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Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS | Hacker News Reader

> Besides the five-year price guarantee, there's at least one more notable pricing detail. T-Mobile's previous plans had "taxes and fees included," meaning the advertised price was inclusive of taxes and fees. With the new Experience plans, taxes and fees will be in addition to the advertised price.

One of my least favorite things about the States is how this continues to be legal. Hiding the true cost of a product from consumers is anti capitalist and violates free market principles. And no, this isn’t “too difficult” to achieve. Basically every other developed nation roll taxes into the listed price and businesses still manage to operate in those nations.

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Same, but it's just the culture. Not enough people in the US complains if "the actual price" ends up being 10% higher than "the price."

A $20 burger actually costs $30 at a restaurant.

Last week I was at a car dealer and they had a car priced at $24.7k which they insisted they could never sell for less than $28k.

I'll never understand why we can't all agree to just make the price the price.

> I'll never understand why we can't all agree to just make the price the price.

Not sure if you're being rhetorical or not, but the reason is very simple: Sellers want it this way because it makes their job (selling you stuff) easier. The sellers are the ones in charge of the laws about selling (there are a few scattered consumer lobbying organizations but they are nothing compared to industry lobbyists in basically every industry). As a result, the preferences of consumers do not matter, at least on the margin.

Mostly rhetorical. I do believe that if a super-majority of consumers revolted, sellers would be forced to make changes. Tipping is a good example of where social norms are playing a big role along with the law.

Sales tax I generally defend because it's not going to the business, it goes straight to the government. Removing it leads to cases where Europeans complain that the price of x is higher for them, forgetting their price includes a 20% VAT from their government. I think it's good to keep every citizen (obviously a large number do understand VAT, but it's not all) be reminded of what they're paying their government for.

But I recently was buying a vehicle and the otd price was 20% more than the price on their site, before sales tax/license fees. That practice is obviously anti-consumer.

We don't forget the price includes a 20% VAT.

We're just annoyed that you pay more than what's advertised. If you're used to truthful labels, that feels insane. And intentionally deceptive.

So if you want to separate them out, put them both on there then. In fine print right above the total of them both added together. Even more price transparency

IME that is certainly the norm in many European countries. Where I'm from the labels usually say the full price and then the tax rate next to it, e.g. "120 EUR incl. 20% VAT" meaning the actual product is 100 EUR and the 20% VAT is already included in the 120 EUR price

The most (supposed) consumer friendly state in the US couldn’t even enforce advertising final prices before taxes, much less after taxes.

California went as far as passing legislation requiring businesses to advertise total pre tax price, and then worked overtime at the last minute to exempt restaurants. Such an embarrassment.

Apparently it’s “too complicated” is what I hear over and over which is obviously bs.

They’re just insulting themselves then, because they’re saying by proxy that they are dumber than the whole rest of the world who somehow managed to figure this out and operates on that system

Marriott has a check box on their site to add taxes and fees. Of course it defaults off. Presumably because all other hotel sites quote ex-tax rates.

Same with airlines - it's recently become even more obnoxious for price comparison (in Canada) since base economy fares no longer include any (checked or carry-on) baggage allowance, and baggage cost is non-transparent - you basically have to go through an airline's website checkout process to figure it out.

To be fair to Marriott, it would put them at a huge disadvantage in aggregation sites where their price (including fees) would be compared with companies that are lying about their price (fees come at checkout).

This is why we need regulation. It’s really hard to be honest when everyone else is lying.

This is what happened with airfare in the States. The reason the government changed the rules recently to force airlines to include the fees for bags is because Southwest, who didn’t charge for bags at the time, operated at a major disadvantage because their prices were displayed alongside other airlines who had these hidden fees tacked on. If you ever wondered why you were not able to find Southwest’s flights on aggregators like Google flights until recently, that is why. Until that regulation went into play southwest prevented their engine to be used in aggregators for this exact reason.

Noticed yesterday Verizon is offering a price lock also. I feel like this is just a rebranding of a way to punish you for switching companies but maybe I’m wrong? Either way, each state has different taxes and fees and sometimes even cities, burrows do too. I don’t think there is a way that could easily be fully transparent. Not defending their actions because I can’t stand all these companies who get big enough to, to your point, become overtly anti capitalist.

Many more humans live in buroughs than burrows.

Some even in boroughs.

Oof; another victim of Muphry's Law*; I even spent time to check "is it one or two r's?", then I looked up the spelling, and I still clowned it.

* - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law

Since they don't control taxes and at least some fees, it makes sense to me to exclude them from their price guarantee.

But to expect a company advertising something like a "price lock" didn't build in escape clauses for themselves is just being naive.

Mint has had flat rates from day one. T-Mobile wholly owns them now and doesn't seem to have a problem with that payment structure.

American telecom companies have been caught making up fees that don't correspond to any government-imposed tax. Sometimes they do control that portion of the bill.

Which is why I said "some" fees.

But they didn't include "some" fees in the price lock did they?

The whole "price lock" concept is a blatant marketing ploy in the first place. As always, "buyer beware" and read the fine print. "Certain exclusions may apply."

https://youtu.be/AtK_YsVInw8

> As always, "buyer beware" and read the fine print.

And what some of us consumers are saying is enough of this bullshit. Corporations should not be able to promise something, and then walk back the entirety of the promise in the fine print. If you want to advertise it, then it had better be true.

Fees they do in fact control, otherwise they would be "taxes." Taxes are costs imposed by government, or legislation at any level. Cellular networks like to comingle the two so that they can hide "fees" they impose by wording them like taxes/confuse consumers.

For example: "Regulatory Recovery/Cost Recovery Fee," "Administrative Fee," "Network Access Fee," "Telecom Relay Service Surcharge," and "Local Number Portability" aren't taxes, but they look like taxes due to the misleading verbiage. These all go straight to the networks and in their books don't offset anything specific. These are your classic "what we can get away with fee."

This comingling of network fees and government taxes, and then wording fees like taxes, has worked incredibly well to the point that people online will defend them. Maybe TicketMaster should take note.

Governments do the same thing, they call something a "fee" instead of a "tax". Go try to get a building permit. There will be a "fee" imposed, which is a tax, but they don't call it that.

Except those fees are paid to the government. Stuff like "Regulatory Recovery/Cost Recovery Fee" is you paying for their costs of compliance, stuff that should just be part of the price since it's their expense.

It depends. I argued on the phone with Verizon for a long time (over an hour, going up and up the chain) about why a certain “Recovery Fee” was not in their per-line costs.

The answer (eventually) was that they do indeed pay the fee to government, but it varies with usage in a complex, government-defined formula in a bill from the 90s.

It doesn't matter what a Verizon customer service representative said. Recovery Fees are not a tax and are not paid to the government. There is no justifiable reasons why they're broken out into a separate line item except to hide the total cost of service.

By that logic, why stop there? Why not have Gas Taxes, Vehicle Registration Fees, Payroll Taxes, Corporate Property Taxes, or Permitting Fees as separate line items in the cellular bill? Which may sound absurd, but that's identical logic to most of the existing non-tax fees.

Some of these fees are, indeed, paid to the government. That does not mean they are a tax, in the same sense that (as mentioned elsewhere) a building permit is not a tax, but is still required by, and paid to, the government.

I'm not trying to excuse Verizon for not including them in their overall pricing, but these two in particular:

- Fed Universal Service Charge

- Regulatory Charge

are both paid to the government, and variable based on usage.

Edit: I will also note that Verizon has a $3.50 per-line fixed line item called "Admin & Telco Recovery Charge" that is utter BS.

> Some of these fees are, indeed, paid to the government. That does not mean they are a tax

It actually means exactly that. A building permit is also a tax. If it is paid to the government (any government of any level) by force of law it is a tax; calling taxes "fees" doesn't make them any more not taxes.

If they said all "taxes and other government fees" that would be better, I suppose. But they don't say that, and their current fees aren't all government originating, ultimately making this price lock completely meaningless.

I hear the tax argument all the time but it doesn't make any sense to me. Taxes don't change daily. The retailer knows the final price and they can accordingly show that price to customers. In Texas the sales tax is 8.25% and it has stayed that way for years. Our receipts at any retailer will show only the sales tax as an additional charge. In comparison, the actual prices of goods and services have changed (increased mostly) way more frequently, particularly in 2021-2024 period. So the argument here is that the seller has no problem changing the price labels when they want to increase the prices but somehow printing the labels with taxes which take years to change is a burden.

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