this is complicating things. A physical ticket can also
| be refunded prior to show time. It's not an option at all,
| it's just a fee. They are charging you to 1) pick your seat
| 2) not have to show up early 3) peace of mind knowing your
| spot is reserved - all of those things are conveniences in
| the purest sense of the word. In many cases, the fee is more
| closely related to a platform fee going to fandango or
| similar service.
| n144q wrote:
| I think the "convenience fee" of online purchases is about
| the fact that if you want to buy a ticket days before
| showtime, you don't have to get a physical ticket at the
| box office in person.
|
| Not necessarily that I agree with it though -- in many
| parts of the world you have no such fees when you buy a
| movie ticket online.
| conductr wrote:
| I'd categorize that under my "2) not have to show up
| early 3) peace of mind knowing your spot is reserved"
| points.
|
| I don't necessarily agree with them either. It seems
| mutually beneficial to the venue to allow me to buy
| tickets digitally. It made sense maybe 20-25 years ago
| when the move online was a significant update to the then
| status quo. Now, it's just a revenue stream they don't
| want to give up that consumers see as the status quo, so
| why remove it? (from their perspective)
| currymj wrote:
| i guess it's technically true that you can go to the movie
| theater, buy a ticket, and then get back in line to refund
| the ticket and leave, but this seems like an odd thing to
| do.
|
| whereas buying a ticket in advance online, and then later
| refunding it (but losing the convenience fee), is common.
| "peace of mind knowing your spot is reserved" is what i
| mean by an option on the seat.
|
| now maybe i'm in fact wrong and all convenience fees are
| exactly passing through the credit card/fandango fees etc.,
| but in practice it sure looks like an option.
| disambiguation wrote:
| Maybe some places operate that way, but I worked on payment
| systems for a few years and since then I figure most
| convenience fees come from credit card processing rates being
| passed on to the customer - at least that's how ours worked.
|
| https://www.creditdonkey.com/interchange-rates.html
| user3939382 wrote:
| Hopefully this does away with the fraudulent "cleaning fee" when
| you book a hotel for $200 and then get a charge for $450.
| bluGill wrote:
| Maybe. If they document how dirty the room was after you leave,
| and how clean it was before hand they can get away with this.
| Generally smoke smell is the only thing they would bother doing
| this for though. If you just leave the normal mess behind they
| shouldn't be charging extra.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Yeah I'm talking about an existing practice where the fee
| applies to all bookings and is just a way to fraudulently
| advertise the booking price.
| a13o wrote:
| It's a start. I'm bummed at how narrowly scoped this is. When the
| RFC period was open I wrote in to highlight how apartments charge
| surprise pet rent fees that don't appear until the application
| process.
| benreesman wrote:
| Lina Khan is my second hero in life after Evariste Galois.
|
| Even if they throw her out it won't change what she's done: she
| put fear in the bellies of some truly terrible people who had
| almost forgot what the word "restraint" means.
|
| Ms Khan, I salute you.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Agree. Somewhat. But given that Elon Musk (who wants to shut
| down the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau completely) is
| likely to have a lot of say in these type of things, I think
| they'll forget that fear.
| benreesman wrote:
| And the public will just accept arbitrary oppression with no
| limit?
|
| No, the investor class will arrive at the negotiating table
| one way or another on a long enough timeline. It will be up
| to them if they still have legs to walk on.
|
| The really scary fascists aren't stupid: Thiel and those guys
| are buying bunkers in New Zealand as fast as the checks
| clear. They understand something that the American public
| lost sight of for a moment: the American Public is
| terrifying, the American public is slow to wake but
| arbitrarily brutal once roused. Pushing the American public
| into a corner has been the last mistake of a great many men
| better than Elon Musk.
| dayvid wrote:
| If the podcasts spin it well enough, they'll have a large
| leeway
| dheera wrote:
| Can we be done with "resort fees" and "taxes" as well? Hotel
| prices should include all of this
| coderjames wrote:
| > The rule would require service fees, resort fees, and other
| charges commonly added to bookings to be included in advertised
| prices.
|
| Sounds like that's what will be happening if the rule sticks.
| trustinmenowpls wrote:
| I need this for my internet provider, advertised price is $25* **
| ***
|
| Network access fee: $2.65
|
| Municipal upgrade fee: $16.30
|
| Fees end up costing nearly 80% of the entire bill. There are no
| taxes or gov surcharges of any kind.
|
| *(with autopay discount)
|
| **(with autopay direct deposit discount)
|
| ***(will not be reflected on first 3 bills)
|
| ETA: here's their current promotion:
| https://i.imgur.com/TfwsdQv.png $20 for service, $20.49 in fees!
| fees are 102% of the supposed price!
| breadwinner wrote:
| My Internet provider charges $50 per month exactly, and even
| the taxes are included! How cool is that? They aren't doing
| that out of goodness of their heart though. It is due to
| competition from T-Mobile 5G internet, which also has this
| policy.
| fn-mote wrote:
| Agreed. The FCC should act even more broadly. Why doesn't it?
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Well, at least we're now in a modern enlightened time when
| there's a standard FCC-required Broadband Facts "label" that
| can be referred to. It does make it easier to compare.
|
| It still seems kind of new and I can't find one for Spectrum
| (my ISP) or I'd share it here myself, but: I pay exactly $59.95
| per month, as the service is advertised in my area, and that's
| that. There are no itemized fees/taxes on my bill.
|
| I don't remember the last time I had an ISP with weird fees
| associated with it -- it seems like it has had to have been
| around a decade now, at least.
|
| (Cellular, too: My cheapskate all-you-can-eat cellular service
| costs me $35 per month, flat -- to the penny.)
| quotemstr wrote:
| Even the most fundamentalist of free market fundamentalists
| should be cheering transparency in pricing. The price signal
| works best when it's not obfuscated.
| breadwinner wrote:
| This shouldn't be controversial. FTC isn't banning these fees, it
| is only requiring merchants to disclose the fees. Why would
| anyone be against that?
|
| Another good rule is click-to-cancel. Just a couple of days ago I
| logged into my Dish Network account to cancel it (after they
| hiked prices). There is no way to cancel online. There is no way
| to cancel via chat. You have to call. As soon as you call you're
| told the wait time is over 45 minutes. There is no call back
| option. Why should a consumer have to be on the phone for 45
| minutes to cancel? (Typically they will drop the call after 45
| minutes and you have to call again.) If you call Dish to sign up
| service the wait time is 0 minutes: they answer immediately. If
| you then tell that you're actually calling to cancel, they
| forward you to the cancellation number with the wait. This is an
| abusive business practice, and banning it should not be
| controversial.
| LoganDark wrote:
| My preferred way to cancel these types of services is to close
| or pause the card they're charging. If you use a virtual card
| service like Privacy.com, this is easy, if you don't, then
| maybe not so much. But using virtual cards for everything you
| can is typically a good idea anyway, imo.
| breadwinner wrote:
| But then that becomes unpaid bills and they send you to
| collections.
| sudoshred wrote:
| You can dispute debt in collections by requesting proof of
| the debt. The consumer protections in that area (debt
| collections) are quite a bit more developed than any
| consumer protections about intentional procedural
| inefficiency when cancelling service.
| nodamage wrote:
| If you never actually took the steps to cancel your
| contract won't they be able to prove your debt via the
| existence of a non-cancelled contract?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The purpose is to take advantage of the sloppiness of the
| debt collection industry. They are designed around
| tricking financially illiterate people, harassing poor
| people, and lying.
|
| When they buy a debt, they rarely get comprehensive
| documentation.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| you will end up with damaged credit. The only negative on
| my credit report is from a verizon phone I bought from a
| verizon store (actually ended up not being Verizon owned
| store,) which i returned within the 7 days return fee,
| even paid re-stocking fee. But which the store credits me
| for having returned it later than I did, which allowed
| Verizon charged me 1 month service fee, which I never got
| a bill or email even though verizon had both, until it
| showed up on credit as collection. Nothing I did could
| get it off.
| xenospn wrote:
| Simple anecdote, but when I paid a medical bill and they
| still came after me and sent it to collections, I contested
| the bill and told the collection agency that this is not my
| debt. Never heard from them again.
| danaris wrote:
| You can _probably_ avoid this--or, rather, cover your ass
| legally--by doing something like sending them a letter
| registered mail informing them that you are cancelling and
| will be blocking further payments.
|
| It's far from a good solution, but it should at least put
| you in a better position vis-a-vis the courts if it comes
| to that.
| spiderice wrote:
| Suddenly waiting on the phone for 45 minutes doesn't
| sound so bad, unless proving a point is your main goal.
| breadwinner wrote:
| Actually there is another option. Make a complaint to
| your state's Attorney General's Office. They usually have
| a website for filing consumer complaints, and AGO will
| contact the business, and the business is usually
| responsive when contacted by AGO.
| eric-hu wrote:
| How does this work? Do you provide the AGO with your
| name, phone and address? Subscription details?
| breadwinner wrote:
| Yes. Here's the Texas AGO's web site, as an example:
| https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/consumer-
| protection/fil...
| hiatus wrote:
| It certainly takes less that 45 minutes to send
| registered mail. There are even online services to which
| you can upload a PDF or document of your message. I have
| done this on numerous occasions.
| danaris wrote:
| For some people, being on the phone for 45 minutes (and
| what guarantee is there that you'd actually get to talk
| to them after 45 minutes?) during business hours is
| simply not an option. They would have to take time off
| from work, which a) might not be allowed, and b) if
| allowed would certainly reduce their pay.
|
| Furthermore, there's an entire category of people for
| whom "talk on the phone" is not an option, _period_. If
| they wanted to cancel by the approved method, they 'd not
| only need to take that time themselves, they'd need
| someone else willing to take that time with them.
| dboreham wrote:
| Only in America
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Even simpler, file a dispute with your card issuer. Dish will
| pay the chargeback fee and block you as a customer, but I'm
| sure you don't want to be their customer again, so that's not
| a problem.
| lxgr wrote:
| What dispute reason would you give? Usually card issuers
| will ask you if you've made any attempt to settle the
| situation with the merchant.
|
| If you misrepresent that you have and they are just
| ignoring you, you might practically get away with it, but
| do know that that kind of misrepresentation might get you
| into trouble some day.
|
| If however the merchant is actually unreachable for a bona
| fide cancellation request, that's totally on them.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| The reason you would give is exactly the reason the OP
| gave, that Dish was deliberately not reachable for
| cancellation.
| lxgr wrote:
| Yeah, the solution to that is to mandate accepting
| cancellations via a single click (or preferably even
| email, since it shouldn't be my problem if I don't
| remember my account details when I want to cancel).
|
| Disputes should have been the backstop to incentivizing
| the market to making cancellations easier, but things
| apparently didn't pan out that way. So arguably, the free
| market has had its chance, and it's time for regulations.
| lxgr wrote:
| This might practically achieve the desired outcome, but do
| note that just not paying does not extinguish your debt to
| anyone you have a valid contract with.
|
| I've seen Americans living in Europe get bitten by this quite
| frequently in some countries, where sending something to
| collections is both commonly done and the collection agency
| will successfully take you to court and win in almost all
| cases even for pennies.
|
| On the other hand, the EU has had "two-click cancellation"
| regulations for a while now, so there is a better alternative
| available for both sides (customer and company).
| drewg123 wrote:
| Dish is terrible. After my mom passed away, they were one of
| the few things that my Dad had trouble cancelling. Even with a
| copy of her death certificate, my Dad could not get the service
| cancelled. He just ended up throwing the bills (and their
| equipment) away.
| flutas wrote:
| Yup, same experience here 3 months trying to make them
| understand "he is dead".
|
| We left their crap in a room for ~6 months total at the
| advise of his estate lawyer. Eventually they did accept that
| he was dead and canceled the account as well as sent a box to
| send the equipment back.
|
| They got their equipment back after it had all had an
| unexpected encounter with a hammer. Never heard a peep about
| it.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I think they went bankrupt, so hope that's some consolation.
| I heard that an attempt to buy them by DTV got rejected on
| antitrust. But in the article it said they went bust
| FateOfNations wrote:
| Surprisingly, neither Dish nor DirectTV has gone bankrupt.
| Satellites are pretty capital-intensive. They both faced
| challenges over the years but have managed to skate by.
| AT&T kept DirectTV afloat for quite a while. The proposed
| DirectTV + Dish merger fell apart for multiple reasons.
| While the government didn't explicitly reject it, there was
| a lot of uncertainty about whether they would bless it. The
| deal also required Dish's bondholders to voluntarily write
| off a chunk of their debt, which they ultimately got cold
| feet about.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Of course it's controversial.
|
| They do this to increase profits.
|
| A certain portion of the population is pro-profit at virtually
| any cost.
|
| It might seem like Dish employees wake up every day and say,
| "What can we do today to screw our customers even more?" But
| usually they're just trying to find ways to make more money.
| Centigonal wrote:
| Dish knows their satellite TV business is on the way out.
| Their strategy is to maximize the present value of that
| business by retaining and squeezing as many of those
| customers as much as possible, slowing the decline and
| pulling as much money out of that vertical for as long as
| they still have it, so that they can reinvest that cash into
| new verticals with more promise.
| Aloha wrote:
| The ironic part of all of this, I would have pay linear TV
| services if it was cheaper - 50 bucks a month for the whole
| house, and I suspect they could have 30%+ more customers.
| thanksgiving wrote:
| It doesn't solve the problem that "the line must
| constantly go up". A steady revenue and constant returns
| isn't good enough, apparently and in the case of dish, it
| will be declining revenue over time no matter what they
| do.
| gosub100 wrote:
| Dish profit doesn't scale that way. They have to pay the
| channels for broadcast rights. More TVs per household
| means in theory more royalties paid to the networks.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I swear these satellite services could eliminate live tv
| and go on-demand only using a hard drive DVR style, with
| maybe 10-20 live channels. Everything else would be a
| stream that would download and notify you when it was
| ready. The bandwidth of those dishes has got to be multiple
| gigabytes per second. They could broadcast everything and
| the viewers would just opt in to the specific shows or
| movies they want. Completely switch the business model.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| > It might seem like Dish employees wake up every day and
| say, "What can we do today to screw our customers even more?"
|
| Shit flows downhill. Their owner, Charlie Ergan, wakes up
| every day thinking of new ways to defraud the government with
| DISH and Echostar: https://nypost.com/2024/03/22/us-news/doj-
| moved-to-dismiss-3...
|
| I usually complain about his spectrum squatting with DISH,
| but there's so much more if you dig a little.
| amyames wrote:
| >It might seem like Dish employees wake up every day and say,
| "What can we do today to screw our customers even more?"
|
| Made the mistake of buying a boost mobile sim this year. It
| was "expired" upon opening it. Retailer refused to refund it.
|
| Having not learned my lesson yet, I went elsewhere and ripped
| it open to check the expiration date this time before I
| bought it.
|
| Well "it's prepaid for 90 days and comes with 35 gigs" it
| says on the card.
|
| Go to activate it, it puts a further $100 on my credit card
| and congratulates me for activating my 30 gig service plan.
|
| Hokey frauds.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Be glad you weren't on Ting.
| simfree wrote:
| What crap did Ting pull on you?
|
| Their aggressive data throttling always rubbed me the
| wrong way, along with the Extreme data pricing,
| considering it was on Sprint's terrible network.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > A certain portion of the population is pro-profit at
| virtually any cost.
|
| This is a mischaracterization of the criticism.
|
| Suppose we all agree that Dish sucks and making it hard to
| cancel is malicious. A rule is proposed to require customers
| to be able to cancel any subscription on the vendor's
| website. Is that a completely reasonable rule that will have
| no negative consequences?
|
| A lot of small businesses don't even have a website, or if
| they do it's fully static content that just provides
| information about their offering and if you want it you call
| them. Some two-person landscaping service doesn't have an IT
| department to implement this and having to call them to
| cancel isn't a real problem because they actually answer
| their phone.
|
| And if this was only one rule they would just suck it up and
| pay someone a thousand bucks to make them a website where you
| can cancel, but it's not. So when you propose yet another
| piece of red tape they have to take food off their table to
| make go away, they line up with rotten tomatoes, and anyone
| proposing to pare some of it back gets their vote.
| nyczomg wrote:
| You make the rule such that if you can sign up for a
| service on a website you can also cancel it said website.
| Now your hypothetical landscaping company is safe
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Are they? A very basic website can easily have a form you
| can fill to sign up and all it does on the back end is
| send an email with the info to the proprietors. Even a
| generic mailto: or tel: link arguably makes it possible
| to sign up via the website, if tapping the link on your
| phone to send a message can directly result in a signup.
| To do the same thing for cancellations you'd have trouble
| avoiding the need for customer accounts to sign in and
| connect to a database to list what services they're
| currently subscribed to etc.
|
| Otherwise people who signed up under the wife's name may
| try to cancel under the husband's name and you don't know
| who they are, neighbors who don't like the racket from
| the equipment see your website on the trucks and try to
| cancel the service even though they're not the customer
| because you have no authentication, people want to cancel
| because they've moved and give you their new address
| instead of the one they're subscribed under, people make
| ambiguous or incomplete requests and you don't know what
| they're asking to do. But if you have to contact them to
| clarify you're not satisfying the requirement that they
| can cancel via the website.
| khuey wrote:
| > A rule is proposed to require customers to be able to
| cancel any subscription on the vendor's website.
|
| Except that's not the proposed rule. The way this works in
| California (and the way the rule the FTC recently published
| works, I believe) is that a business is required to allow
| customers to cancel "in the same medium" that they
| subscribed. That doesn't require anyone to start running a
| website.
|
| The rest of your post is just arguing against something
| that's not even happening.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > a business is required to allow customers to cancel "in
| the same medium" that they subscribed.
|
| But then you're not really fixing it anymore. "Must be
| able to cancel directly via website" (i.e. without
| waiting for a customer service rep) might have been
| useful. Require only the same _medium_ and soon Dish has
| both sign up and cancellation happen via a customer
| service chat window on their website, but if you choose
| sign up the chat has representatives /acceptance bots
| appear instantaneously to approve your sign up, whereas
| cancellation has a four hour queue and if you fail to
| wiggle your mouse every 30 seconds you get timed out.
|
| You have to come up with a rule strict enough to defeat
| the corporate lawyers without making it so complicated or
| comprehensive that it puts significant compliance costs
| on smaller entities. Which is really hard to do, with the
| result that most of the rules that actually pass don't do
| that, which is why people get irked.
|
| One of the better ways to actually solve this is to have
| some fairly significant entity size thresholds (e.g.
| thousands of employees and millions of customers) and
| then exempt all smaller entities but fasten the larger
| entities to the wall with red tape. If you could get the
| regulators to consistently do that. But because that's
| typically not what happens, people continue to be
| discontented.
| BytesAndGears wrote:
| As-is, it works very well in California. I had never
| experienced the resistance you imagined during the 3-4
| years I lived in California, and regularly cancelled
| subscriptions that were notoriously hard in other states
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| California passed the click to cancel law this year. They
| passed a different law trying to make it easier to cancel
| subscriptions in 2018. The need for them to revisit it
| implies that the original one wasn't working.
|
| Corporations act strategically. They typically don't
| immediately thwart new laws because the coalition that
| passed them is still intact and would try to do something
| about it. So they wait a minute, maybe take the time to
| buy some more legislators, before testing the fences
| again.
|
| If people have forgotten about them by then you lose, and
| if people haven't forgotten about them by then,
| California passes the 2024 law and you lose the other
| way. Because they pass the new law in addition to rather
| than instead of the old one, even though the old one has
| stopped working, so you have a ratchet of ever-increasing
| compliance costs that also apply to all the companies
| that were never doing anything wrong to begin with but
| still have to hire lawyers to evaluate their activities
| against an entire bookshelf of rules to see if any of
| them require something they're not doing.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| No timers, no human interaction. And if the process takes
| time (there are times I think confirmations are
| warranted) once that's been done the cancellation takes
| place at the time of your original request. (Which you
| can screenshot.)
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > No timers, no human interaction.
|
| Is there something in the proposed rule that actually
| says this? And if so, what happens to the small business
| that does cancellations over email/phone and therefore
| requires human interaction?
|
| > And if the process takes time (there are times I think
| confirmations are warranted) once that's been done the
| cancellation takes place at the time of your original
| request. (Which you can screenshot.)
|
| The issue isn't that you care if the cancellation happens
| at 9AM or 9PM, it's that if you have to wait twelve hours
| to speak to a representative you give up before reaching
| the point you can make the request.
| acaloiar wrote:
| Click to cancel does not mean exactly what the name
| implies. It means cancellation must be as easy as signup
| [1]. In your example, signup is not a click away, so the
| cancellation process need not be. It's a very reasonable
| position.
|
| [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-
| releases/2024/10/...
| danaris wrote:
| To be fair, the name "click to cancel" does not, in fact,
| imply that cancellation must be as easy as signup in
| cases where signup is not a click away. A name that would
| better imply that would be something like "symmetric
| cancellation", or "cancellation parity". However, that
| would be less catchy to the public than "click to
| cancel".
| meiraleal wrote:
| The directors and shareholders, not the employees. They only
| want to get paid.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| > "What can we do today to screw our customers even more?"
| But usually they're just trying to find ways to make more
| money.
|
| But you repeat yourself.
| daveguy wrote:
| I think the GP meant it's not controversial to make the fees
| more transparent or even ban them. The dish employees
| (C-suite to be clear) and investors are the _only_ ones who
| like it.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > banning it should not be controversial
|
| for many people, any kind of regulation that restricts
| companies abilities to make money, regardless of the
| consequences for average citizen, is "wasteful and discourages
| innovation". Elon would like to get rid of the FTC altogether
| for that reason, as well as the Consumer Financial Protection
| Bureau, which was set up to help protect users from scammy
| behavior like this.
|
| so yeah, don't hold your breath for the next 4 years (or longer
| if Elon manages to buy the next election too)
| mikrl wrote:
| I revisited Henry Hazlitt's economics in one lesson and in
| the chapter on labour unions, he actually is fairly moderate
| provided that unions stick to non-price distorting policies.
|
| Making wage information more accessible to workers being a
| policy he- an Austrian School economist- supports.
|
| This government ruling falls under that class of policies
| IMO. It makes prices much more available to consumers and
| does not on first inspection threaten to distort supply and
| demand.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'm told you can just write the account number to cancel on a
| brick and throw it through their window. Might be worth a try.
| jfengel wrote:
| There is a move afoot to eliminate all regulations unless
| they've been specifically passed by Congress. Which is
| basically incapable of passing anything.
|
| Ironically, that inherent dysfunction is the main reason to
| suspect that won't happen. But politically, every regulation as
| automatically partisan, even when it has overwhelming support.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > There is a move afoot
|
| Who is behind this move? What individuals, and what
| politicians? By what legal means is this happening? I've
| literally never heard of anything like this before - without
| further details, this is just political flame-baiting.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| > Who is behind this move? What individuals, and what
| politicians? By what legal means is this happening?
|
| The supreme court. The removal of Chevron Deference this
| year means that the courts have given themselves huge
| amounts of power over any administrative decision that
| isn't specifically regulated by congress (rather than the
| prior stance which was to presume that agency decisions
| were reasonable interpretations of the legislation unless
| there was clear evidence to the contrary).
| thehappypm wrote:
| Federal agencies now have oversight from the judicial
| branch. That's a big check on their power.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| > now
|
| They always have?
| thehappypm wrote:
| Much less.
| immibis wrote:
| Yes. Previously the court had to prove that something an
| agency did went against the mandate congress gave it, to
| strike it down. Now it can just strike it down for no
| reason. This is useful in times when republicans control
| the courts and democrats control the executive.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| This is not an accurate description of that decision.
|
| Agencies no longer get special privileges in interpreting
| the scope of what Congress delegated to them.
|
| Within the scope of what Congress delegated to them, they
| still have an much power and discretion as ever.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| There was an argument about noncompetes and the FTC in
| front of a Federal judge recently.
|
| The judge said, "Even as the agency has the power, I
| don't feel sufficiently convinced by their argument and
| will block it anyway."
|
| That doesn't sound like they have as much power in their
| delegated responsibilities if an arbitrary judge says
| "... and you also have to convince me personally, even
| though you're entitled to do it."
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| if Congress wanted to delegate decision making to the
| judicial branch they can pass laws that do so. they pass
| a law saying that the agency can make decisions, those
| decisions should be respected. this decision is right the
| equivalent of if the courts decided they had the power to
| block laws that the court thought were bad policy
| jtbayly wrote:
| You should read about the non-delegation principle and
| why it exists. As Wikipedia says, "It is explicit or
| implicit in all written constitutions that impose a
| strict structural separation of powers. It is usually
| applied in questions of constitutionally improper
| delegations of powers of any of the three branches of
| government to either of the other, to the administrative
| state, or to private entities."
|
| What you are proposing is that Congress be allowed to
| abolish its own power, completely destroying the
| constitution.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > What you are proposing is that Congress be allowed to
| abolish its own power, completely destroying the
| constitution.
|
| Who cares if they had that ability? They wouldn't use it.
|
| And even if they did, it wouldn't violate separation of
| powers.
|
| And even if they did, they could make a new law that
| takes it back.
|
| Of all the worries about delegation, this one seems like
| the least meaningful.
| Curvature5868 wrote:
| https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-chevron-
| regulations...
| throw10920 wrote:
| Chevron is irrelevant here and does not support the
| argument being made, unless you're moving the goalposts.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13771
| rat87 wrote:
| The politicians on the supreme court and while the case was
| pretty recent the move to limit it dates back a long time
| before that
|
| https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-strikes-
| dow...
| specialist wrote:
| Yes and:
|
| Two (of many, many) books which detail two separate
| efforts to dismantle our administrative state are:
|
| Lobbying America https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691168016 the
| history of how Business Roundtable, Chamber of Commerce,
| et al reacted to The New Deal by transitioning from trade
| groups to political players.
|
| Democracy in Chains https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-
| Chains-History-Radical-Stea... shares (Nobel winning
| economist) James McGill Buchanan's role in bootstrapping
| the Southern flavored conservative movement (libertarian
| "free enterprise" segregationists reacting to Civil
| Rights Era and The Great Society).
| eadmund wrote:
| > By what legal means is this happening?
|
| Article I, section 1 of the Constitution: 'All legislative
| Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the
| United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of
| Representatives.'
|
| It doesn't say, 'Congress may delegate its legislative
| Powers to the Executive.' Arguably, the 'shall' language
| forbids that! Article I, section 8 does give the Congress
| the authority to pass laws necessary and proper to execute
| its regulation of interstate commerce (among other things),
| but ... it's not necessary to delegate legislative power in
| order to execute the law.
| intended wrote:
| Agencies require masters and Phds amongst their experts.
|
| Those people need to be paid, and their services
| accounted for.
|
| Those outreach and comms programs also need to be
| handled.
|
| Congress can't add 300 days into 24 hours. So this is a
| reading of law kinda like an absolutist readings of a
| text.
| specialist wrote:
| While complimentary, the various policy, legislating,
| rules making, procedures, and enforcement are distinct
| activities in the governmental stack.
|
| By necessity, legislators delegate rule making to
| agencies.
|
| Who do you want determining the precise definition of a
| kilogram? Congress or NIST?
|
| By necessity, some rules have the force of law. Like how
| many state's Secretaries of State are entrusted with
| clearly scoped essential administrivia, like how to run
| elections.
|
| Do you really want legislators doing the technical and
| operational evaluation of tabulators?
|
| Of course, precisely where the lines are between various
| jurisdictions must be adjudicated. That's why we have the
| courts. IIRC, most cases heard by SCOTUS pertain to
| administrative law.
|
| How else could our government function?
| theossuary wrote:
| You shouldn't assume others are acting in bad faith when
| the much more likely explanation is you're just not paying
| attention.
|
| Three major developments from the courts in this direction
| have been:
|
| - The overturning of Chevron gave courts the power to
| interpret portions of laws written by subject matter
| experts, instead of those experts themselves.
|
| - The big questions doctrine has allowed the courts to
| decide when the legislature has deligated too much power.
|
| - Cornerpost has removed the statue of limitations for
| challenge policies and rules out in place by agencies.
|
| These together clearly paint a picture. Any policy can be
| challenged (in any venue, allowing the plaintiff to pick
| their venue). This allows policies in place for decades to
| be challenged and brought to the supreme court. The most
| recent court has adopted the major questions doctrine,
| allowing them to strike down any policy they feel pertain
| to "issues of major political or economic significance."
| (no they didn't define it more than that). Or, if they
| can't make that argument, they can interpret the law to
| strike down the policy due to the overturning of Chevron.
|
| We've seen an unprecedented shift of power to the supreme
| court in the last few years. They're using the disfunction
| in the legislature as an opening to gain power. Which is
| scary considering it's a group of 9 unelected people with
| lifetime appointments.
|
| https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-strikes-
| dow...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine
|
| https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/corner-post-
| inc-...
| soco wrote:
| The Romanian supreme court just decided to block the
| presidential elections. They might have had reasons, but
| they definitely didn't have the mandate, yet they decided
| it nevertheless and because they are supreme nobody can
| challenge them. I'm sure the US supreme court (and more)
| is warming up to this concept.
| immibis wrote:
| You aren't listening. Read about the reasons they did
| that, before concluding they did it for no reason.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| "they might have had reasons, but they definitely didn't
| have the mandate"
|
| "concluding they did it for no reason"
|
| What?
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > There is a move afoot to eliminate all regulations unless
| they've been specifically passed by Congress. Which is
| basically incapable of passing anything.
|
| (At least some of) the agencies brought this on themselves
| with their abuse of the goodwill/benefit of the doubt
| previously afforded to them. Most flagrant has been the ATF,
| for one example constantly redefining machine guns or pistol
| braces, turning millions of citizens into felons with no
| oversight beyond drawn out and expensive court cases against
| them.
|
| I never liked the smell of this power being afforded to
| agencies in the abstract, even for the "good guys" at the CDC
| or Department of the Interior. It's too rife for abuse.
| Federal regulations (whether you call it a law or a rule, the
| party van is coming if you break them) are _supposed_ to be
| hard to pass. We once needed an _amendment_ to ban alcohol
| before we forgot the definitions of interstate and commerce,
| but if my understanding is correct, under Chevron deference
| the DEA could have decided to schedule it without even asking
| congress.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_Review_Act
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Machine guns?
|
| The ATF is simply going on function rather than form. It
| shoots like a machine gun it is a machine gun no matter
| what you call it.
|
| That being said, bump stocks are a simple enough concept
| that banning them is stupid. We should quite our obsession
| over machine guns--there are few situations where it even
| matters.
|
| The problem with it going through congress is that it will
| always be political rather than scientific. The agencies
| don't do a good job, but a lot of that is because of
| garbage they are saddled with by congress (think of the
| machine guns--the basic problem is that the legal and
| practical definitions are out of sync) and a lot of it is
| because politics manages to get in anyway.
|
| How about a middle ground: agencies can make rules but they
| must give their reasoning and supporting evidence--and
| anyone can challenge such in court. You can't go after the
| ruling but if you can knock out it's supports it goes away.
| This would cut both ways--exempt something from a more
| general ruling and the reason for the exemption can be
| challenged. (And I'd like to see the same thing for laws.)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > The ATF is simply going on function rather than form.
| It shoots like a machine gun it is a machine gun no
| matter what you call it.
|
| The part where it breaks down is pointing at a specific
| piece that enables automatic fire and calling that piece
| a "machine gun", even if it's just a tiny piece of metal
| or a specially-tied shoelace.
| AceyMan wrote:
| If it carries the "machine gun" ability with it, it's
| like ... The Enchanted Seer of Automatic Firing.
|
| It turns a 'plain gun' into a machine gun, and there are
| almost no other ways to do that. So it seems like calling
| it "a machine gun" is reasonable from linguistic
| perspective. #wittgenstein
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I don't think the "almost no other ways to do that" part
| holds up.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Yes, other countries manage. Restricting gun ownership
| rather than machine gun ownership is one approach.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| No.
|
| The seers have been banned. I don't think anyone thinks
| they're not machine gun parts.
|
| What's been going on is the ATF has been going after a
| variety of methods of circumventing the concept--means of
| using the recoil to "pull" the trigger without the
| operator actually pulling it. The result sure acts like a
| machine gun, albeit an unreliable and inaccurate one. The
| problem is that it's simply too easy to do, they are
| fighting a hopeless battle.
|
| My understanding is the same problem applies to silencers
| --plenty of filters out there that just happen to be of
| the right size to function as silencers. And there isn't
| even any reason for the rules against silencers. They
| aren't like Hollywood, it's still loud but below the
| threshold of hearing damage.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I think the machine gun issue is mostly settled. But
| there is a lot of controversy lately about what is a
| short barreled rifle (which requires a special federal
| permit). I don't know the specifics but the laws have
| been changed after people purchased their guns, such that
| if they were caught with them they would be in violation
| of serious gun laws (essentially as serious as having a
| machine gun without a permit)
| mmooss wrote:
| > agencies can make rules but they must give their
| reasoning and supporting evidence--and anyone can
| challenge such in court.
|
| I think that's already true, except that you probably
| need standing - you need to show you're affected by the
| rule - to sue. There are many rules around rule-making
| including against arbitrary rules, guaranteed public
| comment periods, etc.
| maximusdrex wrote:
| Your understanding is not correct. Chevron deference never
| meant agencies can just make up and pass law; it was a
| legal doctrine which merely stated that in places where the
| law is ambiguous (say a law declares water must be clean of
| pollutants, or bans pistol braces) that courts should look
| at any guidance from relevant agencies for guidance, since
| supposedly they should know more about the subject than the
| courts. It never allowed agencies to circumvent congress or
| prevented congress from further clarifying law. For
| example, the DEA doesn't have the power to schedule drugs
| due to chevron, Congress includes provisions for the AG to
| reschedule drugs, which the AG historically has delegated
| to the DEA, the point being this was a power explicitly
| granted by congress. While it may sound nice to you right
| now that the Supreme Court did away with chevron due to
| your gripes with the ATF, now the definitions of machine
| guns or pistols or anything else are up to the whims of any
| judge in any jurisdiction, which could be better or, given
| that judges likely have even less knowledge of the subject
| than the ATF, probably worse and more inconsistent.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| > Chevron deference never meant agencies can just make up
| and pass law
|
| Not on it's own, no. The bigger culprit there is the
| erosion of the nondelegation doctrine. But Chevron
| aggravated the problem by allowing agencies to stretch
| their authority beyond what even congress intended with
| little possibility of legal challenge.
|
| Interpreting the law is and should be the role of the
| courts, not the role of the agencies that that law is
| supposed to be governing. It'd be like if we passed a law
| intended to regulate insurance companies, and the courts
| decided to give deference to the insurance company's
| interpretation of that law because "they're the experts
| on insurance".
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Is there a well functioning large country that doesn't
| effectively govern this way?
|
| The US isn't well functioning its just rich
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| I think most democratic nations have a similar principle
| of separation of powers, so... almost all of them?
|
| The US is rich _because_ it 's well functioning.
| hakfoo wrote:
| The US is rich for many reasons that have little to do
| with being well governed.
|
| * The country was launched on most of a century of
| essentially "free" land grabs-- limited pushback from
| native civilizations. buying cheap from distressed
| foreign powers (Louisiana), the main wars of conquest
| being insignificant squabbles with Mexico over trifles.
|
| * Said land was also compelling-- you weren't fighting
| the environment to extract value the way you would be in
| Siberia.
|
| * After 1865, no significant nation-scale conflict on the
| territory itself to blow down existing investments.
|
| * This created an opportunity for bulk immigration--
| first with Homestead Act style programmes and then
| because the American economy was compelling enough to be
| a pull by itself. A high immigrant population has a
| unique "opt-in" demographics-- a situation that self-
| selects for entrepeneurialism.
|
| None of this required wildly competent government. George
| Washington could have chosen to be a king, a religious
| caliph, or a protosocialist planning enthusiast, and the
| deck would have still held almost all the same cards.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Name one and detail how the administrative state differs
| plagiarist wrote:
| It would not be like that, since insurance companies are
| not government agencies.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| That's an irrelevant distinction. Neither are part of the
| judicial branch, which is the relevant consideration
| here.
|
| Consider: Congress passes a law which sets limits on the
| authority of an agency. You think the agency itself
| should get to decide what that law _actually_ means? And
| the courts, the branch of government specifically granted
| the role of arbiter by our constitution, should be
| required to differ to that interpretation if anyone ever
| objects and brings a lawsuit? It 's absurd, and no less
| so than if the law was concerning a private company
| rather than a public agency.
| 1shooner wrote:
| This is coming into my work life with web accessibility:
| The DoJ published a rulemaking in April that filled the
| many, many gaps in the existing law that determines if the
| government is violating the ADA when creating websites,
| etc.
|
| What came before this was at least 15 years of tort action,
| a patchwork of civil rulings across a wide variety of
| jurisdictions, and generally, confusion and ambiguity. Not
| the stuff of efficient government.
|
| From my perspective, this rulemaking is pretty close to
| ideal. I did not dream of getting such a clear, detailed
| direction from a federal agency. I think my jaw may have
| literally dropped as I read through it. I think the web
| accessibility is an interesting example, because it's not a
| bloated bureaucracy harassing some fishermen, it's an
| agency trying to prevent the government from violating your
| civil rights.
|
| So, is the idea that Congress would have accomplished this
| instead? I just can't imagine that happening.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| yeah because Congress now have to become experts at
| everything: from definition of machine guns, to ADA
| guidelines. Afterall, if Congress didn't specifically
| pass the law to the detail, it doesn't exist.
|
| The sheer stupidity of that argument is mind-blowing.
| When you have a government agency with dedicated
| technical resources, but you will rather a bunch of
| couple hundred of people with different backgrounds make
| specific rules about everything. That's just madness
| danaris wrote:
| That's because it's not actually intended to make the
| regulations better. It's intended to make it impossible
| for regulatory agencies to do their jobs effectively,
| without outright legislating them out of existence,
| because the people backing it believe that without
| effective regulation they and their allies will be more
| easily able to enrich themselves at the public's expense.
| rietta wrote:
| It's because that is the constraints that the U.S.
| Constitution places on our form of Federal government.
| The Congress passes laws (and controls the money), the
| Executive implements the law, and the Courts interpret
| the law. My lay understanding is that Chevron shifted too
| much power from the Congress and the Courts to the
| administrative agencies in the Executive branch. It
| seemed like a "good idea" at the time but over time the
| abuses became apparent and this Supreme Court reigned it
| back in towards the balance of powers required by the
| Constitution.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| What abuses
| rietta wrote:
| I am not a legal scholar, but from my understanding
| enough that serious cases were filed and fought and made
| in all the way to the Supreme Court.
|
| In a https://www.scotusblog.com article, Amy Howe quotes
| the Chief Justice as saying "Chevron deference, Roberts
| explained in his opinion for the court on Friday, is
| inconsistent with the Administrative Procedure Act, a
| federal law that sets out the procedures that federal
| agencies must follow as well as instructions for courts
| to review actions by those agencies. The APA, Roberts
| noted, directs courts to "decide legal questions by
| applying their own judgment" and therefore "makes clear
| that agency interpretations of statutes -- like agency
| interpretations of the Constitution -- are not entitled
| to deference. Under the APA," Roberts concluded, "it thus
| remains the responsibility of the court to decide whether
| the law means what the agency says."
|
| I ought to go read the decision for myself, which I have
| to this point not yet done. I am not an attorney, but do
| have a general interest in these matters.
|
| But back to the earlier poster's notes, ATF has been a
| prime example. They have a history of capricious
| reinterpretation at the whims of whichever administration
| is in power. They issue letters to people and businesses
| that say one thing is okay and then outlaw in without any
| law changes a decade later. I have never owned a pistol
| brace, but they stated it was an acceptable innovation
| for certain applications, thousands and thousands of
| people relied on that, they issue a rule making comment
| period and get feedback and then threw all of that out
| and came out with a final rule that bore no resemblance
| to the one in the comment period. Then they stand behind
| Chevron that the courts had to listen to their
| interpretation. It is legal "heads, I win" and "tails,
| you lose!"
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Well, if you look at the case that was in front of the
| court when they overturned Chevron: The National Marine
| Fishery Service decided that since the Magnuson-Stevens
| Act allows for them to place monitors on fishing vessels
| in order to prevent the over-fishing of certain species
| but since their budget was lower and they couldn't
| actually afford to pay the monitors they decided that
| each ship would have to pay for them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v.
| _Ra...
| immibis wrote:
| If congress says "companies can't pollute and the EPA
| determines what is a pollutant" then the EPA is
| implementing a law congress passed. That's not against
| any constitutional constraints.
| intended wrote:
| There's always one part I find worth adding about
| government being ripe for abuse.
|
| Everything is ripe for abuse.
|
| -------
|
| Right now, agencies are the defensive structures.
| Corporations which own media or parties that are
| effectively corporations - are the threat.
|
| One of the specific defenses that's employed by private
| forces is reduction in trust of agencies.
|
| ----
|
| All systems are vulnerable. It's a question of relative
| vulnerability.
| mmooss wrote:
| It's also about dividing power and checks and balances,
| and the legitimacy of democratic government.
| rietta wrote:
| "constantly redefining machine guns or pistol braces"
|
| Pistol braces was struck down not on second amendment
| grounds, but because the ATF failed to comply with the
| Administrative Procedures Act, specifically failing the
| logical outgrowth test. They proffered a comment period and
| then did a switch when publishing the final rule.
|
| Similar shenanigans were afoot with the Trump area bump
| stock ban, which was ruled against by the Supreme Court
| itself in Garland v. Cargill. I think that had to do with
| the agency exceeding its authority beyond what the statute
| specifically specifies. In laymans terms, the legal details
| were not ambiguous enough to justify the conclusion that
| the agency came to stretching the statute through their
| interpretation.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >There is a move afoot to eliminate all regulations unless
| they've been specifically passed by Congress. Which is
| basically incapable of passing anything.
|
| It's hard to argue with this in principal. The rules as law
| BS has been a band-aid over dysfunction. It needs to go.
| It'll hurt in the short term but should be more sustainable
| in the long term. That people will get more angry at congress
| for doing nothing is icing on the cake.
| TylerE wrote:
| It's very easy to argue against when the people that most
| want to violate the rules have congress in their back
| pocket. I personally prefer being actually able to breathe
| the air and not work 70 hours a week with no benefits.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| > That people will get more angry at congress for doing
| nothing is icing on the cake.
|
| I want to be optimistic about this. In practice it seems
| that the strategy created by McConnel to block any
| legislation at all has been doing/tricking the voter really
| well. As he predicted, credit for anything good goes to the
| current admin while anything bad also gets blamed on the
| current admin. I can see a likely scenario where "people
| getting more angry" will only make this strategy to block
| everything work even better. I hope I am wrong and the
| "nuance" that congress exists and isn't controlled by the
| president will finally get into people heads. I also hope
| that once it gets into their heads, the conclusion won't be
| that a authoritarian dictator is needed.
| xp84 wrote:
| I agree with you: frustrated by a Congress that can't
| pass any legislation, the one thing it doesn't seem like
| anyone is willing to try is to consider compromises.
| Everyone seems fully convinced that if only the 50% (or
| more) of the voters who disagree with them would just
| drop dead, we could fix everything. And as a result,
| voters punish lawmakers, who horse trade and negotiate.
| Even though that's the only way things used to get done
| until everything broke 10 or 15 years ago.
| immibis wrote:
| Compromising in the current congress:
|
| "Let's meet in the middle" says the unjust man.
|
| You take a step towards him. He takes a step back.
|
| "Let's meet in the middle" says the unjust man.
| someothherguyy wrote:
| > It'll hurt in the short term
|
| There are decades of rules in the federal register. How
| long do you imagine it will take the legislative branch to
| patch them?
|
| Go skim some of them, and see if you feel the same way
| afterward:
|
| https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/search?conditions
| %...
| m463 wrote:
| I wonder if building codes should be abolished.
|
| then being a renter would be quite an adventure.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| It's really basic contract law stuff.
|
| Here in Sweden, if the amount isn't clearly presented, there's
| no agreement to pay the specified amount, so there's no
| contract and no obligation to pay-- an agreement becomes
| binding because of the reasonable expectation of a party on the
| counterparty.
|
| I don't understand American contract law, since I even see
| ideas like changing agreements, which are completely contrary
| to the very notion of a contracts as I understand it, so it's
| nice that something is done about these strange practices.
|
| I don't understand how it's come to this point though. That
| courts have been willing to tolerate things that aren't in the
| contract (i.e. changes to contracts), provisions that aren't
| clear, etc., and complex and strange provisions even in
| contracts of adhesion and things presented to consumers.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Mostly it comes down to the fees being presented at the end
| rather than at the beginning. You have to follow the process
| through to the end to figure out what it would cost which
| makes price comparisons much harder.
|
| Occasionally this is unavoidable--shipping charges. If they
| simply pass through what UPS charges, fine. Otherwise, they
| should be listed up front.
| impossiblefork wrote:
| Ah, I'm thinking about EULAs etc. where people claim the
| right to change the agreement at any time etc.
|
| With regard to shipping charges, don't you choose your
| shipping options and get to see the price before buying?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Yes it's before buying, but the problem is that it's
| after almost everything else.
| foobarchu wrote:
| You do before purchase, but generally not as part of the
| storefront product listing. That necessitates the seller
| already knowing where you'll be shipping it to, and
| that's traditionally the last step before purchase
| (whether that's best or not I can't say).
|
| Sales tax is also usually added in at the very end, again
| because it depends on where the buyer is.
|
| The difference here is that the "hidden junk fees" are
| just extra money they charge, with no real defence. For
| example, Ticketmaster loves their arbitrary "convenience
| fee", Airbnb was long known for "cleaning fees" (though
| they've improved here), etc. These are things that the
| seller knows they're going to charge beforehand and
| clearly they do this purely to trick our brains into
| thinking things are cheaper.
| jeffwass wrote:
| Dish is evil.
|
| Years ago when signed up with them I opted to pay the extra
| service for local tv channels, which required an andditional
| antenna to install.
|
| For some reason the installer couldn't fit it securely on our
| house, and said to call Dish to remove the service since we
| cannot receive it.
|
| Dish refused to remove the local service! They said since we
| signed a contract we were stuck paying for it even though they
| couldn't fit the antenna.
|
| I pointed out in a hundred different ways that the contract
| also required them to provide a service which they are not
| providing so we shouldn't have to pay.
|
| All of my attempts to reason with them were ignored, and their
| call staff refused to escalate to their manager.
|
| Long story short we had to pay for twelve months for something
| they couldn't provide to us.
|
| Literally the minute the contract was up we cancelled (it was
| easier to cancel back then).
|
| I would never ever go near this company again.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Isn't this what small claims court is for?
| hiatus wrote:
| So now likely hundreds (or more) of individuals have to not
| only wait on hold forever, but have to learn the process of
| and actually go through with filing a small claim? That
| there is recourse is beside the point when it is mired in
| bureaucracy (not to mention taking days off to show up to
| court, etc).
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Class action suits may be easier, if only arbitration was
| opt-in-by-default or easier to opt out of.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Class action is an utter joke that has done nothing more
| than FURTHER commodify harming consumers for a price.
|
| If a company sends you a $2 check ten years after they
| recognize a profit from defrauding you or lying to you or
| harming you, that's not a punishment, and is certainly
| not an incentive to not do those things.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| I think they punish companies to a considerable degree.
| It's just that since legal costs on both sides are non-
| trivial, not much makes it to the harmed consumers.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| it only takes a few hits from lawsuits for the companies
| to fix the process.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I'm surprised I haven't yet heard of companies who would
| handle this for you, like there are e.g. for handling the
| process of getting compensation when an airline screws up
| scheduling or loses baggage, etc. I'm guessing there
| isn't enough money to be won there for them to be able to
| survive off a percentage of it.
| fooker wrote:
| A hypothetical company that can do this, would also be
| capable of handling much more lucrative class action
| suits.
| dh2022 wrote:
| Terms and Conditions usually spell out the dispute process.
| You may find out that disputes need to go to arbitration
| court in a different state.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Alternatively, you can take them to small claims court
| and see if the judge there is hyper-interested in
| upholding their insanely restrictive contracts. They can
| appeal a judgment, of course, but that's likely to be far
| more expensive for them than just honoring the decision.
| noprocrasted wrote:
| You don't even need small claims court. You just don't pay,
| and point _them_ to (small claims?) court if they want to
| get paid for the service they don 't provide.
|
| None of these shit companies will ever take you up on the
| offer though, because expecting to get paid for a service
| you don't provide (and can't provide in this case) won't
| fly in court.
| mikestew wrote:
| _You just don 't pay, and point them to (small claims?)
| court if they want to get paid for the service they don't
| provide._
|
| Have you actually tried this? Because having not tried it
| myself, I'd bet a paycheck that you get sent to
| collections, get a ding on your credit report, and you're
| still on the hook for taking it to court if you want it
| resolve to your favor. (Assuming U. S.) And as a cherry
| on top of that shit sundae, it's probably in the contract
| that you have to go through arbitration anyway.
| noprocrasted wrote:
| I have done so multiple times, albeit in the UK.
|
| When collections calls, you explain them the situation
| (service not provided or whatever, and evidence of trying
| to resolve it with them in good faith) and they go away.
|
| Have yet to see a court summons or anything, although I'd
| love to see them try their lies in court.
|
| I did not care about the credit report impact - it's
| probably the only valid reason _not_ to do this if this
| is something you care about.
| mikestew wrote:
| _I have done so multiple times, albeit in the UK._
|
| Thanks for the follow-up. I suspect UK _does_ make a
| difference, but IANAL in either country. I _do_ ,
| however, have a bit of personal experience in the U. S.
| :-)
| jtbayly wrote:
| The first thing that would happen is they would cut off
| _all_ your service.
|
| If you are relying on them for something other than the
| thing you don't want to pay for, this becomes a problem.
|
| For example, I disputed a charge with my CC from the
| Apple App Store when I was charged for an app that I
| shouldn't have been years ago. They immediately cut off
| my access to the Store. Other apps couldn't update, OS
| couldn't update, couldn't get new apps, etc.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| And this is one of the reasons why I can't buy into the
| Apple ecosystem. With Android, I would be cut off from
| all Google stuff but there are more/less work-arounds for
| those.
|
| But the fact that I have a billing dispute with a company
| and they are able to hold everything else that bit of
| technology touches hostage is just wrong. Imagine if you
| had a billing dispute with the city water company and
| they cut your city power because of it.
| haliskerbas wrote:
| The woke ideology wants to add all of this nonsense regulation
| and make it hard for real entrepreneurs to generate value in
| the wonderful system of capitalism. /s
|
| P.S. this is also a good summary of every all in podcast
| episode post election
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Agree to both. And both are incredibly easy problems to solve.
| For the first just have a law that says:
|
| > Any advertised price must include all mandatory taxes and
| fees. No exceptions.
|
| For the second just have a law that says:
|
| > An end user must be allowed to use the same method to cancel
| as they used to sign up for the service. No exceptions.
| Additionally, an end user cannot be required to perform more
| manual actions to cancel than was required to sign up. No
| exceptions.
|
| No one should be against this except greedy corporations.
| Easily solved, common sense rules that already have working
| examples in the real world. 1 is already the law in Netherlands
| and Australia and these countries aren't falling over from the
| undue burden placed on businesses.
|
| I'll end with: two cornerstones of a free market are price
| transparency and the ability/mobility to switch services when a
| better competing offering emerges. Not having legislation like
| above to protect those values is anti capitalistic
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| But what's a mandatory fee?
|
| Free airfare to Hawaii!
|
| Fee for paying by cash: $1000 Fee for paying by check: $1100
| Fee for paying by credit card: $1050 Fee for middle seat:
| $200 Fee for window seat: $300 Fee for aisle seat: $250
|
| Note that no fee on this list is mandatory because you always
| have other options.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| To me that is totally fine. If there are electives, then
| elective them. Fix the mandatory ones first. Like the
| "resort fee" hotels charge. Or "cleaning fees".
|
| It becomes trickier when the fee is elective, but a
| significant part of the advertisement. Southwest Airlines
| complaining about having to advertise their fares, which
| come with two bags included, alongside other airlines who
| don't include any bags comes to mind. I think there is
| probably some world where elective fees are included as
| well though this seems more nebulous.
|
| However, let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the
| good: Even just including everything that is compulsory in
| the base price itself, including taxes, would be a massive
| improvement to the status quo. Fixing this elective fee
| ambiguity would be a next step
| danaris wrote:
| Did you...actually read what they wrote there?
|
| The (hypothetical) airfare was listed as "free", but it
| was impossible to end up paying less than $1200 for it.
|
| The point being that even if you have a _choice between_
| several fees (making none of them "mandatory" by a
| narrow reading), you're still paying _something_ beyond
| the advertised base price.
|
| The logical good-faith rule in a case like this would be
| that you must advertise _at least_ the minimum price
| anyone would end up paying based on the available "fee
| choices".
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I'd go a little farther and say that if there are
| impractical scenarios to avoid the fee it still must be
| included. (Say, no fee if you pay the fare in Timbuktu.)
| Advertise it based on the 95th percentile of what
| actually happens.
| lxgr wrote:
| That's very easily solved: The minimum total price of all
| possible selectable options is the cheapest price that
| can be legally advertised. Treat non-viable options that
| just exist as a false baseline as false advertisement,
| just like it's already illegal to e.g. send out a flyer
| advertising TVs for $1, but there's only one available at
| the other end of the state/country.
|
| It's really not a practical problem in any country that
| has the appropriate laws. The only thing it takes to fix
| this is the political will to do so.
|
| I recently ordered cake for $x, with a mandatory
| selection of "size". The only possible size was "large",
| which cost an add-on fee of $3. Just make that type of
| stuff illegal yesterday. Absolutely nothing of value will
| be lost.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The ACTUAL solution to these problems that HN always
| seems to be allergic to (because technicians prefer
| technical solutions, but humans aren't technical) is to
| make your court system extremely hostile to "clever"
| bullshit like this.
|
| This insistence at having EXACT WORDS for things that
| aren't exact is just naivety, thinking the world is can
| be divided perfectly into categories if we just make the
| categories specific enough!
|
| You cannot.
| lmm wrote:
| So what happens when you buy that ticket and don't pay any
| of the fees? If you get taken to Hawaii then they're in the
| clear. If they won't take you without you paying the fee
| then I guess the fee wasn't optional after all.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Buy the ticket how? Look at the fees for paying--you
| can't actually buy the ticket without paying for it.
| Zak wrote:
| It looks like the price is $1200, as that's the price for
| the cheapest practical combination of options. An airline
| could advertise this as $1200.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Why is a law needed to address this? Isn't the market supposed
| to adjust for companies like this?
| Freedom2 wrote:
| Precisely. The overarching HN view, although it's not a
| monolith (so the viewpoint isn't shared by all), is that the
| free market solves for all things and regulation by the
| government is largely a waste of taxpayer money that could be
| going to other things worthwhile (roads, military, police).
| Rygian wrote:
| I guess you mean the taxpayer money that the taxpayers are
| currently paying, against their will, towards unwanted
| subscriptions that they haven't managed to cancel.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| I think the idea is that one day you too should found a
| startup that will provide services that are difficult to
| cancel.
| TylerE wrote:
| We have hundreds of years of examples of the blessed free
| market failing to do exactly that.
|
| If the free market had it's way we'd still be under the yoke
| of Standard Oil and Ma Bell.
|
| One key element of a free market is the "well informed
| consumer". How is the consumer supposed to be informed about
| what new cutting edge chemicals are toxic, for instance?
| dotancohen wrote:
| For the hundreds of years of examples, we have not had an
| interconnected network with information available to almost
| every human on the planet.
| TylerE wrote:
| Not a free market project. Funded by the US military.
| lxgr wrote:
| Information is good, but it doesn't automatically imply
| that you have an actionable path in getting what's
| legally yours. Besides that, the Internet hasn't nearly
| eradicated the inherent information and attention
| asymmetry between consumers and companies employing
| people full time to make sure they end up on top for
| every interaction you have with them.
|
| Consumer protection regulations, especially those
| regarded trading and credit, cast a very long shadow (ray
| of sunlight?) you're possibly unaware of, but still
| immensely benefit from.
|
| Obviously there are diminishing returns and
| unintended/negative effects to consumers too sometimes,
| but throwing protections out completely in favor of a
| "pure free market" doesn't do these asymmetries justice.
| LiquidSky wrote:
| Poe's Law truly is a terrible thing.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| The problem with click-to-cancel is that there should be
| confirmations built into important cancellations.
|
| But require it to be practical to do online, with no delays and
| no requirement about when relative to renewals.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| You can always cancel any contract by certified mail.
| kevincox wrote:
| Customers should be able to bill them for wasted time. If you
| are calling to cancel you can bill an hourly rate. Make it some
| multiple of minimum wage. Then services will pop up to have
| someone call and cancel for you, then bill the company for that
| time. Zero effort on the consumer side and suddenly wait times
| will drop. The problem is that there is no incentive on the
| company side to have easy cancellation or any other "negative"
| customer service. If they get billed a hundred dollars for
| keeping you on the line for 2 hours they will suddenly care a
| lot.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| I mean technically, sure. But isn't that a bit roundabout?
| There is no real life reason why unsubscribing should be more
| than a few clicks of effort. If it takes more than 30
| seconds, something has gone horribly wrong. Keep companies to
| that standard, instead of giving them an opportunity to
| calculate that precisely 9 minutes of wait time doesn't cost
| them much and is sufficient for 70% of customers to give up,
| or something.
| kevincox wrote:
| The idea is that this can be extended naturally to may
| situations. Warranty claims, insurance claims...
|
| If you just add a fine with a threshold it is actually much
| harder to pick the right fine amount. This way it has some
| sort of degree of scaling naturally. A small delay is less
| costly to you than a long delay rather than being all-or-
| nothing.
|
| I agree that for simple things like unsubscribing a button
| can be mandated, but for other causes of calls to customer
| support it isn't that simple.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| I agree that the idea generalizes well.
| cgarvis wrote:
| Dish outsources sales calls to a third party. This third party
| doesn't have access to customer accounts so they have to send
| you to an actual Dish call center. Not as nefarious as you
| think but still frustrating.
| calmbonsai wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| With any such service, I budget 1 hour. If I can't get
| cancellation within that time-frame I have a standard form
| letter that gets sent out.
|
| Once the letter is sent, after the current billing cycle ends
| any additional charges from said service are disputed (either
| on the card or on bank account) as fraud.
|
| On three occasions, I've been asked to provide proof of fraud.
|
| I've emailed a scan of the cancellation letter. The fraud has
| never been further disputed even from a gym in Chicago that
| (via their contract's language) demanded an in-person
| cancellation.
|
| Life is too short and time is far too precious.
| barfingclouds wrote:
| Nice I might do this method too
| seatac76 wrote:
| Would love to see what gymnastics the incoming FTC head uses to
| undo this rule.
| coderjames wrote:
| Do restaurant service fees next! "Here's the bill, with a 10%
| service fee added so we can pay our staff more without raising
| menu prices."
| FateOfNations wrote:
| We almost eliminated those here in California until they
| chickened out and exempted restaurants.
| waldrews wrote:
| Doesn't look like they got to DoorDash hidden fees in this
| decision?
| njarboe wrote:
| This is great if it gets rid of the "resort fee" or "urban fee"
| that I have had to pay at hotels. Happened last week. An extra
| $40 a night. It is almost impossible to refuse and find a new
| hotel right when you are checking in.
| madhacker wrote:
| WTF! Definitely paid corporate shill. Legalized corruption in the
| USA. "A judge in Texas blocked a rule that would cap credit card
| late fees, and an appeals court in New Orleans blocked a
| requirement that airlines disclose baggage and other fees
| upfront."
| kazinator wrote:
| Gotta love that TicketMaster convenience fee that is for online
| ticket purchases --- which you still have to pay if you get your
| ticket at the door, because that is also convenient!
| rawgabbit wrote:
| I used to work for a major airline many years ago. I remember
| when they introduced these crazy fees e.g., seat change fee. I
| was really disappointed then and soon left. I learned Don Carty
| then joined Dell who soon started their Byzantine ordering
| process. I was again disappointed. I still buy Dell monitors
| because I like them but I never buy from their website.
|
| I remember an episode of the TV show Happy Days when the
| restaurant owner started charging money to use the toilet stall.
| It was a sad joke and many businesses are following suit.
| ipince wrote:
| This is awesome. There's more to do, but it's a step in the right
| direction. This law should really apply to all merchants in all
| industries, as the original 2023 proposal stated (allegedly).
| Still, I'll take it.
| leeoniya wrote:
| i can't remember the last time i paid face value for a concert
| ticket. the scalping is absurd. it's worse than any fees, by far.
| Sammi wrote:
| The fact that sensible and fair rules like this that favor the
| consumer don't get anywhere in the usa is proof of the regulatory
| capture by the corporate elite. The us isn't a democracy, because
| it isn't ruled by the people, it is ruled by the corporation and
| rich.
|
| Americans keep voting for rich assholes who oppress them while
| telling them they are giving them freedom.
| alberth wrote:
| The hidden fees is what turned me off from AirBnb...
|
| Because it would display the nightly rate as $X.
|
| But then at checkout, it would add in "house cleaning fees" etc
| (which I don't dispute is a fair fee to include) but it at times
| can grossly misrepresent what your true nightly cost is when
| searching.
|
| Maybe this will be a step in the direction like Telco's have had
| to do with creating simplified & standardized "nutrition labels"
| for pricing.
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| On AirBnB just check the "Display total before taxes" box on
| the search results page.
|
| Not including fees in the nightly rate makes sense as some are
| fixed rate, and having the option to see the cost for the total
| stay (including fees) solves the problem.
| zippothrowaway wrote:
| That's still not the total!
|
| It can be done. Marriott show the total including taxes. Mind
| you, this was as a result of a legal settlement, so they get
| no credit.
| Erwin wrote:
| In EU, you see the total and per-night inclusive all of fees
| and taxes when searching and comparing.
|
| If you search for an area without dates, it comes up with
| some arbitrary dates and applies the fees and displays per
| night cost accordingly.
|
| So it's technically possible. They just don't want to.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| ironically a lot of people take issue with the cleaning fees as
| the hosts tend you require you to clean up before you leave
| plagiarist wrote:
| That's correct. Why am I paying them for the privilege of
| cleaning up after myself?
|
| We all know it is a scam fee. People wouldn't be as mad over
| a hold on some amount (usually returned) insuring the host
| against an egregious sloppy mess.
| sbochins wrote:
| I'm not very confident this is going to survive our next
| "populist" administration. Whatever faults you can attribute to
| the current administration, the FTC has taken many actions that
| have been pro consumer over the past 4 years.
| HaZeust wrote:
| This will probably be what I'll miss most about Administration
| 46 - some crazy pro-consumer policies and motions for anti-
| trust, price gouging, and corporate transparency have happened
| in 2021-2024, and I'm certainly going to miss the strides. The
| next administration will remove what has been, or ignore the
| continuing proceedings in the bigger actions (a great example
| of where the latter is going to happen are the Google-Chrome
| breakup and TikTok ban.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| Looking forward to all the freedom and efficiency the market will
| reward us with when Trump rolls this back.
| lxgr wrote:
| The fact that it was ever legal to combine "taxes and fees" into
| one line item is baffling.
|
| One is a thing 100% under control of the business trying to sell
| me a thing, the other 0%. Why should anybody get to scalp me
| _and_ legally be able to blame it on the state /city government?
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