I’d much rather transact in the US than Europe. The entire retail customer experience and return policy is unmatched. The last thing I want is for some government regulation to make it suck like Europe.
Are you aware that Europe has a mandatory 2 year minimum warranty period on consumer purchases? A mandatory 14-days no-questions-asked return window on all purchases?
In the US, AFAIK you're fully at the mercy of whatever the vendor so graciously offers you.
[1] https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...
I have returned half eaten cake that I did not like the taste to Costco and didn’t have to face a weird looking employee. No law and regulation necessary just capitalism.
In any case, the overall retail experience is much better on west side of the Atlantic and prices are generally better too, without the need of too many "customer protection laws" so I don't think a good case is to be made to copy from a failed continent.
Think about it, for example the TV sector: All companies colluded to reduce the selection of TVs to "Smart" TVs only. I can't just go and buy from a competitor, because it simply does not exist!
Which is why (currently) Vizio is my doge because it just turns on with ARC and shuts off when the Apple TV does so I don’t even know it’s smart.
The stupid Samsung (praise be to the toddler, destroyer of shit tech) wouldn’t even let you switch inputs without being connected to WiFi, or if it could I couldn’t figure it out.
You really think "Smart TV" is some collusion/conspiracy and not emergent from the market behavior? The most malicious theory I can come up with is that Smart TV makes more money for the manufacturers due to the ad opportunity, therefore they sell an inferior product to the consumer —in our minds— similar to bundling crapware in Windows laptops, but that still does not make it collusion or market distortion.
Under that theory, it just means dumb TV would have to be a comparatively more expensive product and I am willing to bet even the nerds who care about dumb TV will be buying the smart one, airgap it, and connect an Apple TV. Effectively no one would be paying even $50 more for dumb version of a TV.
In reality, I believe the average Joe & Jill actually strongly prefer Smart TV.
The reason is simple: the companies have a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money for shareholders as possible, and if it's marginally cheaper to shorten the warranty period (whithouth seeming out of touch with the rest of the market), the bulk will choose that. Whereas the aim of regulation is always to secure the interest of the consumer. I say "always", but there are exceptions in cases of regulatory capture, which admittedly is much of the US...
Consumer laws are always a benefit!
Such regulations make products more expensive.
I'm constantly offered warranties when I buy online. I don't want to be forced to buy them, as I don't need them.
Today, the price difference is negligible on most hardware (smaller than $50 on MSRP on an iPhone if you compare New York to Paris for example)
- Any regulation needs to be written, read, analyzed, made sure to comply with, defend in court, etc. which costs money.
- I might want to be very generous and voluntarily take back items from my legit customers because I find out it was good for business, but also have mechanisms in place to prevent abuse by a small minority of bad customers (restrict a subset of products, limits on the number of purchases you can return, etc). Once you codify it in law, it forces my hand in many ways, increasing prices making experience worse for my good customers.
- The regulation may change and the retailer may need to suddenly adapt to comply.
- It may not hurt those particular stores, but prevents cheaper competitors from emerging, which is a bad thing.
To show this whole thing is kind of stupid, where does "two years" come from? Some asshat in European parliament? Why not twenty years? Why not two months?
Maybe it's great in the US, I don't know, but it far from sucks in Europe. Amongst other things for returns policies you have a guaranteed 14 day return period for online orders even if there's no issues. Plus there's a minimum 2 years warranty, and a few years more if there's a reasonable expectation for the item in question to last longer. I'm not seeing the issue.
The person you’ve replied to has stated a concrete (what they perceive to be) benefit of consumer protection regulation. One that doesn’t seem to limit choice at all, but rather improves visibility.
I’m also inserting my own personal experience here. The country I live in, which isn’t in Europe, has similar regulation in place.
In response you’re throwing around some vague notion of “freedom” and vague implication of a “better experience” without really explaining how mandatory unit pricing is a bad thing for you as a consumer.
Has John Gruber got you all upset about the EU?
I’m currently booking a trip to the US and the consumer experience is absolutely terrible. Tax-exclusive “totals”? Resort fees? Give me a break.
It sounds like the US consumer experience is more aligned to your obvious libertarian ideology, and that’s the end of it.
Tax inclusive total means government can screw the business and the end user and hide behind the tax inclusive price tag. Jack up the tax it seems the business is doing it.
In NZ the price you see is the price you pay. The sales tax amount is always clearly stated on receipts, invoices, checkouts, online carts, etc. (by law) and the rate has changed twice in history, so everyone knows when it happens and who is responsible. Everything is explicit and nothing is or can be hidden (we don't do tipping either). In comparison when I visited the USA I never knew how much I would be paying for things, which felt fundamentally unfair and customer-opposed.
Seriously. I don't care if the total price consists of 100% tax or 0% tax. I care only what it is. I don't ask to know how much you pay the cleaners, how much it costs to operate the pool, how much corporate profit you're booking, or how much the CFO is embezzling. The amount of tax is equally useless to me. I care what it costs me.
Look at us poor Europeans with our metric-system money-math
Not if you are voting someone in a political office in the next election.
This is because employers have no interest in what your paycheck amount is. They care about "total compensation", which is what it costs the employer to employ you. Seattle added some "payroll taxes" and successfully sold the fiction that it was the businesses paying it. The businesses did indeed write the check, but it was the employee's money.
In the US, a lot of people think of tax day as a "good day" because they get a refund from the government! Psychologically it is very different if you steal the money before they even see it than take it from them once they have felt it under their tongue.
Plus, I think the OP is referring to money that is technically paid by the employer but effectively passed through to the employee, because that's what happens, not some item on their payslip.
I care about what effects the policies are having, not how much I pay in taxes. The impact of the policies is what actually matters. The tax rate is one tiny detail. I'm not wired to automatically assume collective action is evil, so I only care about it in the context of the effects of all policies combined.
I would very much blame the business for leaving out tax, concealing how much I'll need to pay to try to get me to overspend. Businesses claiming they don't want to be blamed for sales tax existing seems like misdirection from the real reason: it makes it look like you're spending less.
When a tax hike happens, businesses don't automatically have to increase prices they charge by the same amount: they can take a hit to their margin instead. So, the price they choose to charge is not "price + tax". It is "supply-and-demand price, of which we pay X to the state in taxes".
> they can take a hit to their margin instead
Not for long. Low margin businesses tend to go out of business. And if you can earn 5% buying bonds, why run a business that has an ROI of 4%?
Of course, if businesses actually set prices as cost + margin, then it does make sense to separate tax from the price, as the value "price before tax" is a meaningful part of the price setting algorithm.
And lowering your margin is not the same thing as running a low margin business. If your margin was 20% at a tax level of 10%, and taxes go to 15%, then reducing your margin to 18% doesn't make you a low margin business now. Regardless, if you believe in supply and demand as the sole mechanism for price setting, this is all moot: the state increasing taxes won't increase demand or reduce supply with the exact same level as the tax increase, so the price can't move the exact same as the tax increase in this model.
I'd also note that it's not strictly true that taxes are completely decoupled from supply & demand. States do compete on attracting businesses through lower taxation.
That's correct.
> So the tax level is irrelevant to the value of the market price, if you believe in supply & demand as the price setting mechanism.
Taxes raise the price, which reduces demand. If the prices don't rise, then the margins decrease, which reduces the incentive for the business owners to continue.
> doesn't make you a low margin business
It makes you a lower margin business. It reduces the margins on all the businesses, and the marginal (!) ones are no longer viable, and a new set of businesses become at the edge.
This was on top of renting me the flipchart for $107 for 6 hours.
> renting me the flipchart for $107 for 6 hours