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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

#661

Post by account42 »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #637
account42 wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The federal government doesn't need to legislate sales tax, just require it to be included in the display price. For physical stores this is trivial. For online stores geolocation + manual override works well enough elsewhere. Number of sales tax jurisdictions is irrelevant - either companies deal with it like they deal in areas with many smaller countries or they lobby their local city / state to fix the mess.

Sales tax in the Atlanta airport varies because the terminal crosses jurisdiction lines. Geolocation needs an exact location to get the tax correct, which means giving your exact location to every shopping site. Most people don't want to do that and already know what the tax rate at their home is so they already know what to expect at checkout.

This is a very good argument FOR requiring that the tax must be included in the display price. Travelers going through ATL can't be expected to know the tax code for whatever gate they have been funneled to.

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

#662

Post by atoav »

The FTC could ban crushing alive puppies into a homogeneous paste and feeding it to toddlers — there still would be people who don't see it beneath them to get enraged over the proposition and somehow frame it as a fundamental infringement of business rights if they arenmt allowed to crush alive puppies into a homogeneous paste.

I wonder what these people expect to get when they shill for corporations to whom they are nothing in the grand scheme of things.

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

#663

Post by account42 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #656
account42 wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can have a signup form you can also have a cancel form.

If you have a sign up form it doesn't matter if they list the husband's name or the wife's name because either one is valid to sign up. If you have a cancel form it does matter, because it has to match the one used to sign up or they don't know who you are, even if the customer doesn't remember which one they used. Or any number of other issues with matching the request to a subscription. Humans can sort this out, bu…

Ah yes, let's allow businesses to employ dark patterns to profit at the expens of unwilling customers because otherwise they might need to put in a little effort to deal with hypothetical edge cases.

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

#664

Post by astura »

weberer wrote: post #448
guidedlight wrote: post #10

They should ban hidden taxes too. The sticker price should be the final price.

They should just ban sales tax. Many states already have 0% sales tax, like New Hampshire, and Delaware.

New Hampshire has no general sales tax; they still have a Room & Meals tax of 8.5% on prepared meals and lodging.

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

#665

Post by xp84 »

gosub100 wrote: post #475
Centigonal wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dish knows their satellite TV business is on the way out. Their strategy is to maximize the present value of that business by retaining and squeezing as many of those customers as much as possible, slowing the decline and pulling as much money out of that vertical for as long as they still have it, so that they can reinvest that cash into new verticals with more promise.

I swear these satellite services could eliminate live tv and go on-demand only using a hard drive DVR style, with maybe 10-20 live channels. Everything else would be a stream that would download and notify you when it was ready. The bandwidth of those dishes has got to be multiple gigabytes per second. They could broadcast everything and the viewers would just opt in to the specific shows or movies they want. Complet…

What would be the point though? To offer a slower imitation of streaming to people in remote areas? Most people are happy with regular internet streaming.

Dish did do something sort of similar years ago though, don’t know if they still do, but they did some thing where your DVR would automatically record all primetime shows, so in that way, as long as you were ok waiting for the next day, in a sense, “everything was on demand.” https://www.reddit.com/r/dishnetwork/s/e0wspFb7zq

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

#666

Post by xp84 »

immibis wrote: post #468
xp84 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you: frustrated by a Congress that can’t pass any legislation, the one thing it doesn’t seem like anyone is willing to try is to consider compromises. Everyone seems fully convinced that if only the 50% (or more) of the voters who disagree with them would just drop dead, we could fix everything. And as a result, voters punish lawmakers, who horse trade and negotiate. Even though that’s the only way thing…

Compromising in the current congress: "Let's meet in the middle" says the unjust man. You take a step towards him. He takes a step back. "Let's meet in the middle" says the unjust man.

Maybe that’s how it started and maybe that’s a cause of the unwillingness, but how it’s going is that both sides see it as a failing to compromise, even when your opponent has a mandate.

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

#667

Post by anticensor »

calmbonsai wrote: post #654
t0mas88 wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably indeed a US liability thing. The FTC-like agency in my country publishes standard letters for this and a tool on their website to find the right letter or generate it based on some input. We still get the same consumer-hostile practices from companies, but usually they give up if you send them one of those letters.

You're correct. I've lived in Germany and the UK where this sort of thing just doesn't exist and the sheer cost-of-doing-business in those countries obviates away this sort of stuff into "noise". One thing about the U.S. is this sort of liability also has a huge gamut depending almost entirely on which actual U.S. state the transaction is done. However, there's also likewise a huge gamut between what's technically ac…

English rule thrives.

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

#668

Post by garfieldnate »

fooker wrote: post #363
TeMPOraL wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised I haven't yet heard of companies who would handle this for you, like there are e.g. for handling the process of getting compensation when an airline screws up scheduling or loses baggage, etc. I'm guessing there isn't enough money to be won there for them to be able to survive off a percentage of it.

A hypothetical company that can do this, would also be capable of handling much more lucrative class action suits.

That's actually a great idea! Something like the companies that take care of getting refunds for flight tickets when the flight is delayed too long (in Germany you are legally entitled to a refund, but the process is long, so there are companies that do it for you and take a piece). They might have some common claims that they can add to a catalog. You could cut costs by re-using paperwork on these. As long as they could claim legal fees, which I'm not sure of.

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

#669

Post by anticensor »

TylerE wrote: post #424
dotancohen wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the hundreds of years of examples, we have not had an interconnected network with information available to almost every human on the planet.

Not a free market project. Funded by the US military.

and quite a lot of research institutes around the world

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

#670

Post by anticensor »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #637
account42 wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The federal government doesn't need to legislate sales tax, just require it to be included in the display price. For physical stores this is trivial. For online stores geolocation + manual override works well enough elsewhere. Number of sales tax jurisdictions is irrelevant - either companies deal with it like they deal in areas with many smaller countries or they lobby their local city / state to fix the mess.

Sales tax in the Atlanta airport varies because the terminal crosses jurisdiction lines. Geolocation needs an exact location to get the tax correct, which means giving your exact location to every shopping site. Most people don't want to do that and already know what the tax rate at their home is so they already know what to expect at checkout.

Then have the entire terminal a single tax jurisdiction, federal-taxes-only one. Or apply a front door rule like Baarle does.
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