Note that drip pricing for restaurants (e.g. 10-20% non-tip surcharge) is illegal in many jurisdictions (if not "conspicuously advertised" before eating), but some restaurants try to do it anyways (claiming the policy is "conspicuously advertised" on the last page of the menu, or a tiny sign behind the bar).
Sometimes you can just refuse to pay it and they'll back down because they want a repeat customer more. Sometimes they'll insist, but you can still just... not pay it, if you don't plan on going back. It's not like they're going to call the police, and you're paying the main bill.
Unfortunately, it's not infrequent for restaurants to also withhold any unpaid part of the bill from a server's tips. That's usually illegal as well, but most servers would rather keep their job than complain. So you might think you're not paying the restaurant, but then it's the server who suffers.
In other words, literally everything about this sucks.
When I was being trained to work at a McDonald's restaurant (like four decades ago) they had us watch an awesome PSA about "the customer". To this day I remember the closer spoken by the poorly treated customer in the video, "I don't get mad, I just don't come back."
I've left notes on my bill explaining to "management" why I'm not returning to a particular restaurant. I don't like doing it, but I think someone needs to call them out.
But I realized that it was not encouraging for management to have complaint emails. And I hardly had a reply back (I assume most businesses just don't care)
Nowadays I'm once again just the silent customer who doesn't come back.
However, I can hapilly reply to polls, reviews, or send thank you emails to businesses that I liked, to encourage them.
I get a lot of _you welcome_ replies. And a small company even indicating that they would include my review in their staff training, to show what points customers liked.
So instead of being negative, I found it was more constructive to have a positive perspective on services that were worth it, to make them more stable.
> Sometimes they'll insist, but you can still just... not pay it, if you don't plan on going back. It's not like they're going to call the police, and you're paying the main bill.
This only works if you have enough cash on hand to cover the main bill or you're able to be really pushy and get them to run only the main bill on the card.
Yup, you definitely have to be willing to waste 10+ minutes of polite arguing and be willing to insist they run only the main bill or you'll walk out without paying anything at all. Which in many (most?) social situations, it's not worth doing. But if you're willing to take a moral stand against sneaky surcharges, maybe you care enough.
Restaurants must be happy that I am not the type of person who eats out more than once or twice a year. I don't tip unless there is table service. I withhold tips if the quality of the product is bad (sorry servers). Even in social situations. That doesn't mean I don't tip when it is appropriate, but I view it as more of an incentive for good service than to reinforce bad business practices.
I'm not sure how I would respond to sneaky surcharges since I haven't encountered it. Most likely, I would pay and never go back. If the amount was excessive and I was on my own, I would likely protest it and never go back.
Servers make $2.14 an hour in Texas, they're fully dependent on tips. They often/always have zero control over the kitchen or management's ability to do staffing. Keep this in mind when you eat in that state.
Law and practice can often be different. Often "the agreement" is cash tips are not declared on taxes, and you don't hassle the company when you make an hourly shortfall. My impression is that arrangement is far more common than companies actually making sure you get minimum wage every hour.
True. The loophole is that most tips are on credit cards and hence automatically reported. There is no distinction of cash vs CC tips when reporting. So effectively zero dollars in cash tips is being reported.
In the 90s I delivered pizzas for one of the big companies. I raised that if I didn't make tips the company was supposed to pay me $5.50 instead of the $3.25 that was my wage. The boss said, ok, but if we do that then you have to report your cash tips" - the "agreement" was quite explicit
That's if and only if you make enough declared tips to bring you over minimum wage for that period. Otherwise they have to give you minimum.
But it also means that if you snag a $40 dollar tip or something you're basically down to $2 an hour for that day. By comparison some states like California requires minimum wage + tips.
If you live in America you're an asshole if you do this. Tipping is the well-established cultural way for servers to make income. It is -not- something reserved for situations where good service is to be incentivized. Maybe in other countries ... but not the United States.
> Tipping is the well-established cultural way for servers to make income.
One could also argue that its a means for companies to intentionally under-pay their staff while also re-directing any anger at being exploited from the company to the consumer.
Perfect divide and conquer tactics that has somehow become culturally engrained to the point that if anyone refuses to be part of this macabre tragedy they are framed the villain.
I don't live in that place so the advice isn't important. Also I think its fair to argue that joining this macabre dance is also a poor method to fix an inequity.
If its true what others say tips are deducted so their employers pay below minimum wage then why not pay the server outside of the transaction so the employer is forced to do what they should have been doing in the first place?
Do you tip the janitors of each place you frequent? What makes wait staff any more deserving of a living wage than other occupations? Realistically tipping is just a subsidy for corporations who choose to take more profit instead of pay a living wage to their workers.
Wait staff in many states make below minimum wage, with tips expected to make up the rest. So I always tip wait staff and will still tip when theses laws change.
I also try to tip everyone I can when I have the means. Yes, I’d tip janitors, their job sucks, as do most jobs where you have to deal with the general public, and they’re underpaid.
The "expectation" of tips making up the rest is really just an expectation from the business that you will needlessly subsidize their payroll, in all 50 states the employer is mandated to always pay the minimum wage even if zero tips are earned https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/wagestips
I say tipping is unnecessary because there exist a few states like California who ban the practice of paying a lower "cash wage" and allowing businesses to keep tips for themselves. Anecdotally, I notice that typical restaurant bills in California are not any more expensive than nearby states like Nevada, Colorado, or Arizona.
What I don’t get is tipping for take out. Like, no server was involved, just someone handing you a box at the restaurant, and you are still expected to tip 20% (Or is it 25% now?).
Does anyone actually expect you to tip for takeout? I kind of assume the point-of-sale system including tip options on there is just because the system doesn’t have an easy way to disable it for takeout orders.
I think they’re saying that in America a tip is not a voluntary extra payment in gratitude for exceptionally good service. It’s a consultant free for hiring an independent subcontractor.
Truthfully, while it IS well established, this is only because the class of “owners” have beaten it into us (workers/consumers) and it is a great example of capitalism gaslighting more exploitation.
Is it capitalism? That doesn't sound like it's specifically the result of the free market at work. I don't love the situation, but it seems like it's kind of a nuanced history that started with extra incentive for exceptional service, which changed over time. Why? I don't know. But ultimately we (in the US) know that we should be expecting to pay ~20% on top of our bill, and take that into consideration when we're making the decision to eat at a table service establishment.
Part of the exploitation process, imho inherent to capitalism, involved a migration from your “tip to good service” to “opportunity to save” (money) by the owners.
I am, admittedly, a leftist and incredibly untrusting of anything where workers are not an equal part of the ownership in a business, so I know I jump too conclusion/assumption quicker than I prob should. But, I think there is no doubt that there is a lot of FUD around what would happen if staff were paid a living wage, all meant to distract to keep profit in pockets of the owner.
(Anecdotally, I don’t remember tipping being the norm when I visited Europe. But it was some time ago.)
Tipping is uncommon here in the NL. You just don't do it - even if they deliver your pizza.. they'll have a delivery charge and that's it. You might do it at high end restaurants, where I've heard of it being done. It's a complete contrast to the US. In more and more restaurants (esp. in NY) tips are becoming given directly to the wait staff less often anyways. They'll put all tips to the tip jar, then the restaurant takes some percent (sometimes as much as 50%) and the rest gets divvied up amongst the wait staff or even the entire restaurant.
It has nothing to do with 'capitalism', in case you think the alternative is socialism where everything will be perfect (you'll be lucky to get any service at all when salary is not tied to customer satisfaction, as Russians used to their country's culture found to their pleasant surprise when they crowded up at the first McDonald's just before the USSR broke up).
And nothing prevents 'workers' from pooling their resources to run a business of their own as a cooperative and split the profits..as well as the losses.
Australia has some of the highest minimum wages in the world (with its own negative effect on small business owners) and you pay exactly the sum total of what you ordered on the menu as all prices are quoted inclusive of applicable taxes. Tipping is your prerogative if you feel the service was exemplary.
The US needs to get rid of the idea that it is the customer's responsibility to pay servers' wages over and above what they're already paying for the food.
The alternative to capitalism is not socialism, but I understand where you are coming from.
I believe the kind of character(capital owner) utilizing the current system is going to be best tuned to exploit; a process made easiest (in regards to US service industries) by our “tipping culture.”
> And nothing prevents 'workers' from pooling their resources
You are “technically” correct but really so very wrong in practice. That same exploitation driven by capitalism makes it so hard to “pull yourself up by bootstraps” even in a group, if you’re always (by design) one paycheck away from homelessness. (Also a caste kept alive by design.)
> The US needs to get rid of the idea that it is the customer's responsibility to pay servers' wages over and above what they're already paying for the food.
They are only authorized to charge what you have approved. Period. If they charge more, then charge them back for the extra or the whole amount. Make it clear before they run your CC.
One thing I've noticed recently on 2 restaurant trips in the last couple weeks: The automatic tip calculations are wrong in the server/restaurant's favor. Most of us typically check the 20% option and don't double-check the math, but in the past these calculations were always done pre-tax. If your food came to $100 and you tipped 20%, the total would be $120 + sales tax.
Now, the last 2 times I've eaten out the automatic tip calculation was done on the post-tax amount. I live in Alameda county where the sales tax is over 10%, so this is a big difference. Not only that, the default tip options were something like 18, 20, and 25%.
The only reason I can see for restaurants to do this is that the minimum wage here is $15/hour, and if tips alone don't make that rate, the restaurant pays out of pocket because it is illegal for them to pay below minimum wage. This seems like yet another example of restaurant owners passing higher labor costs onto customers in a less than ethical way.
I suspect most people tip on the after-tax amount when they calculate it themselves. I get that you don’t. I also know people who tip on the non-alcohol amount. Personally, I have always tipped post-tax.
These are also low-margin businesses. A post-tax surcharge keeps your overall bill lower than if they had raised prices, which would also raise the tax amount. The high labor costs are going to be passed on to consumers regardless. The surcharge shorts the government (which most of us are probably fine with).
I think tipping post-tax is part of the longer term inflation of tipping. Once 10% pre-tax was the acceptable tip, then 15% during the 90s, and now it has drifted to 18%, 20% and possibly soon above. Somewhere during that drift it went from being pre-tax to sometimes, and even most of the time, post-tax. All this despite it being a percentage of cost and thus scaling with the price of goods naturally.
I always tip on my alcohol purchases, and usually tip 20% regardless of how good or bad the service was.
It's mainly because the sales tax is over 10.25% in our county. If the tax were only 5-6% like in most places in the US, it wouldn't be as big of a deal.
The food prices are also quite a bit higher here than in most places, but that's just due to cost of living. It is not uncommon to spend $200 to feed a party of 4 even without alcohol, so that tip on the extra $20.50 starts to add up.
I live in Ontario, and most people don’t (unless they use the button on the card reader). Sales tax is 13%, so a 15% tip is pretty easy to estimate as “whatever the tax is plus a bit more”.
Here’s a fun one to try next time you use UberEats.
Say your food is $12, and with delivery + fees it comes to $20.
The first “tip %” screen is based on the $20 figure. So 20% would be $4 extra.
If you decline that, you still have the option to tip before/after your food arrives. However, you’ll notice now the percentages reflect the pre-fees figure. So the 20% tip is now only $2.40.
>The only reason I can see for restaurants to do this is that the minimum wage here is $15/hour, and if tips alone don't make that rate, the restaurant pays out of pocket because it is illegal for them to pay below minimum wage.
There is no exception to minimum wage in California for tipped employees, and many cities in Alameda county have a higher minimum wage than the state minimum (Oakland for example, is $15.97/hr this year and Berkeley is $16.99/hr).
In France the prices have to be visible from outside the restaurant and you’d better be able to pre-compute your final bill before pushing the door.
I am always surprised that a country like France protects its invisible market hand better than the US that is more capitalist minded. Information symmetry is absolutely essential for market actors to behave in their own best interest.
Many but not all restaurants in the US do that as well, even though they aren’t required to do it. They do it because customers appreciate it, and they know that customers are more willing to try an unfamiliar place if they have some idea of what the food is like.
Restaurants should generally be expected to get more and more relatively expensive, especially “sit down” restaurants, because of Baumol’s cost disease. There’s a large labor component that isn’t getting significantly more efficient over time.
Many restaurants in our area are "removing the middle man" so to speak - with modern technology, the waiter isn't a necessary component, as ordering, paying, etc. can all be done either through a smart phone or a smart display at the table. A server is still somewhat necessary, but requiring someone who is highly sociable or remembers orders well is no longer needed.
Of course, nicer restaurants will retain waiters because it is nice to be waited on by another human being, but you need to pay for that experience!
If you think about it, this is not surprising. Ultimately you are paying for a lot more than the food.
Let's assume you can make the meal yourself at home. You'd pay for the ingredients, but probably ignore all the other costs.
A) labor is the obvious first candidate. Purchaser, chef, server, host, barman, dishwasher, table cleaner- there are lots of people involved. The price of your meal should include labor at fair rates, including benefits etc. (in the US it doesn't hence the need for tipping.)
By contrast your home-cooked meal uses your (free?) time so already has a head start.
B) location. Your living room is free. Your plates are free. Restaurants pay a lot for space (rent etc). They also pay for equipping the space, and for breakages.
C) wastage. When something goes bad in your fridge you throw it out. Restaurants take this straight off yhd bottom line.
I could go on - marketing, regulation, health standards, parking and so on. It all adds up.
Most restaurants fail because margins are tight - and if there isn't sustained volume small things will drive you under fast. And frankly the food offering at most places is inferior to home-made with only the smallest amount of kitchen skills.
So yeah, small establishments with very low overhead (think food trucks) can be both good and good value. But most places either have to skimp on quality (think most fast food) or try and externalise the cost (via tipping etc)
Put another way. Teach your children to cook. It's not hard. And it's a LOT cheaper than eating out.
>So yeah, small establishments with very low overhead (think food trucks) can be both good and good value. But most places either have to skimp on quality (think most fast food) or try and externalise the cost (via tipping etc)
Option C: charge sustainable prices and honestly post them, like nearly every other business. Why is this so hard for restaurants especially? Imagine going for a haircut and having to choose between 1) a minimum viable haircut administered by a minimum wage unskilled teen, or 2) navigating a byzantine pricing structure where (among other gotchas) you're supposed to pay more than the posted price by an undocumented amount determined by cultural osmosis.
Wait that's literally what happens with haircuts too. The price board, if you're lucky to go to a place with one, states something like "$20 up", whatever that means, and you're supposed to tip on top of that.
Canada sure feels like that when I visit. I always forget the double 15% for taxes and tip. Them comes the expensive beer. In the end I pay more to eat even accounting for the exchange rate.
Boost Mobile did this recently when my wife and I switched cell carriers. They advertised a $30/month/line plan (after a 3-month introductory period at an even lower price), but we are now paying closer to $45. This has pissed me off enough that I want to look for another carrier, but this seems to be SOP for this industry. Telcos behave like nothing less than a criminal cartel, so I was hardly surprised by this play. Nice to know it has a name.
Another comment here pointed out that the FTC is aware of this practice and has solicited comments from the public. Quoting from their linked article on `ftc.gov`:
> FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz asked consumers to share their drip pricing stories with the FTC. Consumers can call us at 1-877-FTC-HELP.
I gave them a call, and the first thing the automated system informed me is that one can file a complaint online: https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
My favorite is when wireless carriers can charge a "Regulatory Recovery Fee", which is basically part of the price, but can magically change and magically appear on your bill. The fact that the FTC is fussed about free chat apps rather than wireless carrier practices in the US is obscene.
It should be law that “recovery” fees, for a service as critical to infrastructure, be tax deductible as charity/donation.
If Eversource fucked up and didnt have enough resource to deal with a storm, and the state paid with our taxes to bail out, how is that different than them charging us a line item for that same end goal?
Along these lines - does anyone comprehend how the taxes and fees can vary month-to-month on your phone bill?
For an unlimited plan, there's really no variation month-to-month. It should be the same freaking bill each month - yet it's always a few-to-a-dozen cents different each time.
A Verizon rep told me it's because the taxes are per day, and the total is impacted by different number of days one month to the next. I haven't compared to verify.
when you sign up, it isnt $7 vs $6.93...rather, it is shown as 0 (by not including it.) It doesnt even show up on the cost when you sign up. Suggesting this is a ACT/365 issue is really a slight of hand to ignore the bigger issue.
Also, the calendar can be calculated for the entire year (or the next 100 years for that matter.) It makes no sense that you can sign a 2yr contract and be locked in yet they cant present a table of actual charges for each month for the next 2yrs when you're signing up. Mortgage paymnets also vary by days due to interest accruals, yet they have developed the "sophistication" (read: regulation) to create a chart of what each month's charge will be for the next 30yrs. Not to mention, you could also calculate the yearly regulatory fee and just amortize it on a 30/365 basis if you so desired. There are 10 ways to slice this cake, this isnt rocket science, this is straight up customer abuse and the FTC is just as guilty for ignoring it.
Imagine any other industry that could get away with this. Imagine you sign up for a $13.99/mo Netflix plan and you mysteriously got charged an additional $3 or $5 "because we cant calculate days per month in advance, because reasons."
Or imagine you buy a burger at McDonalds but get charged a different amount once you pay and commit to purchasing the burger "because we cant calculate in advance whether you get 30 fries or 33."
This reminds me of the old land line "touch tone fee" you'd pay for touch tone service, even long after nearly everybody had migrated away from the original pulse dialing. Not only did the phone company charge for it long after they really needed to, but you had no assurance the fee was really going to pay for that particular part of the service you were getting.
This is one of the big problems with these add-on fees: they claim to be for one service, but there's nothing preventing the company from using the money for something else entirely.
I remember reading that early on in the telephone age, some people had leased their phones from the telephone company for $5 a month or so rather than buying one outright.
They then proceeded to pay that lease fee for decades, ultimately paying hundreds or thousands of dollars more than the cost of the phone, and continuing to pay that fee even when replacement phones could be had for $10 or less.
Regulatory recovery fees have been around for over 20yrs in the US. Sure, the FTC could tackle both, but they 20yrs have gone by, and you still cannot actually get the final price for a wireless contract in the US until after you sign up for a 2yr plan.
Instead we're focusing on chat apps which were born in the past decade, require no 2yr plans, and for that matter, dont even cost money and have 50 free competitors.
They have limited resources, so caring about one they don't currently care about necessarily removes resources from something they currently care about.
I am very impressed that my Cricket bill is what they say it would be -- inclusive of taxes even. They say $25, $25 is what my card is actually charged, total! I almost couldn't believe it until it happened over and over again.
So it's not actually industry-wide... and hopefully even serves as a differentiator?
Why are prepaid carriers so much better then traditional ones, it seems? I've been on Metro for years, service is identical to T-Mobile at a fraction of the cost with no hidden fees.
Competition. You can switch to anyone else easily when it's prepaid with no contract durations getting in the way, so they have to behave well to keep your business. I've been on AT&T prepaid for years at 30/month with only sales tax on top of that.
They are not perfect though - roaming tends to not be available and they can get deprioritized more than the post-paid plans, sometimes painfully so; I was once outside an Ikea trying to notify them to bring out my order and the deprioritization was so bad that I had to walk into the store and use its wifi to notify them to bring out the order. Most prepaid companies are now owned by the primary carriers in the US afaict: Metro by T-Mobile, Visible etc. by Verizon, and Cricket by AT&T, for e.g.
The same happens with my ISP. I just call customer service and tell them I want to cancel. They offer me a significantly better price for a year, I take the new price and after the year it goes up again and I call to cancel again.
I'd hold off until AI can do that job for us at no charge.
Based on their privacy policy it looks like Trim takes a lot more than just a cut of the savings. They collect a shit ton of very personal data. They sell your personal data to advertisers, their "partners", and other "businesses and third-party websites". They keep your private data for as long as is "permitted under an applicable law". They promise to spam you with third party offers and to promote their own services and while you use their service they subject you to ads and let their "advertising partners" collect your data.
"Our advertising partners may also transmit cookies to your browser or device when you click on ads that appear on the Services...use tracking technologies with the Services. This may include the collection of information about your online activities"
If you go anywhere near that service read their privacy policy very very closely and make sure you know what you're getting yourself into.
I am extremely envious, as my local/rural ISP has a monopoly in the area. I am paying $100/month for a 20Mbit DSL line, because there is no competitive pressure to upgrade.
Too many trees that I can't just cut down. I tried them out when they first launched, and it wants a view of the North sky. If I could point it to the South (or even straight up), I would give it another try.
However, I am no longer convinced that it would be worth the cost to upgrade. Too many people have reported overall degraded service in the face of rising subscriptions. Moreover, my DSL service includes static IPs, so I can't simply switch over.
I'd even argue if you can get 20 Mbps DSL that you're happy with, you're probably not in the target audience for Starlink. I'm on Starlink and the alternative is more like a 2 Mbps DSL...
This didn't work last time I called Comcast. I told them I wasn't happy that my Internet bill went up again by $15 and that if they can't reduce it back to what it was, I wanted them to cancel it. They placed me on hold while I sat there grinning about my awesome negotiation skills. Expected to get sent on to customer retention where I could get a better deal. Then the rep came back on and said "As requested, your internet service is terminated as of (next business day). Is there anything else I can help you with?"
This is an interesting challenge. The first problem is for many consumers there aren't able to access more than one actual high speed provider. This drastically reduces your position in any pricing negotiation. If someone were smart they could personalize their offer based on whether your personal house had options although I'm not aware of anyone actually going to that length yet.
The next challenge is that even in the face of competition simple economics can break down in the face of uncoordinated cooperation even without collusion . It may be superior for major providers to collectively increase the price even without literal coordination simply by a small number of providers acting legitimately on shared interests.
In theory someone with more than one option could ping pong between providers during sales that offer free installation but this is for obvious reasons undesirable insofar as internet is a vital service and switching can incur unacceptable costs and the more people actually do this the bigger the incentive to find a way to resolve this. For instance limiting such promotions to those who haven't had them before.
As a buyer I want this to resolve down to a simpler pricing model like T-Mobile even if its not as advantageous as initial pricing offered because I would like a predictable and sane price and for providers to compete on price/value but its likely that the current opaque and complicated pricing model will continue because its more advantageous for it to be complicated.
The biggest threat to this model is probably municipal broadband.
Despite reservations, I've been looking at AT & T's fibre plan because 2 gigabit symmetrical service pre-tax is about what Comcast charges post-tax, which has slowly been drifting up every month. The truly irritating thing about AT & T's disclaimers is they say it could take a few billings cycles before your new customer discount pricing is applied. Yet I am quite certain your discount pricing will end precisely on time. So really the discount is whatever it may be averaged across some arbitrary range of time.
Still, it's tempting except AT & T also doesn't let you bring your own device. The best you can hope for is to put their device into bridge mode, rather than terminating the PON into one you own. Something you could used to do, but apparently they've made it much harder recently to extract the certificates needed to authenticate with your own hardware. IMHO, if someone is sophisticated enough to deal with injecting their own certs, they are arguable sophisticated enough to deal with a little troubleshooting.
Hopefully Comcast get off their butts and start rolling out DOCSIS 4.0, which will bring their service closer to parity with AT & T's.
Comcast also no longer lets you bring your own equipment, you have to use their horribly terrible modem-router combo which overheats constantly and needs to be physically unplugged from power to cool off (at least a couple times a week, in a well ventilated cool location).
Sure, Comcast is legally required to let you use your own equipment. How do they square that circle? You can bring your own equipment for a very crappy, lower speed, insanely low data-capped, highly restricted service. If you want actual Internet service that is reasonable, you have to get the special upgraded plan which requires you to use their modem-router combo. that upgrade cost extra money, although you get the extra fee waived for the first year or two depending on the current promotion. So the net effect is it’s a technicality forcing you to use their hardware (with the explicit threat of higher prices in the future). Technically complying with the letter of the law, while completely screwing over their users. A very Comcastic thing to do.
(for reference, I am in San Francisco, but in a part of town that has no other options than to use Comcast or slow DSL. Comcast policies and trickery very widely across the country.)
Sorry to hear that! Here, you can still BYOD for Comcast's highest speed cable-modem offering. I doubt you may for their fibre-based offering, so at least they're on parity with AT & T there, but not in a good way. LOL. I'm sure it varies by area and competition.
They often have special offers for new customers, in which case you could call back the next day and claim to be a person who just moved in to the address of the person who canceled yesterday.
There is no right for the timid to receive as much as the bold. Your friend also does equally poorly in salary negotiation. $25 doesn't keep the lights on and there are far more of your friend than there are of you ergo you ought to be careful for what you wish for because fair pricing looks a lot more like you and your friend both paying $94.
Fair pricing would result in reduced profits for the ISP otherwise they wouldn't do it.
Therefore consumers would benefit on net from fair pricing. Certainly some hard negotiators do benefit from discriminatory pricing, but their gains are less than the losses incurred by those who aren't.
>> Fair pricing would result in reduced profits for the ISP otherwise they wouldn't do it.
Possibly, if you think short term. Perhaps not if you think long term. Here are things we would consider purchasing if we could get a real price w/o first signing a 2yr contract
- SIM chip/plan for apple watch (x2 for me + wife)
- SIM chip/plan for iPad (x2 for me + wife)
- SIM for Child 1 in case of emergencies
- SIM for Child 2 in case of emergencies
But I have no clue if the cost of the above would be $100/mo or $300/mo, really there is no transparent pricing that I can see. Would have been great to just bundle all these into my single Verizon bill but i'm so afraid to even touch the plan.
Define fair? Internet is inherently both front loaded in terms of the substantial investment to build the network and fairly divorced from cost to maintain a given customers link. What's the fair price for access? The cost of access is negligible but the investment to build and maintain the network is not and without profits achieved now the network it would never have been built in the first place.
The Canadian government compels the major telecommunications providers to lease their services to independent ISPs. Getting internet service installed with an independent ISP literally involves a visit from the major telecommunications provider and the service is pretty much equivalent to what the major telecommunications provider offers. The difference is price. Few of the independent ISPs try to attract customers with special offers since their rates are typically lower than their provider's consumer internet rates to start with, even when you consider the major provider's special rates.
The company I'm with was almost apologetic when they raised their rates, twice over the past decade, even though their increases were lower than inflation and the major ISPs were increasing their rates nearly every year. They don't play games with customer retention. If you want to cancel, they cancel. If you don't really want to cancel, well, you won't get a special rate.
While a part of the independent ISP's advantage is due to the rates they pay being regulated, I get the impression that they also keep their costs down by not playing games. It also keeps my costs down since I don't fall prey to their
games. It also reduces the stress in my life since I really don't like playing exploitive games.
The result sounds similar to what happens in some places in the U.S., where you'll find a reseller or two that offer the same service as a major ISP with a better rate plan. Such is the case here in Louisville, Kentucky. IgLou resells AT&T. They don't play the promotion game, and their plans are better. While AT&T's fiber plans feature asymmetric speeds, IgLou offers the same up and down on every plan. They've changed their published prices recently, but I'm still paying the same price I did when I signed up. They don't offer the plan I have anymore, and I didn't even know it until I went looking for prices considering an upgrade, because they also don't call and bother you every year or 6 months trying to get you to buy more schlock you don't know. It's great to get AT&T's network without having to deal with AT&T. More places should be like that.
$58 CAD for a 100/10 Mb/s, which is fine for my use. The cheapest advertised plan from the company actually providing the service is $116 for a 350/10, which is $11 more expensive than a 1000/15 from the company I go through.
I'm not sure if this is still the case, but internet service had caps in most parts of Canada a while back. Around here, it is unlimited from all of the ISPs. It is also worth noting that a lot of the complaints come from rural customers. Living in the city, I have very few issues. (For example, the download speeds are over the advertised rate. It is supposed to be uncommon to get the advertised rates in rural and even suburban areas.)
T-Mobile's pricing is quite straightforward (but more expensive than you state).
$50/line for 2 lines, $10/watch for 2 watches, $5/line for international plan adds up to 130/month and I pay 130/month, nice round flat numbers for years now taxes/fees/etc are all rolled into the advertised price and not hidden after the fact.
Not anymore. It's $45 for the actually-usable plan if you have a modern flagship smartphone. Gone is all the "party" pricing stuff that made them so popular in the first place.
If a government watchdog like FTC doesn't stop this or a new explicit law that only allows "total final price" clearly displayed before purchase, it means every type of business will want to play the "Ticketmaster-convenience-fees" game by creatively coming up with new fees.
If businesses are trying to get more money, they should do it by transparently raising prices instead of tricking people into paying hidden fees.
> If businesses are trying to get more money, they should do it by transparently raising prices instead of tricking people into paying hidden fees.
Yup. This seems like a terrible long term strategy. If I'd eaten expecting $X, and the total is now $X + $Y, and they have the nerve to remind me it's not a tip, I'm probably not leaving a tip, and I'm -definitely- not coming back.
Most cities are rather static in populace. This is a great way to see yourself out of business for a tiny short term profit.
Some restaurants get the vast majority of their business from tourists who would never be repeat customers regardless. Those restaurants might think they can get away with such fees.
But those restaurants are highly dependent on Yelp reviews et al; such fees are a great way to get bad reviews.
One small township near us does this. They passed a law that states restaurants must put an additional 2% charge on every bill that is used to pay "kitchen staff." When we asked our server about this surprise charge they said "the law requires that we charge it now."
We decided to simply reduce our normal 20% tip by 2% and pay that. We don't like the fact that the city has stepped in to mandate additional fees like this and think this practice should stop.
Outstanding, just outstanding. Way to stick it to your server to throw a fit about a duly-enacted law you don’t like.
I would have thought the price of surrendering one’s decency and regard for fellow humans would be somewhat more than two cents per dollar, but I suppose I was wrong.
It's a mandatory tip so we view it just like the restaurant that adds a mandatory 20% on a party of 6 or more. We'll pay it but we're not going to pay an additional tip. 20% (or 18% if you think it's not going to the wait/kitchen staff) is rather generous so please...
In the U.S., servers are commonly expected to tip the kitchen staff. If a locality mandated a 2% fee to pay the kitchen staff, that's 2% the server doesn't have to pay out, so this seems entirely reasonable to me.
What is unreasonable to me is the locality thinking by mandating a 2% tip the problem they claim to be solving will somehow magically disappear.
Does the link have some issues? I see a hair in the upper right part of the screen and it scrolls too.
I thought it was my hair strand and tried to remove it. I realized it was not my hair and then suspect my monitor has damaged. Opened a new tab and finally realized it was the page haha.
This. The other industries mentioned might tack on fees at check-out time, but the service/product hasn't yet been consumed, so the consumer can back out.
This isn't true with dining out, where you see a price list, order, eat, and then get a bill at the end. You can no longer opt to eat elsewhere. You either make a scene or pay the undisclosed fees. Restaurants should at least put a notice on the menu in a highly visible location, but even that isn't going to be foolproof.
Really, this practice should be banned everywhere. As a consumer, I largely don't give a shit what expenses a vendor has; I only care about the final price. I can see an argument for disclosing regulatory fees, because as a resident/citizen, I can at least lobby politicians to change those fees. But, even that's a bit of a crap argument.
You can only do that if paying cash. And if you do, what will effectively happen is that the money you intend to leave as tip will go toward the fee instead.
Yes, because as we all know, service staff have enormous power and dictate restaurant policy. This is why they're so highly paid and aren't abused at all by customers, for example. /s
If I work for a company that I've seen screw over our customers on a daily basis, and enough customers refuse to pay my company, then I don't have a leg to stand on when I don't get my full salary all of a sudden.
This is true whether I'm a developer, a ski instructor or a waiter.
People like to act as if wait staff are completely innocent, but when I was younger I had a policy that if a female waitress started touching me close to the closing out of the deal she got no tip.
> Yes, because as we all know, service staff have enormous power and dictate restaurant policy.
No, as we all know the service staff has no power over the restaurant policy.
They are, however, the communication agent between customer and restaurant, so they should be informing the customer about these surprise charges up front. If they don't, they are indeed complicit.
You should be able to do that with a card as well. They can’t charge your card more than you authorize. (And if they did a call to the CC company will get it all taken care of).
They can decline to charge payment for anything other than the full figure leaving you with the ability to walk out or pay. If you opt not to pay you are dining and dashing and subject to prosecution the fact that you offered to partially pay notwithstanding.
Logically pay the bill then leave a negative review and never eat there again.
The advertised prices form part of a contract you're agreeing to. The drip fees are un-advertised extra expenses after the contract is signed and completed (you're fed). If you're willing to pay the agreed upon price, and they're unwilling to accept your payment, that should be their problem, not yours.
They have violated the contract, added new fees after the fact. They have violated the contract, refusing to accept the agreed upon payment.
This seems like an expensive fight to have wherein the opposing parties lawyers probably already did the due diligence to ensure those fees are legally defensible by virtue of signage. Seems like you would probably be hiring a lawyer with a 3000 retainer to fight an 8 dollar charge.
Get a recording of you asking them to confirm their refusal to accept cash payment for the pre-fee amount. They will either let you do it or you have good enough evidence that the managers not gonna make an issue when you have a recording that will make him look like an asshole in front of a jury and his boss.
These places stiff their servers and expect customers to make up the difference. I doubt they care to pay an attorney to tell them what they already know about their unscrupulous practices.
> If you opt not to pay you are dining and dashing and subject to prosecution
Is that actually a crime? My understanding is that you can leave your contact info, walk out. I’m not aware of any cases where police have gotten involved in a payment dispute. I used to work in a law enforcement adjacent field, and when the topic came up, the cops said it’s a civil dispute, not a crime.
Edit - after searching online, there are a few cases of diners being arrested, though it seems the charges are always dropped. Also those cases involved posted notices of the fee before the diners ordered.
You are not right. The crime being committed is fraud and the guilty party is the restaurant. If they refuse payment for the actual payment, that is their problem. Any court in any jurisdiction in the world will side with the customer in a case such as OPs.
Why would the card company take on the dispute? If you signed or entered your PIN have you not agreed to pay the amount shown for the thing you received?
Why hasn't anyone court in any jurisdiction found this by now then? Added fees are pernicious and annoying but I'm not aware of them being found to be illegal. The most likely end result is the court finds your lawsuit is frivolous and simply dismisses it then you end up paying the $8 charge if you are unlucky legal fees for bringing a frivolous suit.
Instead of relying on your fictional understanding of how the law works in every state of the union the more logical thing would be to either vote with your wallet or work to pass local laws against such fees or hell why not both.
>The most likely end result is the court finds your lawsuit is frivolous and simply dismisses it
You're completely right, the case will get thrown out. If you remember, in your scenario it is the restaurant suing the customer for not paying the 20% fraudulent fee, it's not the customer suing the restaurant.
Trying to add a fee after the price has been agreed and the food consumed is plain fraud. That's why they won't take you to court. If you dispute it while in the restaurant, they will let it go. Because they know the justice system will side with the customer.
Imagine for example if Ticket Master would charge extra fees after a concert, preventing you to leave if you do not pay. Not even they would do such a thing.
> If you opt not to pay you are dining and dashing...
No. If they refuse to charge your card the agreed amount then they are refusing to take your money and that's no longer your problem.
They might well claim otherwise, and you might well end up in a scene, but please don't accept their fraudulent framing, or spread the idea that they are somehow in the right with that framing.
If it's prosecution you fear, then consider that they can prosecute you for anything at any time. Why not a 100% fee? A 200% fee? Ten times the agreed amount? At what point will you refuse to pay?
Most employee interfaces don't have a way to represent customer paid arbitrary dollars towards their ticket but not all of it. Try this at retail. I'm only going to pay 50c towards that candy bar because that's what I feel like it should cost and ask to swipe your card for 50c. Most systems could represent a payment of less than the cost of the ticket as a partially completed transaction but would be faced with the decision to either complete the ticket or void it returning all funds.
If their system is inadequate that is their own problem, certainly not any problem for the customer. Machines are not the masters of people.
>Try this at retail
I do this all the time in retail, paying part in cash and part by card. No problem at all, cashiers often ask if I have any cash I'd like to use towards the bill first.
If you don't complete the transactions all funds are refunded including previously processed cards. There is essentially no button for customer decided to only pay part of the transaction no funds will be retained. The agent you are dealing with can no more complete half your transaction than you can complete half an amazon order and expect goods to be sent to you.
The employer sets fees the employee just implements and isn't liable to be able to delete a fee. Your disagreement with employers policy isn't employees problem and you making it so kind of makes you the asshole.
You ought to inform management that you disagree with the fee and won't be eating there again now that you know about it. You of course can no longer claim not to know about the fee after this point.
Deleting the fee case by case would be shitty policy because it adds constant friction. Deleting it wholly and raising prices is the right thing but as mentioned in the article there is a strong incentive to keep the fee structure to avoid losing our to places that do so.
The correct thing therefore is to get with city government and forbid the practice because now everyone is incentized to do the right thing.
Your suggestion to throw individual temper tantrums all over town is manifestly ineffective compared to my suggestion to pay the piddling fee then fix the underlying problem.
You must be quite used to always being right in everything, since you think it's adequate to call somebody an asshole out of the blue when opinions are different.
I've managed restaurants and worked professionally with implementing POS systems. Any restaurant owner who tries to force customers pay an extra, hidden fee, after the food has been ordered and consumed knows that what they are doing is fraudulent. Maybe they don't know it is illicit.
Every POS system has a way to delete fees and parts of an order. Business would be impossible without this, since waiters make mistakes and have to correct them. And if the system doesn't have that function it is a problem for the restaurant, not for the client.
Many people share the same misconception that you have, that somehow the machine or POS system decides what the customer has to do. The purpose of a POS system is to make life easier for your staff - if that is implemented in a way that makes life harder for the customer it means you have failed badly. The human is the master and the machine is the servant. Therefore you as a customer politely but sternly refuse illicit fees when they try to force them on you.
Your talk about "going to city government" shows that you don't understand that these kind of fees already are illegal on state and federal levels. Recently the Federal Trade Commission in the United States has committed explicitly [1, 2] towards cracking down hard on these hidden fees, that they call "junk fees" in the hospitality industry. Let me quote for you:
"Unavoidable charges imposed on captive consumers: Consumers may be forced to pay junk fees because they have no way to avoid or opt out of them. They might be dealing with a company with a monopoly or exclusive rights that can extract fees because there is no competing option. Or consumers might get hit with fees after they have already sunk costs into a product or service, and they can’t easily walk away."
This is from the White House [3]:
"Surprise fees that consumers learn about after purchase. Surprise fees that consumers do not expect – and which may not be mandatory – similarly make it hard to comparison shop and can burden household finances."
Are they throwing temper tantrums? Are the state attorneys who are successfully prosecuting large hotel chains for junk fees throwing temper tantrums? Is the EU throwing temper tantrums about this?
Back in the real world there are countries where it is customary for restaurants to add a service fee - usually 10% - on the final bill. This is clearly stated on the menu, and usually the waiter will ask you for permission to add this fee before bringing you the bill. This system is used instead of tips. If the customer don't want to pay the fee they have the right to refuse it and all restaurants accept such a refusal. Imagine if the waiter said "Sorry, our machine doesn't allow us to remove the fee, so you have to pay. You pay now!". Most would laugh, you would pay.
If you the business owner want to make a behavior mandatory you explicitly make it mandatory by policy and often by business rules enforced by the computer. I am aware of POS systems for a number of major concerns in retail not in dining mind you where such affairs are systemically enforced without a button to delete fees individually. Adding a adds b removing b removes a. Anyone who is a big enough asshole to charge such a fee after you eat probably is a big enough asshole to enforce compliance from the staff.
You say "most would laugh" and I feel like perhaps you haven't made much of a study of the human species. Most people are wimps and afraid to look like an asshole over a few bucks. This policy is pervasive enough to bitch about because it's damn near trivial to bully people into compliance if it would make them feel or look like an asshole and the cost is small and more importantly if they feel like it's normal and a social faux pas to complain. An authority figure even one as trivial as a waiter or manager telling them that this is normal and customary is sufficient to inspire conformance especially with a room full of people who are paying and leaving and not making a scene.
For myself I would have read the signage and made an informed decision not to eat there on principle but had I sat down and eaten I would in fact pay a modest fee because it's not worth my time to tilt at windmills.
Can you imagine sitting at a table spending your afternoon fighting the battle of the sandwich fee with a "manager" himself paid a pittance and counting yourself the victor?
Winning looks like walking away and knowing they are slowly alienating their customers and they will be dead next year.
If those things, would be only visible after I payed like on a kiosk or something, I would dispute the charge and report their fraud to my credit card company. Good luck doing that often.
Photo of the menu, what i was charged and telling everybody to do the same.
If an establishment adds a 20% surcharge to a dining check, that's a tip, and generally considered to be on the higher end in the US. I would simply consider them to have chosen my tip amount for me and leave it at that.
When I see a delivery fee that's a % I assume it's a tip and don't tip myself.
It's the same thing here. It's not my job to be fair to the employees. I'm generally a very fair tipper but if you put a % fee on my bill I consider it my tip. Most of the time it's less than I would have tipped regardless and I'm ok with that.
I also typically won't go back if a restaurant does this because I fundamentally disagree with it for all except large parties of people.
They can claim it, you can not pay it, express why, and sooner than later the restaurant will be unable to hire.
It's harsh to the worker, but in a recent market of high employment and many companies unable to find staff, should you feel bad? (Today, there may be a restaurant literally across the street hiring)
Before this thread goes much further I'd just like to point out that literally every argument for or against or indifferent regarding tipping has already been made on HN, including in this most recent thread starting yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34496438
Ideally the list price should include all expected costs. So a menu item should have taxes and the expected 20% or whatever tip (and any other fees) built in.
Then the receipt can break things out and charge less per line item + add in total tax and fees and leave space for a tip (with the default applied unless you choose differently).
Likewise with AirBnB: when browsing for specific dates either show the total cost or the amortized per night cost, inclusive of all fees.
The problem with AirBnb cleaning fees is that they don't disclose what's included in them. If you're going to charge me $500, fine, but it's not great when I show up and find out that you expect me to wash and remake the beds, power wash the deck, get rid of that wasp nest that's been there for a month and also assemble some Ikea furniture.
These days I ask for a list of cleaning requirements before I book.
Airbnb should set standards. Some places make me do absolutely nothing like a hotel room. And some places make you wash the linens, dishes and sweep/vacuum the floors while paying $300+ for a cleaning fee. Probably why I now prefer hotels because i know what i am getting.
Honestly, I'm fine with hosts charging whatever they want and asking guests to do whatever they want, as long as it's properly disclosed. If I show up and the house rules/cleaning requirements are more onerous than what's disclosed, I ought to be able to notify AirBnb and just get my cleaning fee refunded or somethin else slightly punitive to keep hosts honest.
If I get charged $500 for cleaning and I find a speck of dust, anything foreign (hair, eyelash) on bedsheets or streak marks on any gloss surface - I'm doing a charge-back as soon as I check out.
The good news is that if everyone does that it'll still not be worth it to continue their deceptive practice, the bad news is that not everyone will stop going to the restaurant and the owner who sees the number of customers decline might be thick enough to assume it's for some other reason. I wouldn't make a scene, or let it ruin my night, but I'd make it clear that the hidden charge lost them my business.
It's still annoying, since they don't show up when you search on the map, as far as I remember.
Mostly due to this, I've given up on Airbnb in favor of traditional hotel booking sites (specifically the one with a capital B). Many private apartments are also listed on them these days, and I value not having to play stupid pricing games more than the slightly higher availability on Airbnb.
When changing the country to Europe (or currency to EUR?), listings even include taxes and local fees, allowing a true apples to apples comparison between offers.
I agree it’s annoying, it’s just not as bad as changing you 20% after you leave for an unannounced “Fair Wage and Wellness” fee. The restaurant is straight out stealing.
Once they started including cleaning fees on the regular, often for as much as a single night's stay, I've largely curtailed my use of the service, and have gone back to hotels. Very occasionally, like for an out of state wedding, especially out in the country where hotel options are limited, we'll still at least glance at airbnb type services. I used to really like airbnb but instead of undercutting hotels on price they're often significantly higher, along with significant risk of an unpredictable or even bad experience. Staying at a chain hotel virtually guarantees no unexpected issues and no unexpected charges or drama. The last experience I had with airbnb (two years ago) the host grilled me on why I wanted a last minute booking (pandemic staycation baby-moon). Was not thrilled with the experience. When you book with a hotel all they ask you is for your ID and if you want a king or two queen beds.
I'm not defending the restaurant as I hate this as much as the next person but I'm sure the fee was mentioned on the menu - probably in small print and this was omitted for the sake of a good story.
Contractors have been doing this for decades. Here are two examples of the scam.
The roof of your property needs replacing. You call a few roofers to come by and give an estimate for work. You choose the cheapest roofer, who uses the same materials as the others and has been allegedly in the family-run business for the last 125 years. After the first half of day's work, the shingles of the old roof were removed. The proprietor contacts you and gives you bad news that there are several sections of wood that rotted away and they recommend you not apply new shingle to it as it will never fasten. It will cost additional to replace these parts, naturally, and the cost ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars. The problem with this situation is that there is always wood paneling that needs replacing. You never just replace shingles without replacing a few wood panels.
The next scenario involves masonry. The limestone steps of your outdoor stairs is cracking and the brick needs re-pointing. You bring in a few contractors to give estimates for the repair work. Once you've contracted work, at the end of the first day you are contacted by the proprietor who informs you that there is nothing but sand holding your stairs up and they cannot work with sand. You have to rebuild the stairs, laying concrete for each step. Only then, can limestone steps be safely installed. It will cost several thousands of dollars more for this work.
Both contractors engage in drip pricing, waiting for you to be along the way with their work, leaving you to decide whether to stop the project, accuse you of breach of contract, and exploit your vulnerabilities for not having a roof or stairs. Both roof and stairs projects required work that the contractors were not forthright about. Both gave a partial price for estimates and wait to have you over a barrel before you pay the full amount.
This definitely sounds bad, but at least in custom services, I can imagine scenarios where it's not possible to give an accurate estimate before starting the actual work (and already incurring cost in the process).
There is just no justification at all for goods and services with a uniform sticker price, such as a meal in a restaurant. If you can program it into a POS, you can print it on the price tag.
They'll say, this is how much it costs to replace the roof tiles, here's how much it would cost to replace the framing if necessary. It's not like rotten wood under the roof is a complete surprise to anyone.
When I had my roof replaced not only was this the case but their estimate included a certain amount of decking to be replaced for exactly the reason GP cites. I wound up not needing that much, and they only charged what I used.
I always object to US retail adding Tax to the price of the items. In the UK (and I expect Europe) the price on the shelf is the price that you pay. VAT is included.
In the US, you walk into a store and have to become an expert at understanding local taxes in order to figure out how much anything costs. Hotels often have four of five extra fees tacked on.
I'd like "The price you see is the price you pay" to be the rule.
Most places in the US, the local tax is the same statewide. Not in Ohio, where it can vary by township, sometimes across invisible boundaries. I once attended a large flea-market where such a boundary cut through the fairgrounds. Taxes were different on one side of the line than the other.
It's so bad that Ohio actually has a mobile app that uses your phone's GPS to figure out which jurisdiction you're in and show the applicable tax rate.
If I say mean things about Ohio from time to time, this is part of why.
It often even varies by item, or there are weird incentives/carve-outs for some products.
For example, shoes are sales tax free in NYC (if they're less than $110). This can mean that the difference between a pair for $109 and one for $111 is close to $10.
When grocery shopping, I'm always surprised which items are taxed and which are tax free. Other than most (but not all) produce and basics like pasta, bread etc. I'd consider staples usually being tax free, I haven't been able to detect any underlying at all so far.
Exactly why I cherry-picked that example; it's consistent with the parent's Ohio example in that most transients flying to SF via SFO don't even realize that they're technically in a different city/county.
Similar situation with Julington Creek Plantation and Fruit Cove; both are technically in the same county (St. Johns County) and literally butt up against each other, and yet the former pays Jacksonville (Duval County) sales tax.
> Most places in the US, the local tax is the same statewide.
Is it? Kansas[1] has the same setup:
> Q:What is the sales tax rate in Kansas?
> A: The state rate is 6.50%. However, various cities and counties in Kansas have an additional local sales tax.
I feel like I've seen posts on HN in the past about how hard it is for online retailers to properly figure sales tax and should outsource the lookup to <insert startup here>.
They know how much to charge you at the till, therefore they know what price to put on the label. It is that simple.
For webstores, require customer to disclose location so the right price can be computed; they have to do that when it comes to the billing page so it isn't novel work.
Everything else is bullshit reasoning to get away with false pricing/false advertising.
Taxes change every few months? Anyways, yes, I expect them to reprint them if the price changes as well, which actually is liable to happen somewhat often. If you’re worried about paper waste, they make lcd labels too, which can be reprogrammed on the fly, so you can’t even make the “reprint” argument. It’s really and truly not an unsolved problem.
That doesn't sound very economically conservative or environmentally friendly. I (and many other conservative HN readers) would probably not shop if stores were to do this.
>It's so bad that Ohio actually has a mobile app that uses your phone's GPS to figure out which jurisdiction you're in and show the applicable tax rate.
I'm curious how legally binding/legitimate that is, considering consumer-grade GPS can be fairly inaccurate at the best of times.
My gut feeling is it's a "don't quote me on that" good will guesstimate, but some professional insight would be interesting.
"I'd like "The price you see is the price you pay" to be the rule."
Totally agree. I don't care what other fees or taxes go into the price. They are all cost of doing business. Just wait until the baker charges you extra for the flour and yeast that went into the bread.
Meh, that one I do like, if you read enough EU comments you see people arguing over why the price of X is more over there, or why does Y country have a higher income tax rate but provide less, totally forgetting they pay a 20% sales tax on just about everything.
At least sales tax the company is basically telling you "this one's on your government, if you don't like it take it up with them".
But generally your random consumer buying a random widget has some idea about what taxes are involved and roughly what to expect when they buy specific consumer goods / the machine tells them what to pay.
It's complex if you want to do the math and get the exact number each time, but for most transactions it's a fairly small amount / not something you need to think about / need to know the exact number.
If I go pickup a burrito I'm not worrying about if it is $10 or $10.25.
If I wanted to worry about that it is possible to figure that out without knowing all the taxes myself.
In my experience, hotels show total cost prominently. Go to Marriott/Hilton/Hyatt/IHG/choice/Wyndham websites, and before you can reserve, it will show you total cost and list potential parking/pet/resort/other fees.
Some states charge you sales tax only on the difference between the new car and the trade in. Often person to person car sales aren't charged sales tax (but maybe sometimes there's a transfer tax?)
A $2.13 "Parking Recovery Fee" is charged to cover the expense in building their parking garage...and then, they charge me another sales tax on top of the parking recovery fee, then charging me a recovery fee because they need to recover the credit card fees charged on the city and state sales tax items.
Resort fees are also becoming more and more common, even in hotels that shouldn't need a "resort fee" -- if I'm staying at an Embassy Suites in the middle of nowhere, Iowa, why do I need to pay a resort fee?
I once had a hotel charge me a $30 per night "urban fee" - literally it was called that- on top of the advertised nightly rate. It was for work travel so I just payed it. I emailed them (I know pointlessly) to tell them I was never coming back (it was a hotel i used to go to a lot) and they just ignored me. Imo it's criminal, and it also looks pathetic for the companies doing it.
I have a company, and if I charged made-up fees to my clients after quoting them a price, they'd tell me to get lost and I'd lose their business. You can always tell who has inappropriate market power
It would be nice to have bundle reform that requires all prices to be listed as taxes-and-fees-inclusive here in the US. Ok, it’s not going to happen federally, but I’d at least like it where I live.
Changing prices is already regular maintenance, so the idea that this would place a burden on businesses is BS. If they have metadata at the cash register to know how to tax different items, they can have it at the label printer too. And for ecommerce, it’s even easier.
As to the wellness fee, I would be way more receptive to the 20% increase being included in the menu prices with a note about what that 20% does.
>>It would be nice to have bundle reform that requires all prices to be listed as taxes-and-fees-inclusive here in the US
No no no no
Taxes should be listed for atleast 3 reasons
1. The company is not paying the tax, you are. You owe the tax not the company, the company is merely collecting the tax for the government. In many states the company is paid to collect this tax on the governments behalf. If the tax was not collected at time of purchase you still owe the government the money
2. Hiding taxation is never a good thing, Taxes we pay should be transparent to everyone as they are extractions from the economy and we should be fully aware of the amount of money the government is stealing errr extracting from us at all times
3. Tax increases are blamed on the merchant if they are hidden in the price instead of on the government where they belong, this makes is politically easier to raise the sales taxes if it is all hidden from the consumer. If a state goes from 8 to 10% people will notice that tax went up instead of the price. This is one of the reasons why of you look historically gas taxes have increased far more than the sales tax rate, because gas taxes are hidden into the price of gas where sales taxes are not.
So make 'em include the tax amount and percentage in big print on the receipt or alongside the price on the price tag at some percentage the size & weight of the price itself. Both problems solved.
Paying a different price at checkout than what was on the tag is dumb and provides cover for exactly this kind of fiddling-with-the-price crap.
Here in Belgium (and most of Europe), we basically do both. Each line on a bill has 3 numbers: the untaxed price, the tax or tax rate, the taxed price. There are also 3 totals.
Hypothetically, what do you think about requiring a big, up-front total and a high-level cost breakdown (section numbers for tax codes, overall material cost, amortized facilities cost)?
To some of your points:
1. Isn't super important because on the <<1% of sales that could happen that way they're required to inform you of your tax burden.
2. Break it out as a line item. Bold it. Maybe a bit more transparency would help with the pattern of stores raking in record profits when any upstream supplier has a minor price hiccup.
3. Having to memorize the tax rates in every city for every class of goods and apply those accurately on the fly doesn't benefit anyone unless it finally pisses off enough people to turn our mess of a system into something simpler. Displaying the actual tax rate on the receipt should more than suffice.
The thing that worries me about the pattern of tacking on crap after a total had already been agreed to is that it conditions is to accept that as just something that happens once in awhile. Like how SF restaurants started tacking on a fixed percentage to cover employee health benefits when that law passed. You'd sit down to a meal, choose what you're going to eat at least partially based on the price and expected tip, and find out after the meal that they expect you to pay some amount greater than what was listed and societally accepted at the time -- and critically, on average it's a much greater fee than is actually required to pay the offending tax. That particular instance has gotten a little better since at least they usually have small-print signs informing you of that fact now, but it repeats itself in car dealerships making up line items passing on ordinary costs of doing business to consumers as if they were collecting ordinary sales tax, in toll companies separating out an additional fee for the envelope they're using to send you your bill, ....
I dont think simply putting on the reciept is a solution to #3, because people internalize pricing and make the choice to buy before the transaction. it would only work if the before Tax and After Tax price was displayed before purchase.
Anything less is still hiding the taxation IMO
Also I am intrigued by the people that say they are "Having to memorize the tax rates in every city" and "apply those accurately on the fly" I am not sure I have ever in my life needed to that? Why would you need to calculate that on the fly? Unless you are buying a big ticket item costing thousands of dollars then the tax should not be a factor on if you are going to buy X or not so what purpose would it have to calculate it in your head like that?
> what purpose would it have to calculate it in your head like that?
Huge swathes of people in the US struggle to afford food, and an extra 10+% floating around makes a big difference. It's nice that you can afford to spend your time more productively, but that's a luxury a lot of people can't.
As something of a side note, it's a bit of an odd position to take that taxe hikes are important enough to make it illegal to even mildly obscure them but that they're minor enough they would never affect your purchasing decisions on all but the most major of items.
>US struggle to afford food, and an extra 10+% floating around makes a big
I am not aware of any us state that charges sales tax on staple food items. Also I feel sorry for anyone that lives in a place with 10% sales tax that is crazy high
>>a bit of an odd position
Not really one of the ways I believe we have to keep them low is by ensuring transparency. My state has less 7% sales tax less than 4% state income tax, less than 1% local income tax and a capped property tax of 1%
> I am not aware of any us state that charges sales tax on staple food items. Also I feel sorry for anyone that lives in a place with 10% sales tax that is crazy high
Most major US cities are at 8-9%. Many smaller cities (and St Louis) are more than 10. Cumulatively it's a lot of people afflicted.
Also, I'm with you on staples not being taxed, but that's part of the problem with the tax being added later instead of precomputed into the total; if you're shopping at a general purpose store (the Walmart in Mt View AR has been an offender for awhile, but I rarely find perfectly correct tax calculations on receipts for all but the simplest of purchases at any store) and buy a mix of staples and clothes and whatever, very frequently you'll find that staples were taxed, and if you weren't tracking things closely you'll have missed where the extra few dollars went. You don't know till the register what the price will be and can't easily plan ahead.
Another related problem, especially in the poorer parts of the country, the cheapest calories you can buy, especially if you're working too many jobs to have time to cook, are often excluded from such tax exclusions to discourage unhealthy eating habits (note also how obesity negatively correlates strongly with income). If you go into it with a vague notion of food not being taxed you can get surprised with 10% sales tax, a 5% junk food tax, and often a 10-50 cent (on cheap food a non-negligible percentage) plastic use tax or some other crap.
And so on. The problems stemming from not knowing what you'll pay are common and real, and they disproportionately hit people who can least afford it.
So the reasonable compromise here is to just have both prices on the labels. The pre-tax and post-tax price. I wouldn't be opposed to knowing how much taxes increase the individual price of the item, but I do want to know the final price before I put it in my cart.
If the company is collecting the tax they owe it after the sale.
Yes it's a tax on consumption/commerce. There's no point saying it's paid by the buyer as there's no transaction without the seller either, and if there were no tax the seller were able to raise prices. (And likely the new market equilibrium would be somewhere between the two extremes, so it means both parties pay it actually.)
And as others mentioned in many places the law says the receipt has to show the applied tax, so it's absolutely not hidden.
I dont think simply putting on the receipt is a solution, because people internalize pricing and make the choice to buy before the transaction. it would only work if the before Tax and After Tax price was displayed before purchase.
I would be agreed if they displayed/advertised both. but Only displaying / advertising the final post tax price and then itemizing it on the receipt does not change the psychology of the issue where by people will internalize the final price and not fully understand the tax component.
In the same way people are complaining about not being able to understand the final price if it not displayed
In many cases, especially for flashy new restaurants in my state, the TIF fee exceeds other "taxes". Since these are solely for the benefit of the real estate developer and its tenants (including the restaurant), I would prefer that these were never split off from prices because that's misleading.
Do they? The rest of the world has all kinds of Insane tax rates.
I think the US Taxation is absurdly high and I pay in total about 25% to the government, many parts of the work 40-60% is common (when you factor all taxation), and that to me is out right theft.
Great analysis. Adversarial pricing/information strategies are offensive and represent a form of cognitive theft from the public. I greatly resent the fact that the advertised price of goods and services in many US jurisdictions is simply not reliable because sales tax is typically not included.
If a vendor wants to display information at the point of sale or on a receipt about how X% of the price consists of direct taxes, I have no issue with that. But having to pre-emptively apply it to every price signal or budgetary allocation adds a non-negligible overhead to the detriment of consumers. Consider a person doing grocery shopping on a limited budget, say $50. Before entering the store, the consumer must mentally reduce the $50 in their pocket to $45 (if sales tax is 10%) and then keep that limit in mind while shopping, in addition to evaluating product value by per-unit cost (which some retailers display clearly and others don't), nutritional content, coupon or discount offers, and much else.
For utilities and many other services, the opacity level rises drastically, making budgeting substantially more difficult. Add in the fact that pre-payment for things like phone plans often costs more than recurring charges, punishing those who try to manage limited or uncertain cash flow with thrift. And the people most likely to struggle with economic insecurity are the least educated.
In other countries where this is not the norm, prices of many goods seem high and disposable income correspondingly looks a lot smaller. But if you see something you want to buy advertised for €100 and you have €100 in your pocket, a winner is you.
A few US businesses take a different approach or clearly signal '$X out the door' on sales adverts, and I try to make a point of thanking them for the practice as well as just giving them my money. I think it's important that they get positive feedback.
What really gets me at restaurants is that they often don't disclose this on the menu up front. I've started taking pictures of menus when I eat out, so when the bill comes and there's a 4% surcharge, I can be sure that it was not disclosed.
I think if you disclose it, it's annoying but hey, free markets and all that. If you don't disclose it and charge people extra, I think that's just downright dishonest.
The upside is that they will take it off 100% of the time - the waiter will almost always do it, and on the rare occasion that they have to get a manager, the manager will always do it. I never bitch at the waitstaff about it, but if they make me talk to a manager, I absolutely bitch at the manager.
You should be sending the pictures of the reciept and the menu to your attorney general. Typically hidden non-tax fees are not legal if you never mention it early on.
Honestly, the cost/benefit ratio isn't just there. Leaving a one star review on Yelp is both faster and probably more likely to have an impact on the restaurant.
Those get burried, and maanged out by social media marketers. Also it doesn't stop the behavior as quickly. Those people are defrauding the people who go there.
I've seen this over and over in SF and now rarely eat out. Many friends and coworkers are taking the same approach, most of whom never used to cook at home. Scamming your customers 5, 10, 20% at a time doesn't seem like a great long term strategy
That's the inevitable outcome of this type of behavior. Like so many startup's attempts to squeeze customers in the short term, it works for a small window of time but leads to longer term consequences that are never properly accounted for.
For most tech workers an extra 20% on top of everything else is not that big of a deal, but for anyone who saves up for a night out that can be a big upset.
The only companies that can do this drip pricing and hope to get away with it long term are essential services without serious competition (for example telcos). All of the rest of these drip pricing schemes will come back to hurt companies in the long run.
I just wanted to say that this practice backfires with me. Those want to excercise such tactics better be in the 'deceive a large amount of persons once then go under and repeat' kind of business because they will never see me again. Assuming they could scam me once. Which is harder and harder by each passing occasions others give the liberty to themselves. Being tired of being scammed got me to reacting harsh even to a faint smell of such and make my stand. Especially when they try to wrap it into supposedly guilt triggering tactics like calling it Fair Wage fee, only to expose how unfair they are with their employees. Those wan't to engage in fair and transparent practices will meet my appreciation as it is so hard meeting such services I want to hang on to them and pay fair prices without forcing on me.
Same for me. I am feeling more and more that a lot of businesses are becoming more and more dishonest and are basically just trying to rip their customers off. I don't enjoy concerts, sports or restaurants anymore because of this and lately I also resent going shopping at places that have one of the tablet checkouts that tries to guilt trip into a 20% tip. One more reason to become cynical. As if the world isn't cynical enough already.
Showing one price on the menu and then charging a different price is deceptive and dishonest. I don't see how this creatively named fee is different from saying "the sandwich costs $10" and then later saying "actually you owe us $1000".
I've basically given up on restaurants entirely. Even without ridiculous tipping and other surcharges, prices have gotten out of control. The food just isn't that great, and restaurant food is not known for being healthy, with excessive amounts of fat, sugar, and salt. The only function it fulfills is that I'm less hungry after eating it.
So these days I just prepare my own food. It's better in so many ways: cheaper, healthier, faster, no risk of disappointment.
Exactly. My solution is also to just not eat out. Like the article says though, it's unfair to the businesses that choose not to do this. Maybe the solution is to just not pay extras if places don't disclose all costs up front.
The staff all get paid an award wage that is set by the government, and it is plenty, around $24/hr or more depending on age. This makes our food somewhat expensive: at least $20 for a sit-in meal, around $4.50 for a coffee.
But what you see on the menu is what you pay and includes tax: tipping is not in our culture, and I have never seen drip charging here except on public holidays (“public holiday surcharge”).
Our consumer rights laws probably protect our right to walk away and not pay undisclosed drip charges, although it has never happened to me.
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Admittedly, the award wage makes it difficult for newly established bootstrapped businesses to hire their first staff. For example, we were looking at hiring a graduate engineer, but the award wage was around $40/hr after benefits (superannuation etc), and then there is mandatory Work Cover insurance on top of that. Legally we can’t hire anyone below this amount because Fair Work would have a field day suing us, so we put it off until we can afford to pay, but without financing the leap we are maybe stuck in a catch 22.
Not just that, it's a legal requirement that the price advertised is the price you pay. The ACCC will enforce this.
It's why, for example, the supermarket ogliopoly have a "if it's mispriced it's free" policy, they got fined for inaccurate pricing and tried to turn it into a PR win.
Airlines and ticketmaster are currently fighting to change it but now we have a less right-wing federal government again hopefully the ACCC will be allowed to do their job.
I didn't know about the "if it's mischarged it's free" policy. My local supermarket (not Coles or Woolies) always rings things in at the till wrong and I feel like I'm watching them like a hawk.
It's called the Supermarket Scanning Code of Conduct. If it scans wrong, you get the first one free, and the rest at the proper price. It's designed to keep the ACCC off their back.
I used to do it all the time - it's great when they stuff up prices on expensive items like Razors. One time I went back every day and got a free pack and ended up with several years worth of (free) expensive razors in surplus!
Usually the manager needs to come because the basic checkout person doesn't know about it.
You mention public holiday surcharges, some restaurants are starting to charge a surcharge every day, and as long as it's mentioned somewhere it appears to be legal. Check the bottom of this menu (pdf warning: https://rockpool-websites.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/th...). 5% "service fee" Monday to Saturday in minuscule writing.
> at least $20 for a sit-in meal, around $4.50 for a coffee.
That's actually currently pretty much true of the USA too, especially after recent inflation. Unless exchange rates make the dollar-for-dollar comparison inapplicalble.
But either way, we're paying $20 for a sit-in meal too, but the servers are only being paid literally $3-$6 base rate plus tips, instead of your $24/hour. (Of course, depending on the restaurant, they may make $24 or more after tips... but it looks like median after tips is more like $16/hour, meaning half make more half make less...)
Its analogous to that in a lot of the US but the social pressure remains and is somehow getting worse.
Where I live, waiters used to be exempted from the minimum wage laws, meaning tips were effectively their entire wage. Recently, my state removed the tipped employee exemption (meaning waiters earn minimum wage plus any tips) and nearly doubled the minimum wage.
But, did the expectation to tip go down? Nope, its been shooting up from 15% to 20+% instead. I've been dramatically cutting back on how much I tip to <10%, which makes me rude and a jerk.
Also in Australia I believe it is illegal to do drip pricing. For example Airlines need to advertise the entire price up-front. It includes all of the hidden fees. The only "extra" at the end is 1% or so if you pay via Credit-Card, however there are free Direct-Transfer options (e.g. POLI), so I think that is fair.
I will sometimes succumb to drip pricing for the reasons given (already received service, already done research and made purchase choice, etc) but I remember and avoid giving them repeat business.
I don't have time for scammers. Best remedy is to cut them out of my life.
I thought it was already illegal to force a change of price after fulfilling your half of the deal? Unless the customer agrees to these fees before service, I don't think you can legally force them to pay it. If they do it without question, of course they can get away with it.
They likely have the sign posted in a place that is easy enough for diners to miss as they enter, but still prominent enough to fulfill legal requirements about giving customers notice of the fee.
Just say no. If the added fees are known up front, take business elsewhere. If they're only revealed after the fact, I would become That Ugly Customer, and they would never get my business again. If enough do this, then behaviors will change, especially if such businesses are retaliated against. As they should be.
In America. This would not fly in Europe, I hope. Pretty sure menus have to be displayed out front with full pricing and service charges have their own rules.
Specifically it's illegal under EU rules. The priority is that the customer needs to know the final cost up front. You can add a surcharge for something customers can choose, e.g. customer wants delivery even though they walked into the store and could take the product with them, but the EU has repeatedly told vendors to knock it off with bogus surcharges that in practice just increase the price for all customers, and is currently fighting ticket companies for various "dark patterns" like "optional" surcharges where the opt out was some tiny unobtrusive text no normal user clicks.
Yeah, I live in an area that straddles the line between the midwest and the south, and I haven't seen anything like this. Same for the QR-code-only menus that the internet has been complaining about lately.
I'm sure that if one local restaurant implemented this they wouldn't last long, but if a lot of local restaurants started doing it at the same time, they'd probably get away with it. Maybe they're all waiting for someone else to take the plunge.
I had a sneaky service charge like that (10%) added in a bar in Vienna (Austria, EU). Asked them to take it off, and they did, but the attempt was certainly made.
Many other places add it routinely and have it listed in their menus. Not just for parties of 6 or more, but two guests.
America is a big place, so is Europe. I wouldn't expect this to fly in a lot of places in America either. I've seen a place in America where they tried it and it failed.
I wrote the above and then I thought about Ticketmaster and the other members of this cartel of shitcreeps and I remembered the booking fee, the insurance fee, the print-at-home fee (the you gotta be fuckin' kiddin' me fee) and was thankful we weren't allowed easy access to guns because this is the sort of nonsense that leads to mild-mannered individuals turning to ultra-violence.
Online, you can get away with (figurative) murder.
The same concept is already heavily ingrained in American culture. Try and name a place that provides you with a price quote up front that is already inclusive of all taxes and fees.
In Europe it is illegal to sell things without tax and fees included (unless it is B2B but they still include VAT listed next to the non-VAT price) so they couldn't even try this.
Saying that I have started seeing gratuity automatically applied to some of my bills... So perhaps it's not as illegal as I thought...
The most memorable example I've seen of a business sneaking higher prices past consumers was an apartment building I lived in.
Let's say apartments were $1000/month. They announced that rent was going up to $1200/month, but if you signed a new one year lease the rent would be $0 for the first two months of the lease.
That meant that for the next year you would have paid 12 months @ $1000/month if the rate had stayed the same, and under the new rate you would pay 2 months @ $0/month + 10 months @ $1200/month. Those are both $12000, so you are still paying $12000/year.
A year later when it was time for people to renew their leases management said "Good news! No rent increase this year! Your rent is staying at $1200/month!".
I think I may have been the only tenant who realized that this was actually an increase of $2400/year over what we'd paid the previous two years. Everyone else seemed to actually think that the annual rent was the same as the year before and the year before that.
I haven't encountered anything that egregious but in the last year or so, a number of local resaurants have started charing the CC fee back to you, and in some cases, way more than the CC fee is likely to be (i.e. 5% or 7%). It seem to be associated with some of the fancy new payment processors--evey place I go with an old fashioned CC machine doesn't do this, but the fancy touch screen one seem to have that feature and some of the local restaurants are abusing it. As I learn about them, I try to avoid the restaurants that do that.
The concept of tipping is for "tipped" positions in restaurants. Someone in a Tipped position earns far less then minimum wage, which is made up by customer Tips.
So this leads into my frustration with the proliferation of tipping, which seems to have started at Starbucks (edit: at least that's where I first saw it occurring for counter services), is someone working at Starbucks making tipped wages or at/above minimum. If it's the latter, then they shouldn't be tipped except in extraordinary customer service situations.
It would be interesting to see how tips in restaurants that have drip pricing have changed since the implementation of them.
All that being said, I love in France (and I'm sure other parts of Europe) where there's a service charge added to each bill and that's it. I can leave some extra coins if I wanted to, but otherwise additional tips are expected. There, wait staff are paid a livable wage.
> which seems to have started at Starbucks (edit: at least that's where I first saw it occurring for counter services)
In my experience, it existed before in the form of tip jars (in NYC area), but really blew up when tablet point of sale systems like Clover came into the picture.
They earn a percent of the transaction, so adding a simple option to increase the amount of the transaction is a no brainer for increasing profits. And the act of actually having to press no tip is better at guilting people than simply being able to ignore a tip jar.
And then the point of sale providers got even more greedy and removed the no tip option, and started making it so users had to press “custom tip” in order to tip zero or otherwise increase the friction of not tipping.
Pre-Covid, wife and I went and tried a Grilled Cheese place in town that had been open for at least a year. As we were checking out on the tablet they had, my wife asked something about the Tip prompt on it. The cashier said, "Don't worry about it, the tips just go to management."
So, makes me wonder at every other place, how well the tips are distributed.
The other area I have an issue with (although I still tip here) is with my barber. She owns the business and she's the only one I go to. Technically speaking, she's keeping all the profit, so is a tip still warranted?
My water delivery company added the ability to add a tip for the delivery driver. I'm waiting for the county trash collection to offer the same option.
There is obviously social pressure against pressing "No Tip". I feel it.
But then I remember that a tip is for good customer service. Starbucks didn't provide me any customer service, they simply transferred the coffee from their vat into my cup. At which point I can feel justified in declining.
I guess they're taking advantage of people who aren't familiar with this view of tipping, which I'd argue is the standard view in the U.S.
> They [Clover] earn a percent of the transaction, so adding a simple option to increase the amount of the transaction is a no brainer for increasing profits. And the act of actually having to press no tip is better at guilting people than simply being able to ignore a tip jar.
I have wondered about this as a possible motive. I assumed that shops paid a monthly fee, or perhaps a per-transaction fee. But they're paying based on gross revenue? Do all POS systems work this way?
Every payment processor that I know of takes a percentage. The structure might vary (e.g. percentage cliffs based on revenue), but it’s never fixed on a monthly basis.
(So yes, they’re incentivized to introduce friction to the tipping flow — it always means more money for them.)
I would assume all POS systems have to take a percent cut, given that they clear credit card transactions. They have to at least take 2-3% to cover the cc transaction fee.
The CC transaction fee is generally about half of that. A normal sized restaurant will have their own merchant accounts for CC transactions and not pay the POS provider any percentage.
That's just one POS system, with a very unfavorable price. Most restaurants of medium size and up will not pay high rates like that on their transactions. If you have a merchant account you negotiate rates with your bank (or other account provider). The POS just connects with that. And yes, these POS systems are an expensive one-time purchase, with some yearly or monthly fees. However much more economical than paying on transactions.
If you're a smaller actor, there are POS systems that make their money on your transactions, but even among those Clover is a really bad deal. Compare to Zettle for example, that comes with a POS system, has no monthly costs and a flat 1.75% fee: https://www.zettle.com/gb/pricing
Oh sure, I figured they pass that charge through. But even that charge is not a straight percentage, is it? I always thought it was a percentage plus a constant.
Our family went out to eat a nice restaurant over the holidays and our bill had the '20% economic recovery fee' tacked on at the end. Naturally we didn't leave a tip and were happy to return a few days later to repeat the process.
I'm usually happy to tip at restaurants, and if there is any surcharge on the bill like this then I just consider it the tip, as they often tack on for large groups.
>Our family went out to eat a nice restaurant over the holidays and our bill had the '20% economic recovery fee' tacked on at the end. Naturally we didn't leave a tip and were happy to return a few days later to repeat the process.
If you used a card to pay, you may well find yourself listed by name at https://bitterwaitress.com (N.B., this used to be hosted on the open web, now it's behind the Facebook login wall, so I won't be looking at it).
Not tipping your waitstaff? That's cruel - that's part of their pay, which they need to get to minimum wage. Expect to be treated like dirt next visit. I would.
Waitstaff should expect that any surcharge, aside from taxes, will result in a lower tip especially because those surcharges are usually described as tips on the bill. Whether or not they are actually distributed as tips by the manager isn't my problem.
I got food poisoning when at an American university and I used the university hospital. They followed up with me to ask me whether I ate out anywhere. Next thing you know they've gone and done an inspection on the place and it's closed for a couple of days. Seems a bit high risk.
Tbh I think I got sick off my own food but I was doing the thing where I just honestly gave them all the info. I never really expected anything to come of it.
No, restaurant workers will not mess with your food in that way. No matter what they think of you as a client. Ask people you know who have experience in that sector and they will tell you that such things are absolutely taboo. Anybody who did anything like that even once - or even suggests it - would be instantly fired and blacklisted in the community.
If the waiters or chefs hate your guts, at most they will swear in the kitchen.
Absolutely. A server who doesn't explicitly tell the customer about these fees in advance is complicit with it, and I'll assume they get the full benefit of these fees in lieu of tips.
A cafe near me started adding "shuumi land tax" on the price of a cup of coffee. It's fine by me if they want to participate in some weird scheme were they rent land from some native tribe who are long gone, but don't pass it through to me. Another place started charging 25¢ on to-go coffee cups which I assumed was some city litter tax so I asked for my coffee "for here" and the guy tapped the terminal a few times and it changed into a 25¢ "for here" surcharge! Naturally I do not frequent either of those places any more.
When I see this, I multiply the charge by 2 and deduct it from the tip paid to the server and add a note. I don't like surprise charges, and I feel that the restaurant should charge appropriately and transparently in order to pay its employees. It isn't my responsibility as a guest to pay for the food as well as the back and front of house staff separately.
Interesting. I used to either go to Peets or Starbucks, and after a while exclusively the latter because of the annoying Peets tip thing which I never know what to put on. Is a $2.5 Americano a $1 tip? Who the hell knows? Anyway, I eventually stopped going to Peets. Then a year passes and Starbucks started this shit. The local workers do that embarrassed "and there's a new extra button you have to hit" thing, but it was just a bit more annoying and now I just use the Nespresso pods at work. We just got a bunch more of them.
My colleagues just use the app which doesn't involve that interaction and then they go pick up.
It's probably a strange pet peeve of mine, but having to think about whether I'm disappointing this service worker or being impolite to them or pick the right price or whatever is costly enough that I'd rather just not interact with them.
It's also why I like the market delis, Chipotle, and Sweetgreen so much. You just show up, grab what you want, pay, and walk out. Smooth experience.
I've never been prompted to tip at the Starbucks drive through in my area. I pay using the app after loading up the gift card (you get more stars this way).
I'm very much tired of the explosion of tipping culture though. Now fast food wants me to tip workers. This was definitely not the norm when I was growing up, or even pre COVID, and as far as I'm aware, they're all hourly workers that started making pretty good wages in due part thanks to staffing shortages (McDonalds was hiring for 18-20 USD an hour, pretty big increase)
I feel like service industries and restaurants are doing anything they can to push costs onto the consumer without raising "official" prices. Like they all employed the same sociology consultants and they discovered what social levers they can instrument to get people to pay more without "paying" more. I been seeing these "economic recovery fees", "COVID safety fees" and other nonsense too.
Waffle House is an interesting example for me - it's one of the few establishments that outright declares on its menu that all food prices already include sales tax. Yet you still have to tip your server, of course.
But then, if you order take out, that's either called in or ordered in person, a pre-detetmined "tip" is applied to your total, in essence a fee for takeout that is evenly distributed among the staff.
But *then,* if you order takeout online, not only are you subject to the takeout fee, but sales tax is applied to the prices that supposedly already include sales tax! What the heck?
First the tipping. Then the tipping after forced tipping. And the consideration is on whether to tip the tip or tip sans tip. Mind blown.
Can you not pay the random additional charges on the bill? What are the consequences? In UK some restaurants charge an optional service charge and we are free to opt out.
What happen to you if you accept a job offer and the employer deduct 12.5% from it because HR service fee? Both situations are taking money from your pocket with a hidden fee. Would the discussiom be "do I pay tax pre or post HR service fee"?
A local restaurant tired a wellness fee (it was actually a small %) in my area (Midwest USA), got a ton of bad press, traffic when I went by looked like it had dropped off significantly. They survived but according to the manager I spoke to only because they were owned by a restaurant group that had income from other restaurant without a wellness fee.
They made a big public statement, emails, flyers, about reverting the fee and so on and eventually recovered.
I support restaurants breaking out health insurance as a separate charge so that it's very conspicuous.
In the restaurant industry, it isn't customary to provide health insurance benefits. (It shouldn't be that way, but right now, in the US, it is.) If a restaurant is going to try to treat their employees better, it's crucial for customers understand why they're paying more.
Otherwise, they'll just think it's a bad deal and go to another restaurant. Then the restaurant will have to stop providing insurance.
I don't think you can make it work if it's built into the price. You can try telling people about it and putting up signs, but you'll run up against two unfortunate laws of human nature: people don't listen, and they don't read.
This add-on fee should be disclosed beforehand as prominently as possible so that you don't get charge more than you expected. But I think it needs to be a separate fee. Otherwise, I just don't see how you can get customers to understand that your food prices are comparable to other restaurants.
Why should it be that way? Why should health insurance be the responsibility of an employer at all? It is in the US, for historical reasons as an unintended consequence of WWII-era price and wage controls, but I don't understand why we continue to think that makes any sense at all.
I don't actually want restaurants to be the ones providing health insurance. I want the workers to have insurance.
Within the framework of the laws that exist today (which, like you, I think should be changed), there are tax advantages for employers that provide it, so that's the most practical approach right now.
> In the restaurant industry, it isn't customary to provide health insurance benefits.
Not just the restaurant industry. It’s any place where you work less than 40 hours. And I’ve worked at many, and most of them will try to give you 39 hours so they don’t have to offer this to you. I think the number of hours have changed (it’s 30 hours now?) but the problem persists.
At least at smaller restaurants this is easier to take a stand against than with Airbnb. Unless it's a huge chain, it doesn't take many negative reviews on Google maps or whatever is the common local service for the owners to notice what behaviour is not ok.
"1 star, they tried to add X% fee sneakily" can do wonders.
US is the only place on Earth where I found out that a sale tax is added to price tags in grocery store at the moment of check-out. I remember my astonishment the first time I faced that abomination. How's that even possible, what is the reason behind it?
The reason behind is that the product manufacturers and distributors want consumers to know how much they are paying in taxes. If consumers don't know, then politicians will be free to hike up taxes as much as they want.
Adding government-mandated charges separately is not a big problem, in my opinion. The big problem is when businesses hide a portion of their actual price under "fees". And the fees are not disclosed upfront. As an example of various fees see the AT&T example [1].
In some countries it would be illegal. If you haven't seen the additional fee before ordering and they mention it only afterwards, it's a fraud. Personally, I can't imagine I would pay it. Yes, I don't shy away from a confrontation.
It ought to be illegal, I've went to a take-out place that had a tiny note card taped to the counter where no one EVER looks before ordering: "optional" COVID surcharge.
This is a pattern I see everywhere. The last time I purchased Verizon FiOS, there was a big $25 per month advertisement. I purchased it. Later, I realized it is only for the select 5g plan. I have to 5g plan, but later I realized it is only for the "selected" 5g plan which I don't qualify.
They didn't mention it during the order, I only realized that on the first billing.
The only solution is to make sure all tipping, taxes, etc. is included in the menu. Unless it is codified I am not sure anything is gonna happen soon.
The important thing about the bs “fair wage fees”, is that because they’re not tips or anything protected the employer has no legal obligation to pass it on to the staff. Which is the point.
Never understood how any of that is legal. The price is the price, why would you be allowed to break it down into many small components and only advertise one of the components until it’s time to settle the bill?
And of course the addons are things that will guilt trip you into not being picky about them like “staff appreciation”, “healthcare fee”, etc. Why not “owners greediness surcharge” or “I’m too cheap to pay my people living wages fee”?
I have had the exact same T-Mobile account and plans for more than 10 years now, and I have seen my monthly bill go from ~$82 to ~$86 today because of additional fees. The bulk of my plan has been the exact same, just additional or increased fees for the extra $4. It's not much money, but it's the principle that they can adjust my costs upwards without me consenting, essentially forever, that pisses me off.
Comcast sold me on an "upgrade", more bandwidth, free HBO, and less per month.
Till the deal expired, then they added a $10 a month "broadcast fee". I only wanted internet, but they denied my request to switch to an internet plan. I had to cancel the service and switch the bill to another person to get an internet plan.
Since then the broadcast fee has increased several times, it's insane.
IMHO, the larger goal of "drip pricing" is breaking down the association between products and their price, so that, ultimately, the price of a product isn't what consumers are willing to pay, but how much money a company decides to charge. Confused/powerless consumers isn't a bug, it's a feature of the modern consumer economy.
I would call this plain FRAUD, if this was not mentioned in the menu in big letters or presented by the waiter.
This is just wrong.
I would refuse to pay their „out of thin air“ charge. Seriously.
If those things, would be only visible after I payed like on a kiosk or something, I would dispute the charge and report their fraud to my credit card company. Good luck doing that often.
Only silver lining that can come from this is that this offers a path to fold wait staff into this service charge, and maybe we can drop the tipping culture nonsense in the US (still may need to drop the income tax in order to do so, though).
But yeah, I wouldn’t return to a restaurant that pulled this sh*t, and I’m not tipping if I get suckered into one that does.
You have various fees and taxes that are not part of the posted price, and then the high-pressure pushes to buy extended warranties, paint protection, upholstery protection, etc. all of which are nearly pure profit for the dealer.
I am going to open a restaurant where everything is $1 and in tiny text at the bottom of the menu explain that you also pay a $19 Price Convince Fee per item.
Is this kind of scam legal anywhere? Isn't it a contract? I will sell you this little doggy in the window for $50 the customer says "ok" then seller says " so that will be $80 plus tax".
SeaWorld does this at their parks and it’s absolutely ridiculous. They put it as tiny fine print on their restaurant menu boards (which are electronic). There’s no excuse for not just raising prices.
> A pernicious aspect of drip pricing is that, as it becomes more common, businesses that do not do it will feel pressure to follow suit; The honest restaurant is at a distinct competitive disadvantage despite providing a superior customer experience.
In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don’t take it die out. Eventually, everyone’s relative status is about the same as before, but everyone’s absolute status is worse than before. The process continues until all other values that can be traded off have been, but relative X is still the same.
There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”
The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”
Cost of your seat on the plane is hard to determine before the fact. Depends on how many people were on the plane, what route it ended up taking (so how much fuel was used and how many hours were logged), assumptions about depreciation, which staff were on it, since different pilots have different wages, etc.
If you don't want BS, I recommend living near an airport that's a hub for an airline, and always book on that airline from their website if they serve your destination with no connections. Bonus points if they don't do a lot of BS anyway. Try to plan several months out, and prices will at least be OK.
Otherwise, call a charter company and they probably don't have a lot of margin or BS. It's just really spendy, because you're going to have to pay for the time you're in the plane as well as the time to get to where you can get in.
Every time some company finds a new way to trade their morals for profits, it creates a system where every other company must also trade their morals or be out competed.
Eventually we will reach a new equilibrium where every company has sold their morals and then they have to either start competing again on a new front or find new morals to sell.
I don't have a pithy takeaway from this. It's capitalism.
It's still sad when options are being limited. A nice world would have high-quality affordable produce for home cooking as well as affordable dining out.
Dining out should be cheaper than cooking yourself, since they can optimize the process and buy in bulk.
Sometimes you can just refuse to pay it and they'll back down because they want a repeat customer more. Sometimes they'll insist, but you can still just... not pay it, if you don't plan on going back. It's not like they're going to call the police, and you're paying the main bill.
Unfortunately, it's not infrequent for restaurants to also withhold any unpaid part of the bill from a server's tips. That's usually illegal as well, but most servers would rather keep their job than complain. So you might think you're not paying the restaurant, but then it's the server who suffers.
In other words, literally everything about this sucks.