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Bill to ban hidden fees in California signed into law

oag.ca.gov

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Re: Bill to ban hidden fees in California signed into law

#201

Post by JumpCrisscross »

guappa wrote: post #198
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't give your address, but the price depends on your address, how does the store know how much to charge you? I don’t want to give my address to see the price. After I’ve decided to buy the thing, I’m okay disclosing who I am. But simply to see the price? Also, if I’m a retailer and people are giving me their address before I price them, on what planet am I not going to use that to help me price discrimina…

You don't need the address, you just need to know in which city they live, AT MOST. Taxes don't change every street.

> Taxes don't change every street

Ha. Oh boy. I remember when an engineer at a POS system start-up said something similar. It's like when someone decides they're going to roll their own time zone calculation.

In case you're curious, yes, two people in the same city can be in different counties, different school districts, different water boards, et cetera. Each of those typically has taxing authority. And this is before we get into crap like urban enterprise zones [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:New_Jersey_Urban_Ente...

Re: Bill to ban hidden fees in California signed into law

#202

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #50

Comments that are bringing up taxes (which are totally exempted by this bill anyway) and tips (with one small caveat) are completely missing the point. You can have a debate about how to display those items on a price list, but everyone knows about them and they are expected. The whole point of this bill is to prevent bait-and-switch, where loads of unknown or variable fees are tacked on after the price is initially…

> everyone knows

Displayed prices should be the price you have to pay - full stop. No math required or knowledge of local municipal/state/federal tax structures, no required knowledge of local cultural expectations around tipping. Just pay the price. Just because you're accustomed to tax/tip additions doesn't mean they are in any way a good thing that should be preserved.

Re: Bill to ban hidden fees in California signed into law

#203

Post by pandaman »

guitarbill wrote: post #58
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #50

Comments that are bringing up taxes (which are totally exempted by this bill anyway) and tips (with one small caveat) are completely missing the point. You can have a debate about how to display those items on a price list, but everyone knows about them and they are expected. The whole point of this bill is to prevent bait-and-switch, where loads of unknown or variable fees are tacked on after the price is initially…

Disagree. Bait and switch is one symptom of the issue that the price is not what you'll pay. Which to be clear is awful. And that matters if you have to be careful about spending. Also, "everyone knows about them", really? If it's so easy to "know" the local tax rate for various things, why isn't it easy to label them? See the rest of the world, where even young kids can go shopping. If you give them 5 , and the item…

>If it's so easy to "know" the local tax rate for various things, why isn't it easy to label them?

Because you pay the tax from the total of your purchase and not from each item separately. E.g. in Santa Monica, CA sales tax is 10.25%, a price on a $4.95 item with tax included would be $5.46 but on 10x of these items it's just $54.58.

Re: Bill to ban hidden fees in California signed into law

#204

Post by boxed »

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #143
boxed wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stockholm syndrome talking. Displaying THE PRICE on products is so amazingly basic that it's always mind blowing seeing Americans think this is a complicated question. It's not. If I have to pay 5 dollars at checkout THEN THE PRICE IS FIVE DOLLARS.

It might be somewhat complicated when every town has a different tax rate.

You didn't think that through heh. They know the price at checkout.

Re: Bill to ban hidden fees in California signed into law

#205

Post by frumper »

pandaman wrote: post #203
guitarbill wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Bait and switch is one symptom of the issue that the price is not what you'll pay. Which to be clear is awful. And that matters if you have to be careful about spending. Also, "everyone knows about them", really? If it's so easy to "know" the local tax rate for various things, why isn't it easy to label them? See the rest of the world, where even young kids can go shopping. If you give them 5 , and the item…

>If it's so easy to "know" the local tax rate for various things, why isn't it easy to label them? Because you pay the tax from the total of your purchase and not from each item separately. E.g. in Santa Monica, CA sales tax is 10.25%, a price on a $4.95 item with tax included would be $5.46 but on 10x of these items it's just $54.58.

Retailers can charge whatever they’d like. Retailers are paying the tax, they’re just allowed to add it to the bill, but they don’t have to. They can calculate it per item, round up a penny and that’s the price.

Re: Bill to ban hidden fees in California signed into law

#206

Post by devilbunny »

Jensson wrote: post #162
ffgjgf1 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be somewhat complicated when every town has a different tax rate.

The store is just in a single town, it is trivial for them to fix their labels. For the user on the other hand it isn't trivial to figure out the tax rate for every store they visit as they travel since as you admit it changes everywhere.

For a big corp, they want to advertise nationally. "$1 hamburgers!" or "$799 refrigerator!". You can't make a national ad if you have to have precise pricing.

Not the strongest argument, but there it is.

A college friend worked at a pizza place that straddled a county line. One county had its own sales tax; the other did not. The register was in the back of the store to take advantage of this (the location of the register was considered the point of sale for tax purposes). Question: would it have been legal for them to advertise a price in the higher-tax-county part of the store that only applied if you bought the pizza from the outher county?

Local sales tax and national VAT are similar, but they don't work that much alike in practice.

Re: Bill to ban hidden fees in California signed into law

#207

Post by devilbunny »

guappa wrote: post #198
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't give your address, but the price depends on your address, how does the store know how much to charge you? I don’t want to give my address to see the price. After I’ve decided to buy the thing, I’m okay disclosing who I am. But simply to see the price? Also, if I’m a retailer and people are giving me their address before I price them, on what planet am I not going to use that to help me price discrimina…

You don't need the address, you just need to know in which city they live, AT MOST. Taxes don't change every street.

They might. Cities can, in most states, cross county borders. Both counties and cities can have their own taxes.

I've seen cases where a neighborhood was split. Two near-identical houses, but one had less than half the property tax of the one next to it.

Re: Bill to ban hidden fees in California signed into law

#208

Post by devilbunny »

krab wrote: post #137
dehrmann wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least tips are expected. It's the 5% "employee support fee" that annoys me because it's a hidden fee, and it's not clear how it relates to tips.

Never heard of that, sounds funny. :-)

There's a restaurant I've given up on for one of those fees. It's not on their PDF menus at all, nor the HTML ones. Just a nice little surprise when you go there. Fuck you. Pay your employees out of my bill, or go out of business, but don't tell me I owe 4% more for "kitchen support".

Much like restaurants that want to charge the customer for credit-card fees. Oh, you want to do that? I'll show you why restaurants were among the first to adopt credit payments even with merchant fees: because when you pay cash, some employees steal. And they steal a lot.

Re: Bill to ban hidden fees in California signed into law

#209

Post by HDThoreaun »

musicale wrote: post #22

Looks like Ticketmaster, AT&T, Comcast Xfinity, Hotels with mandatory "resort fees", airlines, banks, car dealerships and rental agencies, realtors, landlords, etc. may have to make some changes. Deceptive pricing is extremely annoying, as are stealth price increases.

Airlines already have to disclose all fees. I don’t pay a cent more than the price listed on google travel.

Re: Bill to ban hidden fees in California signed into law

#210

Post by HDThoreaun »

krab wrote: post #14

> Hidden fees are fees in which a seller uses an artificially low headline price to attract a customer and usually either discloses additional required fees in smaller print, or reveals additional unavoidable charges later in the buying process. Like tips?

Not only is tipping not mandatory, it’s not hidden either. You know that every restaurant will want a tip, there’s no surprise factor.
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