291–300 of 396 posts
I almost booked a Turo for an extended period of time, peer to peer rental cars, it gave me a 40% discount for that time length, but all of that discount was erased by fees and it was more expensive than the previous page said it would be. Curb stomp them please, thanks.
I'm not sure I've ever seen such a casual use of such violent imagery. I did not care for it.
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It has way less to do with any "awareness campaign" and more to do with how tax rates are different in many municipalities that are very close to each other and how hard that makes advertising. For instance, the famous "$5 footlong" from Subway couldn't be advertised that way nationally, or even within a single state or metro area due to different taxes on prepared food.
You can, you just do the math backward so it’s $5 everywhere (or $6 or whatever).
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…
>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…
That may be true, but those are measuring two separate things - customer desires and customer behavior. Just because it results in more sales doesn't actually mean the customer still wants that. I know I didn't when I rented a car recently but I was pretty much stuck when picking up the car at the airport. I would have definitely found another solution if I knew upfront how much the real cost was going to be.
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> 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 legal…
You have a very odd definition of "fraud" in my opinion. But I'll just leave it at that, because this feels like the perfect example of the oft-quoted "99% of all Internet arguments are over semantics" line.
My definition of fraud is: “lying to someone to induce them to do something they wouldn’t have done without the lie”.
I think the hidden pricing lines up neatly with my definition.
What’s your definition? (We don’t need to come to an agreement, just curious how you think about it)
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You can, you just do the math backward so it’s $5 everywhere (or $6 or whatever).
From a compliance perspective that would work. However, that means that franchisees in high-tax areas like Chicago make 10% less per sale than those in Oregon or Delaware. That doesn't seem tenable in the long run.
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While I agree with you mostly, why wouldn’t you call sales tax progressive? The more you earn, the more you will spend, so the more you pay. The big issue I have with sales tax is that it is a much worse solution to the problem than a simple value-added tax (VAT). Most countries have figured out that VAT is more difficult to cheat.
Yes that is generally common sense reasoning but it is called regressive because then poor people spend a larger % of their income. Honestly seems like some mental gymnastics to me to argue that regressive is about what % of income is spent on taxes rather than amount of taxes paid but that's the argument.
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> airlines where the base price is akin to "we let you hang on to the wing", and everything else is an upcharge This legislation wouldn't stop that, nor resort fees, because they're not required. It would however effect Airbnb, one of the worst offenders, because their fees are mandatory and not shown until checkout. It's funny the government has exempted its own taxes and fees (the largest last minute fees we all pa…
While i agree with you on the taxes front, one hard thing is that not everyone pays it. Depending on what's being sold and who the buyer is, the buyer may have tax exempt status, which may not be known until checkout.
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>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…
> 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 That may be true, but those are measuring two separate things - customer desires and customer behavior. Just because it results in more sales doesn't actually mean the customer still wants that. I…
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…
>But, as someone who is privy to a ton of A/B testing in this area, the opposite nearly always results in higher conversion I suspect this might be the case initially, but eventually consumers will get fed up with being tricked again and again and refuse to deal with that particular industry (and A/B testing won't predict that). I know this is the case for myself and local services (e.g. cleaning, lawn mowing, applia…
You pay online, then you show up and they demand $90 for cleaning and other fees. I hope this goes through and moves us towards a sane direction.