421–430 of 691 posts
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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.
Really, you expect them to go through every item in the store, multiple times per year, and update the price tags?
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…
> 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 ye…
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.
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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?
For the hundreds of years of examples, we have not had an interconnected network with information available to almost every human on the planet.
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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 e…
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 spec…
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Safeway, Walgreens.
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
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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.
Really, you expect them to go through every item in the store, multiple times per year, and update the price tags?
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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.
> 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.
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> 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 h…
> 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_.
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.
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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.
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…
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".