Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

In the states, the more I deal with cellular companies and airlines, the more I hate them.

It's not just me: it's a common opinion. One prominent business magazine had a cover a few years back titled something like "The companies we all hate"

Consumers like to purchase things in atomic units and simple terms. If I go to the grocery store, there's a bushel of apples. The sign says "Granny Smith apples: $1"

I can confidently pick up an apple, walk to the register, and expect to pay a dollar. The grocery store can advertise their wares and prices in the paper or online and I can plan on going to the store and making the same exchange. People like being able to predict how much of one thing they have to trade for an amount of something else. When lots of competitors do this in a market that anybody can participate in, it's good for everybody.

But when I buy an airline ticket? The rules are many times so byzantine that entire cottage industries have sprung up in an effort to capitalize on them. How much does it cost to fly coast-to-coast? Beats the heck out of me. There is no answer. Could I pick up a job where I had to fly ten times from point A to point B with a few day's notice and be able to include travel costs in the price? No, not unless I were to charge up to 17 times the cheapest rate.

Complex pricing systems may be great for the airline, but they're damaging to the free and open market. Instead of using rapidly-changing yield management systems, we'd all be better off if they just used an cross-carrier auction with transferable tickets. Let downstream providers handle liquidity.

I doubt this will happen, and instead there will be more penny-pinching, crazy rates, and unhappy customers.

This doesn't take away from your point at all, but I just wanted to point out that:

> I can confidently pick up an apple, walk to the register, and expect to pay a dollar.

This is true in most of the world, but not in the US, where you don't know what you're paying until you reach the checkout counter.

Well, you can weigh the apple yourself on the scales that occur all throughout the produce section... but yeah, I'd be surprised to see a flat rate for fruit by species no matter the size.

Fruit is sold by weight, not count, in China too.

That wasn't their point.

In most of the world if a product's price tag says X then you pay exactly X at the register (e.g. £2 sandwich costs exactly £2 in cash, you hand then exactly £2 and leave).

In the US that is not the case. Almost everything has a "hidden fee." You go buy a $2 sandwich but pay $2 + 6% ($2.12), if you get food in a restaurant you pay $price + 15-20%, an advertised $30/month cell phone plan is actually $45 after "taxes and fees," and so on...

Within Europe/EU in particular these types of hidden fees are actively combatted. Just within the last few years a few airlines (e.g. Easyjet) got into trouble for charging both a credit card or debit card fee (approx. £3-5) which wasn't reasonably avoidable and wasn't mentioned in their adverts.

The US in general is rather consumer hostile on the grounds of "business freedom."

Try to buy an apple in California and see whether the sales tax was included in the price ;)

I have a two-part theory as to the advertising of prices exclusive of sales tax (which, again, doesn't apply to the apple example, for those HN readers who live in Silicon Valley); it goes like this:

1. Companies that sell products out of more than one store would like to use the same advertising everywhere, instead of making one ad per sales tax region they're present in.

2. This causes everyone to have to advertise prices the same way.

Actually, now I'm curious what the tax scheme was when you ordered something out of the Sears catalog.

Most of your examples have something going for them, but this one

> an advertised $30/month cell phone plan is actually $45 after "taxes and fees,"

is something I've never heard of. All of my US cell phone plans advertised the exact price they charged.

> is something I've never heard of. All of my US cell phone plans advertised the exact price they charged.

Like hell they are. Here's a 1:1 copy/paste from a recent AT&T bill (only modified for formatting, and <Local> for privacy reasons):

      Surcharges & Fees
      Administrative Fee	$0.61
      Computer Aided Dispatch Surcharge	$0.06
      Federal Universal Service Charge	$0.82
      Municipal License Surcharge	$0.59
      Regulatory Cost Recovery Charge	$0.66
      Relay Service Device Fund Surcharge	$0.02
      <Local> Universal Service	$0.10
      Total Surcharges & Fees	$2.86

And:

      Government Fees & Taxes
      City District Sales Tax - Telecom	$0.08
      City Sales Tax - Telecom	$0.18
      County Sales Tax - Telecom	$0.05
      Local Wireless 911 Surcharge	$0.61
      <Local> State Sales Tax - Telecom	$0.81
      Unified Statewide 911 Charge	$0.09
      Total Government Fees & Taxes	$1.82

These are charged on top of their headline rates. Some of these are federal fees so aren't likely avoidable no matter where you happen to live.

Prepaid plans across all US carriers generally have all taxes and fees included in the advertised price, except for standard sales tax (if your state/locality normally charges it).

You don't have to be charged like that if you don't want to. That's not a problem with the US, it's a problem with your phone service.

It's far from "a hidden fee." You simply have to know the rules.

In some states, there is sales tax. In others, none. Sales tax may or may not be applied to clothing depending on state. Sales tax may or may not be applied to food, or only some kinds of food (e.g., alcohol always taxed), or only to food above a certain threshold.

All in all there's nothing hidden about sales tax. It shouldn't be a surprise that people are expected to know how the sales tax system in their state works when they are interacting with it every day.

Your attempted defense of the US system is ineffective because it applies to all hidden fees. Any company ever that uses trickery to load additional fees on you could say, "well, you simply have to know the rules."

Is it in the price tag? No. Therefore hidden.

There's nothing else to say on that topic. I won't further debate what is or is not a "hidden fee." That's my definition, if it isn't in the headline price and is unavoidable then it is a hidden fee.

>> It's far from "a hidden fee." You simply have to know the rules. Sure. And the same could be said for airline pricing. You could 'know the rules' and look up fare buckets, availability and pricing on services like expertflyer or kvs.

> It's far from "a hidden fee." You simply have to know the rules

But that's the same thing! If people don't know or understand the rules, the fee is hidden to them. You could say that people have should educate themselves, and my reply would be that there's infinite amount of complexity that could be added to the pricing if needed: "Oh, on cloudy Wednesdays, when Jupiter shines and the Yen is down.. it's 2$ extra"

There's also "taxes" inside malls, counties, and cities. And various vendors take different approaches to how they collect. In SF, I've seen surcharges for some "restaurant employement" thing, and have noted different rates at different restaurants.

Not that I disagree with you, but at least in the produce case, the real price is only a small percentage more than the price on the tag. On the other hand, airplane tickets fluctuate wildly in price and if you don't know the rules you could end up paying more than twice what you need to.

I hope that was their point, because if "it's too hard to calculate tax yourself" was the point, it's a bad point, especially in the modern era of smartphones.

I'm pretty sure that "it's too hard to calculate the tax yourself" was exactly the point...

It's less about being hard to calculate and more about being annoyingly unnecessary.

A basket of 10 random goods in a grocery store may have wildly different taxes applicable to them.. there are sales taxes, sin taxes (on tobacco, alcohol, etc), and others. These aren't listed on the price tag, so are essentially hidden.

Here in Fiji, I walk into a grocery store with $100 and can arrive at the checkout counter knowing I have $98 worth of goods and can expect $2 change for my bus fare home. I don't even have to know how to multiply numbers to figure this out... simple addition gets me there.

I agree that it's annoying and unnecessary and I won't defend it, but that's rather different from "you don't know what you're paying." You only don't know what you're paying if you don't want to figure it out. All the necessary information is available.

Surprisingly, in Denmark it is quite common to sell fruit like this.

If you want to pick nits, some fruits and vegetables - like melons, pomegranate, pineapples, artichokes - are often sold by the head, not just by weight.

That varies from store to store. I know the fruit stand off Hwy 1 near Moss Landing usually has 7 (small) artichokes for a dollar and similar.

If the airlines adopted a simple, predictable pricing scheme, you likely wouldn't be able to afford it.

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