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FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

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Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#561

Post by AlchemistCamp »

mrguyorama wrote: post #540
paulryanrogers wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Class action suits may be easier, if only arbitration was opt-in-by-default or easier to opt out of.

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.

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.

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#562

Post by calmbonsai »

breadwinner wrote: post #140

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…

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.

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#563

Post by FateOfNations »

aziaziazi wrote: post #149
itake wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and service fees at restaurants. The price on the menu in Seattle or SF is ~25% lower than what the product actually costs.

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)

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).

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#564

Post by ghaff »

bobthepanda wrote: post #527
ghaff wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-opt-out resort fees and facility fees and the like are especially annoying. They're also (presumably deliberately) a small enough portion of the total amount that they're not really worth getting into a big lather about. I think we're agreeing. While a lot of airline fees are nickel-and-diming, they're also over and above transporting people from A to B, in many cases for as little money as they want to spend as…

These days they’re not that small. I recently paid $20+ in fees for a $60 face value concert ticket.

Booking fees for events are probably especially a large proportion and annoying.

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#565

Post by FateOfNations »

runako wrote: post #381
cyberax wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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…

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.

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#566

Post by Dylan16807 »

jtbayly wrote: post #514
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

> 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.

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#567

Post by barfingclouds »

calmbonsai wrote: post #562
breadwinner wrote: post #140

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…

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 le…

Nice I might do this method too

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#568

Post by wlesieutre »

dchichkov wrote: post #491
Spivak wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At the expense of other people's time.

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.

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#569

Post by Dylan16807 »

immibis wrote: post #467
soco wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You aren't listening. Read about the reasons they did that, before concluding they did it for no reason.

"they might have had reasons, but they definitely didn't have the mandate"

"concluding they did it for no reason"

What?

Re: FTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket prices

#570

Post by FateOfNations »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #102
YaBa wrote: post #79

Now do the same with airline companies. WizzAir charges the crap out of you for everything they can. Do not fly with WizzAir!

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.

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.
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