Except it's not as straightforward as this. There's usually some fine print at the bottom that says there's a 20% service charge, taxes not included, or whatever.
Regulation that protects the consumer while simply asking that the final price is displayed anywhere shouldn't really be controversial, it just seems that in the US these tricks by retailers have been so widespread that it's now normalized.
Aside from that, this law would not eliminate the need to do math. The sales tax would still be added. Despite "the price you see is the price you pay" slogan, it excludes certain government taxes and shipping fees. That exclusion includes sales tax.
Probably the core of the disagreement here is different definitions of "fraud". For me personally, information that is misrepresented and hides behind the mask of an unreasonable amount of work to be correctly understood is a form of fraud, and I know others don't share that definition.
I'm sure the next decade will be full of litigation to decide what counts as a "restaurant" and what counts as an "add-on fee" and every business owner is just going to try to skate on by with the status quo using technicalities and acksuallys.
The point is to forbid the fine print. I dislike many German laws around taxation and stuff but one thing we're doing right here is that all consumer-facing prices must be final. You can give a rebate if you want but you cannot charge a surplus. Prices as displayed must include VAT and any service fees, period. It's annoying that for some reason airlines do not seem to be bound to this, but the vast majority of businesses are. And I don't see the problem. It's so unfriendly when you put this and this and this in your cart / on your table and then when comes the time to pay, jumps a henchman out of the bush and demands some more. Where in the world does that translate into consumer satisfaction?
When did I say that? I only claimed that having additional fees that are disclosed in fine print doesn't meet the legal definition of fraud, and that some rando calling it "fraud" doesn't make it so. That says nothing about whether I support California's SB 478, and in fact if you check my other comments I actually support it.
Annoying and burdensome is not the same as fraud.
You can want to be free of both without conflating them.