I wanted to see James Taylor, but didn't know it would cost $5k | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to see James Taylor, but didn't know it would cost $5k

berkshireeagle.com

106 pointslightlyused79 comments

These sites are super scummy, but it does feel a little like the author is being willfully ignorant. I don't know why he didn't dispute the charge/request a chargeback.

Also, I went to the site, and here's what I saw:

First, you get a list of tickets to choose from. There is a small but clear "ea" under the price: https://i.imgur.com/erAV4W7.png

Then, once you select "buy", the order summary clearly says "each" or "x4" every time the price is listed: https://i.imgur.com/58N6Fne.png

Once you select a method of payment, the order summary looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/IFfvVwC.png

For the record, that says "total charge" in bold with the exact total amount you pay.

And before the place order button is: https://i.imgur.com/y2K4LrF.png

Unless that amount is somehow a lie, I'm not sure how this is misleading. It is very clear what the total, final charge is, it says it in multiple places, and it is consistent.

Certainly, but I’m guessing you are not the James Taylor core demo.

The grand total, while bold, is also a smaller font than the per-ticket price.

It is? It doesn't look that way to me in the screenshots. The "$XXX ea" stuff in the first screenshot is from a previous page.

The source was posted 4 days ago, I wonder if they changed things since then, but I agree the screenshots you posted seem pretty Normal. And that's depressing because a $110 surcharge on each ticket being normal sucks.

Hmm, they certainly could've changed it. And Wayback Machine wouldn't be effective for a checkout page.

There's also a 7.50 electronic transfer, what is that even?!

Its a charge to keep the internet tubes free from rodents, rust, and debris. I think they use WD-40.

Haha

especially depressing when you know they also take 15% from the seller too, so thats another $50

Are there any web stores anywhere that don't list per unit prices like this?

If I go to amazon.com and add four umbrellas to my cart, it shows the subtotal at the bottom, but the price listed is the per unit price. Doesn't even include "ea".

Is that what we want? It's usually practice to have the unit price and amount on any invoice or receipt, this isn't something they invented to trick you. Honestly it's easier for me to reason with unit prices than totals.

Let's see how readable the "ea" is when you're 80.

yeah i was thinking the same thing, at the very least it's not designed with accessibility in mind and could easily trick people who are more vision impaired.

The only reason to display the subtotal (a subtotal being "the total of one set of a larger group of figures to be added") as "$387 x4" is to deceive the customer.

Another reason is that people buy different numbers of tickets, yet decide based on the individual price.

I may be buying 2, 4, or 6 tickets but I’m going to pick the seat location based on the individual seat price. So I want to see if the seat is $998 seat or a $700 or a $2000 seat. I think the decision point is based on the item price.

The article told you: because the writer tried to do the polite thing and explain the transaction had been a mistake, and cancel it. The ticket company resubmitted the charge 4 times while the writer was trying to negotiate with a chat system.

Also, the writer is nearly 80. That tiny 'ea' might not be clear to him, and in any case the layout is a very obvious antipattern. Let me make it very simple: any time a customer needs to do mental arithmetic prior to a transaction, it's an antipattern. Would you buy groceries somewhere they didn't announce thte total before you paid? Of course you wouldn't.

This is your zero-trust, max-security world folks. It's a kafkaesque digital prison which literally promotes adversariality.

Yes, it's bad they did that. But while the tiny "ea" might not be good, the order confirmation page is extremely clear, includes all the totals you expect, and it seems like the author just clicked past it.

They should have done the morally right thing and refunded him, but, I am just not sure how much clearer the UI really needs to be here. It says the total price multiple times in multiple places and says multiple times "we will charge you this amount and we will not give it back."

In the author's defence, they do start the article by calling themselves an idiot.

Thanks for doing the research!

Dispute the charge with the credit card company based on predatory and deliberately misleading pricing information. Especially the lack of a "total amount" to be charged in their checkout workflow.

Just because the charge has gone through doesn't mean you are out of options with the credit card company. And, you won't be responsible for the disputed amount until the dispute has been resolved.

Yup, one of the reasons for CCs to exist is to be able to reverse such mistakes.

I don't understand the second part of the article. They decided to contest the charge with Visa, and had a very valid case for it. But then they saw that the seller had "submitted the charge" and Visa had "authorized it", so decided there was nothing they could do. What does that even mean? Of course you can contest a charge with the bank. The entire dispute process (required by law) exists for cases exactly like this. You can even do it online these days. Would definitely have been less effort than publishing an entire opinion piece about it.

I tried this with my bank when I mistyped the email on a ticketing purchase (.con instead of .com) and they wouldn't initiate a charge back. Perhaps they were in a similar situation?

You opened a dispute. This person hasn't. So not the same situation.

Credit cards are much easier to dispute charges on

>my bank

Just to be clear, we're talking about a credit card right? Credit issuers always side with the buyer unless you're obviously attempting chargeback fraud.

Yeah, it was a credit card

He has a case with the card issuer. I'd suggest he get on the phone with the card company and ask for a 2nd level support or manager, then tell them to reverse the charge. He never responded YES to allow the charge. The reason for that type of check over SMS is due to an aggreement between the card issuer and the card user to prevent fraud.

The author could have disputed the charges. That doesn't lead to card cancellation. It leads to you getting your money back.

The author could also have CC'd the the various consumer protection services of Massachusetts.

He's either clueless about how banking works -- you can dispute bad deals, which is one of its best selling points relative to crypto -- or he actually thought $5K was an acceptable price to see James Taylor.

Clear and legible pricing is essential. I took a look at the event page in question [1]. The "ea." seems like something that can be overlooked, especially given the comparatively miniscule font size (8px versus 14px for the price) [2].

On the checkout page, the fact that it is per ticket is clearer, but there's no total/subtotal information. Looking at the "Terms Of Use And Privacy Policy" [4], there's also this fun line:

> You further understand and agree to pay service fees and delivery fees, which cover the costs of our operations, including the 100% buyer guarantee outlined below, the checkout security services, customer service, and the delivery of the tickets.

...and those fees are supposed to be shown during checkout. [5]

[1] https://www.ticketsales.com/james-taylor-tuesday-tickets-kou...

[2] https://i.imgur.com/raPeRac.png

[3] https://i.imgur.com/975Sp0a.png

[4] https://www.ticketsales.com/content/termsandprivacy.html

[5] https://help.ticketsales.com/support/solutions/articles/2600...

Simon Winchester has written several great books that I've thoroughly enjoyed over the years. He's one of my favorite non-fiction authors.

A pair of books called The Atlantic and The Pacific; detailing the history of the ocean, people in it and around it. The Perfectionists, about precision engineering

I'm in the middle of The Perfectionists right now -just put it down on the nightstand to browse HN before bed and thought I recognized the name of this aritcle's author. It's a fascinating book and I'm shocked to see the wide variety of topics that Mr. Winchester can write about with authority and understanding. Certainly makes me want to read his other books.

Couldn't agree more, he's a fantastic author. The Perfectionists is a wonderful exposition into how the modern world was made.

In Ireland at least, there's no such book title - here it's "Exactly: how precision engineers created the modern world"

https://dlr.spydus.ie/cgi-bin/spydus.exe/ENQ/WPAC/BIBENQ?SET...

Just in case anyone else can't find it under the "Perfectionists" title. ISBN at that link.

“The map that changed the world”

Also brilliant - story of of how the first geology map was created by finding differently evolved fossils.

This is possibly not as bad as my experience, where Stubhub managed to fool me into thinking I was purchasing tickets from the venue, through some clever omission in their design.

I paid what turned out to be twice the face value and then when I figured out my mistake I called them angrily and they told me to get lost - no refunds.

The silver lining, if you can call it that, was that the tickets never were sent my the third-party seller, and I was refunded.

(I wound up driving 5 hours to stand in the lobby with my best sad puppy face until the house manager took pity on me and connected me with a comped no-show for face value.)

What predatory practice, particularly in the use of 'customer service' as a distraction flare, whilst the reseller used the time to expedite the payments processor. Should be illegal

The article makes no sense. Credit card company denied the charge and sent a text asking was that you, Yes or No. So then, the dots do not connect. All he had to do was text "No" in response. Instead, the family convenes and they decide to waste time with some chatbot on the original site and after to try to call humans at the credit card company ("cardistas")? Meanwhile, the Yes/No times out or something and charges go through. I don't get that; if they suspect it wasn't you, why wouldn't they give that reply all the time in the world? In all my experiences with Visa people being suspicious about activity, they freeze things until they get a hold of you.

Twice I’ve had transactions that were declined on first attempt, and then accepted on a second attempt that seems to have been made approximately immediately afterwards.

The author of the article says he's nearly 80, and also an immigrant. I assume all his family is is in a similar age bracket. They tried using the customer service on the website because that was the most honest approach, to contact the seller and take responsibility for making a mistake. It may not be obvious to them that there's only a short time window to make a decision about the charge.

Perhaps it doesn't make sense to you because you are not old enough to remember a time when there was such a thing as customer service and an expectation of integrity in commerce.

The author is a native speaker of English, who immigrated from the pre-electronic world of Emily Brontë and Jane Austen, as evidenced by writing such as "[a] tale which I tell here not to evoke sympathy nor to seek redress, but to caution any others similarly compromised of the costly perils of unyielding stupidity."

It is true that the "ea" on ticketsales .com is smaller. I opened up the inspector and the price for a ticket is at 14px and the "ea" is at 8px and since the price is numerical while "ea" is lowercase the actual size difference seems even more drastic.

Classic Dark Pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern design. There are many lawsuits winning against this. It's about time. More legislation will probably pass for this in the US and elsewhere. Even China is starting to clamp down.

On my non-Retina screens, the "ea" is small enough that with anti-aliasing, the letters are more shapes than clearly defined letters. I remember that in the old days of web design (including baking text into graphics!), 8px was the point where we'd switch to a dedicated pixel font like Silkscreen.

This is why I never respond to the texts. Plausible deniability.

I expect to see a TOTAL when hitting the purchase button. Even tax included.

Even when I get a hotel it shows me the actual total. Not the per night and then letting me multiply it.

The same firm that had written ‘ea’ in near-invisible lettering had gleefully resubmitted the charge four further times and Visa, seeing no challenge from me, had given up the fight, assumed everything had been correct all along and authorized it.

Nightmarish. Great to know banking institution security barriers can be bypassed by simply spamming the blocked transaction.

Huh this is strange. Someone stole my card and tried multiple times and it stayed frauded.

This poor man is almost 80. It's pointless being like "Oh he shouldn't have done this or shouldn't have done that". He's old. People that age make a lot of mistakes.

Let us not say that people at the age of 80 make a lot of mistakes. Rather, let's say that the world, society at least, is arranged for the benefit of those in the prime of their lives, say 30-40. By age 80 those same norms and conditions make things like reading, using a mouse accurately, and cogitating about things designed to be deceptive, at the edge of clarity, is inordinately difficult.

Tl;dr the guy used a reseller website to buy four tickets, and was confused because the website never actually shows the total price including fees, only the per-ticket price before fees (I checked the website myself). I’m surprised this isn’t illegal.

Many states have laws which make misleading advertising illegal in some way. If this were me, I'd get a lawyer to send them a letter on their letterhead. Or if I couldn't stand sinking any more money into the problem, my state's AG.

Walk into a hospital and ask how much an appendectomy costs. The answer is they really don't like that question.

Or four appendectomies.

The answer to that question is:

1. depends on what specific services you will receive, which varies, and

2. the people behind the desk in the hospital are clinical staff, not billing

It's walking into the front door at Accenture and asking the receptionist how much a website costs. They need to gather requirements first. And there are some things your surgeon won't actually know about your surgery until they cut you open. And the people at the front desk aren't knowledgeable enough to even know what those things are.

I'd settle for an answer to "Is this thing going to cost in the ballpark of $500, $5000, $50,000, more?" - which is still impossible for the hospital to answer w/o lifting heaven and earth.

In California:

> $1,500 to $180,000, with an average of $33,000.

It really depends on a lot of factors, many of which are not known in advance.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/study-appendix-surgery-costs-di...

It depends what the billing specialist and charge master for the hospital say, and how much they think they can ream you.

For example, I got a bill for my Covid booster ($42.50) and Mpox ($67) vaccine, yet apparently my state considers this fraud, as the vaccines are supposed to always be free to the patient, regardless of insurance status or citizenship.

In the link I posted, the study shows 2/3 of that range of costs is due to differences in treatment, not billing. Major surgery on a vital organ is always a customized service not a commodity.

My attitude is: if they don't quote a price, then it's up for negotiation.

$25,000? No, sorry, the highest I can go is 15. You'll do 19? I have to go ask my manager; that's more than I'm authorized for. Sure you can't do 15? There you go!

That's actually more or less my take these days. If you don't know how much it costs, then I don't know if I can pay it. So I suppose we'll find out together.

Then they ruin your credit score.

Even simple shit they don't know. I walked into a door and busted my eyebrow open in the middle of the night so regular clinics weren't open. Went to the hospital. They gave me stitches. Routine procedure. This was months ago. I still don't know how much I owe them.

A few weeks later I went to a clinic to have the stitches removed. I paid them $20. Maybe if I told the hospital I didn't have insurance they would have let me pay in cash too, but probably not.

> Maybe if I told the hospital I didn't have insurance they would have let me pay in cash too, but probably not

11 years ago I had a minor fracture on shoulder from a fall. Ironically it was during a 12 week period where I opted out of offered COBRA coverage between gigs (Mainly due to the fact that the COBRA was nearly $800/mo and I’m a cheap bastard) Went to ER, explained that I didn’t have insurance but could pay cash. Also because I was curious I asked what my charge would have been if had I had the COBRA. Cash price was roughly $1300. With COBRA the charge would have been $2400 for the 3 months of coverage, plus another $1000 for the ER visit, but the insurance would have paid another $4K to the ER if I remember correctly. Those numbers aren’t precise, but they are in the ballpark at least relative to each other.

No doubt I hit a sweet spot and if I was injured to a greater degree…COBRA would have won the economic toss, but for my one incident where I could test cash price medical care, cash price worked out.

> I'm surprised this isn't illegal.

If you watched the latest state of the union, Biden spent a while talking about changing the law to make this illegal (at least with tickets to events, airplanes and hotels). Given that the speech is considered pretty "prime time" to suggest new laws, this suggests it will be a major attempt. That is, currently legal but hopefully not for long.

The bullshit service fee should, separately, be illegal (the Biden angle). But also the misleading sales practice that didn't display a total is anti-consumer, unrelated to Biden, and the majority of the expense that the author is complaining about.

Similar thing happened to me the last time I went to see a movie. They added a few bucks to the total charge, without any notice or explanation, when I went to the final page. So sleazy. And this really may be the LAST time I go to see a movie.

It should be a criminal offense with prison time. Not fundamentally different from a burglar.

It’s both illegal and against the terms of the seller’s merchant account.

People do illegal and contractually forbidden things.

>It’s both illegal

...good luck with that...

>and against the terms of the seller’s merchant account.

...this, on the other hand, is how you hit them where it hurts.

Who are the scum that program this? Surely they look at this site every once and a while.

Can’t tell how bad this is. I tried this site for these tickets and:

1. It’s pretty clear that the price per ticket is times the number of tickets, so I wouldn’t confuse a small amount per ticket for the TOTAL amount (it says $900 x 4 for four tickets), but

2. On the other hand, it would be better if it showed $3,600 for four tickets rather than “$900 x 4”, further

3. It doesn’t show fees, which seem to be substantial.

So yeah I don’t think I or my peers would have gotten caught in this trap, but also the ticket seller could/should have done better. But for the majority of the population of internet users, the surprise would have been at the extra $1k in fees and not the 4x ticket cost, so perhaps there’s an argument to be made that very old people should be restricted from using the internet (and our highways, roadways, etc. while we’re on the subject).

Screenshot? Beats comparing your and his descriptions.

but $900 is not a small amount. given that normal ticket prices for a james taylor concert at that venue are less than $100 how would anyone even think that $900 is the price for a single ticket. that's actually more than 10 times the real price.

https://www.bigstub.com/James-Taylor-Tickets/Lenox-MA/event-...

I don’t think “ban old people from the internet” is the right take away here. This company has a team of people whose job it is to trick as many people into buying more as they can. Many people beside old people can get tricked by something that has been “conversation optimized”.

The correct response is consumer protection laws. Requirements to display prices in a standardized way and requirements to allow refunds in case of mistaken purchase.

(Assuming they haven't pushed an update and/or it didn't display weird on his browser/form factor/resolution/device.)

Hello if whoever that is didn't want to work with scummy ticket salesman he wouldn't have. Artists still have that kind of freedom. They do not care one bit.

The artists don’t work with scammy ticket salesmen (well they do work with TicketMaster). Scalpers buy tickets from TM and then resale them.

Artists don't work with the ticket salesmen, the venues do. This is an important distinction because there's a lot of places in the US where you aren't going to have much luck finding a moderate-to-large scale venue for an event that aren't associated with one of these scummy ticket sales companies.

This is not true.

The artist signs a deal with a promoter for a show. The promoter owns the tickets and can sell them how they wish.

Depending on the deal the artist does with the promoter they may get a fixed fee or they may get a fixed fee plus a percentage split of X, where X is an amount in excess of Y.

I just bought James Taylor tickets for $60

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