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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

Going to play devils advocate here: San Francisco has a very high cost of living so is this any different than charging people different tax rates because of their income? Geolocation is a sloppy proxy for income, but statistically, a person in San Francisco makes a lot more money than a person in Kansas City.

(I don’t agree with the practice, but I am also opposed to progressive taxation as well.)

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Because it’s not taxes. If everyone were to charge you progressive rates for things you wouldn’t be rich, you’d just be the same as everyone else.

Isn't that something socialists would actually champion?

If done uniformly, sure, because the money would end up flowing to the government in the end. The problem is that it’s not done uniformly; it’s just making some booking site CEO richer.

San Francisco hospitality is on death's door. The SF Hilton Union Square owner (Park Hotels and Resorts) had to turn the note over to the bank and walk away from a $750 million loan due to they aren't able to make interest payments. They limped along during the pandemic due to there were funds to house certain people. Now that area there aren't that many visitors. For nearly all SF hotels the "revenue per available room" (RevPAR) is terrible. The commercial real estate vacancy is also high, about 34%. Before the pandemic, Hilton in an area like SF their business model was 80% business travelers. That obviously changed for the entire industry, but in SF the homeless right in front of hotels injecting/smoking hard drugs and defecating in public are a huge hospitality buzzkill. What customers remain have to absorb the increased costs.

The government isn't a for-profit enterprise so I'm not sure it's exactly equivalent (if the hotels were using the extra money for charity it might be more similar). But I guess I don't have a problem with student discounts at pizza places so I don't have a huge problem with price discrimination in general (other than that it might be applied unfairly).

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