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Comment by zaroth | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea, and the execution, but just one nit -- you say "no hidden fees", but I think bundling the fee into the total price is the definition of a hidden fee. If your examples itemized the fee it would be a different story. Other comments here express a similar anxiety, e.g. how much [extra] am I actually paying for this?

Also, I know you're busy, but FYI CA state law requires you have a Privacy Policy. I would like to know how long you retain records and who you are sharing them with before doing business with you!

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When you're using a concierge service is not the time to pinch pennies.

Corollary: When you're pinching pennies is not the time to use a concierge service.

The whole point of a concierge service, such as this, is to have someone on call to whom you may say "Here is my problem. Make it go away." Such services generally come at a much higher rate than Magic appear to be charging.

I think there's a fallacy here . . .

Is there, though?

Sure, it'd be preferable to have a full fee schedule available, for cases where it's needed. But, given that using a concierge service is perhaps the definitive case of spending money to conserve time; given also that this is a side project which has suddenly blown up in its creators' faces; and given finally that said creators appear to be working unbelievably hard to scale it up and out to meet the demand they've discovered -- given all that, I think it's pretty unreasonable to shit on the people who've made concierge service cheaper and more accessible than ever before because, in scrambling to meet unexpected demand, they have yet to get around to polish. Give them a month or two to get everything shaken out, and if they still haven't put up any fee information, then go after them. Until then, calm yourself; you are, after all, free not to use their service, if it fails to meet your requirements.

I hope their business model is to provide sane-cost concierge.

Well it's not hidden because they tell you up front, before the order is placed, how much it will cost. If they told you $20 and asked for $25 when they got there, that would be a hidden fee. Like AT&T saying you can get cable for $20/mo, but your cable bill always ends up being $32.88.

Getting someone to push back on ATT bill errors would be an amazing feature if Magic could make it work.

We're happy to call ATT on your behalf :) Try us out!

I would love to see a report on how this, or something like this went. That really would be a valued service. Whether the value is set high enough is a very good question. Transaction costs are very low so that provides more leeway.

The last time I had a problem with ATT I had to make multiple calls and spent over an hour in total on hold. How would you charge for that?

I'd have gladly paid for someone to take that pain away. There's probably a viable business model in there somewhere if someone can independently put a competent customer service layer in front of companies like ATT.

This would actually make a lot of sense if you could detect when a call came off hold. A small pool of operators could deal with calls as soon as the operator on the other end becomes available.

And if they're all busy, they could put ATT on hold. That I would love to do, even if they just immediately went on to the next call.

There's a service that will negotiate with them to reduce your bill. I remember reading about them last year, it's some Berkeley MBA who likes to practice negotiation, he might handle this too:

https://www.cabletipster.com/

This looked quite interesting and useful right up until it asked me if I /really/ wanted to close the page.

That's very poor negotiation in my books.

Do you have the authority/credentials to make customer service calls on my behalf? Like if I wanted a refund on my flight or wanted to reduce the cost of my ISP payments?

There's potentially high value add in exactly these tasks. Dealing with the workflow in large companies is something that takes a lot of mental energy, and a company that could produce a strong workflow to stay on top of it and drive it could be far more efficient at it than most of us. And it's something you'd be glad to pay for.

The fact that there is a fee is hidden though.

Charging more than you say is not a 'hidden fee' it is fraud. Hiding the fee in the total price is exactly a 'hidden fee'.

To this point, look at @exogen's extremely helpful demo of the service he posted. Can you tell how much the fee was? I was curious, so I actually went to Octo Sushi's site and tried to mock up a fake similar order, and I couldn't figure out if there even was a fee added on top of Octo's price or not.

The minimum order is 25$, not including tax, and I don't know if that includes the delivery charge. So the final Octo Sushi price has a minimum of around $27.50-30.00.

Although after thinking about it I disagree with your post, I had the same initial impression.

I think it is because the wording of the texts make it seem like they are quoting the price of the service you are requesting, but the quote actually includes their fee. There's nothing wrong with that, but for some reason I didn't realize it on first read -- maybe a small wording change can make this more clear.

I take "hidden fees" to mean asterisks. That is, offering something for $10 and adding 7% for tax, a $1 service charge, 10¢ convenience fee, 5¢ concierge vetting fee... you get the picture.

They could make everyone happy by switching "hidden" to "extra"

I think "extra" means wrong things though.

Perhaps it should be something along the lines of "final price exactly as quoted including tip, nothing more" the key being that they aren't one of those services (like so many others) that advertise one price and charge you another.

"no hidden fees" is a recognizable meme though, and being pedantically correct is perhaps – and this is a pedantic concern – not as valuable as the phycological grab of that phrase.

Well, they're showing Magic being used for a lot of delivery services where the deliverer will expect a tip, so it seems like there is a hidden fee in the same sense...

Unless they're working out something with the provider where the third party will not expect a tip, which would be a miracle.

Edit: I stand corrected. Someone quotes the site as having:

> It's completely free to chat with Magic. When you order something, we'll let you know the total price so you can confim it before you are billed. There are no hidden fees, and tip is included.

The price that they quote you is the only fee. It's up to you to decide if it is worth it.

> CA state law requires you have a Privacy Policy

Who does that apply to? Companies based in CA? Companies doing business with anyone in CA?

Both of course! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Privacy_Protection_Act

Interesting. I'm not sure I understand how California can make laws regulating companies in any part of the world.

They can't, but if you make CA mad and they decide to sue you, you'll be out much more than it would've cost to just copy and paste a boilerplate privacy policy. A great deal of legal mechanics work this way -- sure, someone can't technically make that kind of mandate, but since it costs a lot of money and time to have a court case where that kind of thing gets proven, you're better off just making sure no one even tries.

Pretty much any civil action is similar. Unless it's on a massive scale, ask a lawyer what you should do when someone appears intent on pushing a frivolous copyright suit on you. Sure, you have every right to use that content, but do you have the tens of thousands of dollars (minimum) and months or years in court to prove it? It's practically always easier to just accept that you've been bullied out of exercising your rights and replace the contested content with something that the claimant won't launch a frivolous suit over. Lawsuits are only worthwhile when the workaround is more expensive, which is often a hard standard to meet -- that's why most cases end in settlement.

Bad idea: Giving legal advice without a license.

Worse idea: giving incorrect legal advice without a license.

Jurisdiction is complex. With the Internet, you do not need to have a physical location somewhere to do business there.

Fortunately for us, no reasonable person would construe my generalities as "legal advice".

>With the Internet, you do not need to have a physical location somewhere to do business there.

Although this is true, the rule of thumb has generally been that sites are governed by the rules of the principality where their servers reside, because it's the only effective or practical way to determine jurisdiction in a worldwide network. (It's likely that most websites have something hosted in CA, by the way).

I agree that this issue can become complex, but it's really only a side note to the intent of the post, which is that under our current legal structure, people are regularly bullied by plaintiffs that make exercising legal rights and obtaining justice much more costly than just complying with their original demands. The privacy policy thing is just one example of this.

It would be more worthwhile if you pinpointed what exactly the poster said that's incorrect. At least one place in their post, they suggested consulting a lawyer, so I'm pretty sure no one's construing that post as Official Legal Advice.

I'm not a lawyer, so I could just be talking out of my ass, but it annoys me to read uninformative "you are not a lawyer" comments, as though people who are not lawyers are wholly unqualified to even informally discuss law on a message board. Of course it's true that anybody who takes serious business action on account of dubious message board advice is a fool, whether that's legal, medical, financial, tax, or otherwise.

The core problem is that practicing law without a license is illegal. That actually is a pretty low standard to accidentally break unless you read and re-read your posts to make sure every statement is non-specific enough. I am perfectly qualified to discuss law (I took several law classes in my life, several from a top-4 law school) but I don't do it, since a post like this takes an obscene amount of time relative to a normal post. The same is true of many qualified non-lawyers on the Internet, so most of the people who do comment are either sufficiently clueless about the law to not know they shouldn't, confident of anonymity, Ina different jurisdiction, or similar.

In this case, there are many issues (indeed, most of what idiot wrote is not correct), but to give one: op is taking money from people in different states, placing orders with delivery services there, etc. Contrast that with idiot's statement about no jurisdiction and frivolous lawsuits.

There is fairly length set of rules and case law governing all of this. The short version is that if your company is engaged in business with Californians, there's a decent chance that California law applies to you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_contacts

This isn't entirely unique to California by the way (although California is notable for reaching further than other U.S. states). For instance, there's a famous case (or series of cases) concerning the application of French law to Yahoo with respect to activity taking place on U.S. servers but accessible to French users. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LICRA_v._Yahoo!

On a practical level, if you're worried about California law, you should consider if you have any people or resources located in California. Or in the U.S. generally. Or if you plan to expand to California at some point. It's one thing to break California law. It's another to have any assets that California can go after.

Doesn't stop them trying.

When you pay at the restaurant you don't know about the extra of putting it together, and so I don't think they're morally obligated, but it's certainly controversial and something to think about.

A magician never reveals their secrets...1st rule of magic.

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