Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

California AG and state senators introduce bill to ban hidden fees

oag.ca.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 396 posts

Re: California AG and state senators introduce bill to ban hidden fees

#241

Post by yamtaddle »

wpietri wrote: post #216
yamtaddle wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are local sales taxes just a US thing? How do so very many other developed countries manage this just fine?

The US, thanks to being well, states that are united, has a history of devolved government. In a lot of places the power structures are much more unified, but here there's a tradition of independence within broad limits. There's a short history of California sales taxes here on page 3 (which is ~30 by PDF page count): https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/pubs/report/... But basically during the depression,…

Careful what you wish for—it causes strong race-to-the-bottom effects and tragedies of the commons / free-rider problems—if tax districts are small enough, I can go enjoy the parks in a neighboring tax district while having chosen to live where taxes are insufficient to pay for such nice parks. Extend for everything, not just parks, and you've got the situation in tons of major US cities, where low-tax suburban and exurban towns attract people who pay taxes in their little town but strain the public resources of the city proper, which city is the only reason those towns are 1/10 the size they are in the first place. City forced to raise taxes by all the free-riding, effect intensifies. It's not great.

Re: California AG and state senators introduce bill to ban hidden fees

#242

Post by ncallaway »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #212
slg wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is also a case where consumers say they want one thing, but their behavior is a different matter. For example, pretty much everyone says they prefer the full price to be shown up front in search result pages. But, as someone who is privy to a ton of A/B testing in this area, the opposite nearly always results in higher conversion, where there is a lower up-front price and fees are only tacked on during checkout…

I don't think fraud is a good analogy - the whole point with fraud is that you are getting something different after you agreed to it, when it's too late to back out. Going back to the airline example, most people say they hate getting nickel and dimed on things like paying to pick a seat up front or paying even for the first carry-on, but they will still pick one flight over another if the base rate is $5 cheaper. A…

> I don't think fraud is a good analogy - the whole point with fraud is that you are getting something different after you agreed to it, when it's too late to back out.

Nah, it’s fraud. It’s a minor, lightweight fraud, but it’s still fraud.

These companies are just lying to customers to get what they want, that’s fraud.

There’s a veneer of legality to it, because they tell you the price before the “contract” is legally complete, but only after making the customer jump through a few hurdles.

The entire point is to make the customer do enough work before you show them the actual price, that they just give up and deal with it.

It’s a moral fraud, even if not legally fraud. Even if not on the dotted line, they’re forcing the customer to spend their time on it under false pretenses, in the hope that the sunk cost is enough to trap the customer.

Re: California AG and state senators introduce bill to ban hidden fees

#243

Post by jasmer »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #82

I think a lot of comments here are missing the reason as to why these hidden fees have become so much more prevalent in the past 20 or so years. The short of it is that comparison pricing is now much easier to do because of the Internet, and many, if not a majority, of shoppers will just sort by price ascending and pick the first result (or, only pick from the first couple results). Thus, there is a huge incentive fo…

The other reason is continued civic moral debasement.

We used to live in communities, whereing social mores were at least nominally respected or accepted. Even if they were broken, at minimum 'wrong was wrong' and in particular, reputation mattered.

We later moved into larger corporate entities wherein mores could be sidelined, and now we've flipped the game entirely and there are few civic questions to contemplate. It's just "The Funnel" and that's it.

Even if most people don't fully buy Milton Friedman's Chicago School 'the motive is only profit' stuff, the ideal set it.

VC-land and the Valley never even talk bother about civic good, consumer surplus etc. other than maybe in some situations a kind of DEI/Climate specific kind of ideological way. The baseline assumption is 'the product must be doing some kind of 'good' and if not who cares'. Commerce is generally positive but it's pretty easy to see where the frayed edeges are.

Dark Patterns abound, even by supposedly reputable companies. I don't think people realize how perverse this is and how it strongly degrades civil life. It's not good that we have to be worried about how we are being ripped off / misled by major companies we are supposed to trust.

Paradoxically, in the long run, most of it is not worth it. A small optimization in the funnel is not going to change anything.

Re: California AG and state senators introduce bill to ban hidden fees

#244

Post by ajsnigrutin »

meltedcapacitor wrote: post #209
yamtaddle wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's weird, at least in the US, is that the higher-end the joint, the easier it is to shop by price, generally. Tax-inclusive, whole-dollar-value (no "$7.99" crap, it's just "8"), all-prices-aligned menus are more common as one heads up-scale.

Makes sense: at the high end of the market, patrons need to be able to identify and get the most expensive option to impress their date/mates, and understandably restaurants want to be helpful. (See "Veblen goods".)

Never seen the impressing part... usually if you want to eat cheap, you go somewhere cheap, if you want something more expensive, you're prepared to pay more, but you don't want to be surprised after.

So, noone who goes to a place like this cares if one soup is $12 and the other $14 and then pick the cheaper one... but if you have a $79 bottle of wine on the menu and a $7900 bottle of wine on the menu, it's in the interest of the restaurant to have the patrons know clearly that the expensive bottle is really really expensive, and having deceptive pricing there ("$7.9 per 0.7ml") only causes problems when the check arrives.

Re: California AG and state senators introduce bill to ban hidden fees

#245

Post by novok »

meltedcapacitor wrote: post #209
yamtaddle wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's weird, at least in the US, is that the higher-end the joint, the easier it is to shop by price, generally. Tax-inclusive, whole-dollar-value (no "$7.99" crap, it's just "8"), all-prices-aligned menus are more common as one heads up-scale.

Makes sense: at the high end of the market, patrons need to be able to identify and get the most expensive option to impress their date/mates, and understandably restaurants want to be helpful. (See "Veblen goods".)

For the high end restaurant clientele, the difference between 10 vs 20 or 10 vs 9 is not much (which is what 19.99 and 9.99 tricks are exploiting), and they are optimizing for time and optimal experience, because they have 'less' of that compared to their money. Also seeing the tricks like that is indicative of being lower class, because $10 or $1 prices differences matter at that level.

Re: California AG and state senators introduce bill to ban hidden fees

#246

Post by jimkleiber »

denton-scratch wrote: post #186
jimkleiber wrote: post #140

> The legislation — the first bill of its type across the state — would prohibit advertising a price for a good or service that does not include all required charges other than taxes and fees imposed by a government. I don't get it, so it's OK for government to hide its fees but not the business? I wish the government were to lead by example and also try to eliminate hidden government fees. Here in California, differ…

> I don't get it, so it's OK for government to hide its fees but not the business? Other way round; the bill would make it mandatory to include all fees except the government's fees.

Yeah, I think they'd have a stronger argument if they mandated all fees to be included, including government fees.

Re: California AG and state senators introduce bill to ban hidden fees

#247

Post by qotgalaxy »

yanderekko wrote: post #220
fumeux_fume wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This misses the point that it's not useful to have the one-time costs separated from the nightly costs when trying to compare options.

Multiple people have explained how it's useful to them. Do you think these people are all jointly deluded in the exact same fashion?

[dead]

Re: California AG and state senators introduce bill to ban hidden fees

#248

Post by gdprrrr »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #82

I think a lot of comments here are missing the reason as to why these hidden fees have become so much more prevalent in the past 20 or so years. The short of it is that comparison pricing is now much easier to do because of the Internet, and many, if not a majority, of shoppers will just sort by price ascending and pick the first result (or, only pick from the first couple results). Thus, there is a huge incentive fo…

I read it as "customers would prefer if everyone showed prices upfront", ehich makes sense to me.

Re: California AG and state senators introduce bill to ban hidden fees

#249

Post by novok »

jameshart wrote: post #233
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think fraud is a good analogy - the whole point with fraud is that you are getting something different after you agreed to it, when it's too late to back out. Going back to the airline example, most people say they hate getting nickel and dimed on things like paying to pick a seat up front or paying even for the first carry-on, but they will still pick one flight over another if the base rate is $5 cheaper. A…

The problem is when the customer chooses the lowest price only to find it stacked with fees before checkout, they don’t think ‘wait a minute, this is more expensive than some of the other flights I saw on the original search page. I’d be better off going back and trying one of them’ The customer assumes that all those other prices would also be lowballing them and that if they went back and chose one they’d end up wi…

This only happens in non competitive markets, or markets where fraudy behavior becomes the norm because profit margins are too low and they can't innovate their way into better profit margins. It's an act of desperation essentially.

Re: California AG and state senators introduce bill to ban hidden fees

#250

Post by [deleted] »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #82

I think a lot of comments here are missing the reason as to why these hidden fees have become so much more prevalent in the past 20 or so years. The short of it is that comparison pricing is now much easier to do because of the Internet, and many, if not a majority, of shoppers will just sort by price ascending and pick the first result (or, only pick from the first couple results). Thus, there is a huge incentive fo…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN