You're getting lots of replies from (I presume) Americans, who are used to much scammier business behavior than what I know from Germany and you describe in Australia. One related example is the pervasive practice in America of displaying a price without fees (like "resort fees" for hotels that can be +50%) and of course taxes, with the actual price only becoming apparent after additional effort is invested in the checkout process.

True, my views are non-American. For example when I go to a convenience store, I pay the price listed on the item. I don't have to do math in my head that's +x% sales or state tax. That type of practice just isn't acceptable anywhere else.

It's even enshrined into law in some states and locales. A few businesses have tried to market themselves as "no-nonsense, no-bullshit" and put the right prices on things, but that's totally illegal in parts of the US.

It's illegal to put on the price the customer is actually going to pay? My search attempt failed ("illegal to put price with VAT" neither g nor ddg liked it), please tell me more!

In fact, there was a wine store in New York City that tried to post the real prices and had some legal issues, so they would post _both_ the "price before tax" and the actual price (in some format that allowed them to evade the laws, so stupid).

I now live in the Netherlands. All prices are what you pay, _and_ the receipt breaks down how much of that goes to taxes, which I think is completely logical.

> I now live in the Netherlands.

In the EU it's illegal to show prices ex VAT (or other components that might make up the final selling price) to non-business/commercial consumers.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/1998/6/oj

I think, showing the taxes separately is a very good idea in principle, so that you know how much tax you are paying. I usually hate the fact that I can not see how much tax I am paying, although, in Germany, the amount of tax is shown in the checkout pages.

The question is, does the tax matter so much it's worth putting it on every price sticker? I'd argue no - it's not like you can opt to not pay it. I assume your sales tax works like ours (Poland), i.e. per product/service category, so it's also not like you can buy a substitute product with lower tax.

I like the solution we have - price stickers have full price, and printed receipts carry tax breakdown.

Bizarre though it may sound, some politicians in America are in favour of badly designed tax systems, for anti-tax reasons.

By making tax as difficult as possible, they recruit supporters for their anti-tax stance, and they can claim they're delivering on their anti-tax policy by 'making the system collapse under its own weight' or 'making everyone aware of how much tax they're paying' and they can allow loopholes and fraud opportunities and they can collect donations from tax preparation companies.

It's the same here in Germany as well, was also the same in Greece and Turkey. I guess the whole Europe is like this, if not everywhere except the US :)

> The question is, does the tax matter so much it's worth putting it on every price sticker

Especially considering the fact that usually there are 2-3 rates tops, so one can easily remember that 5-10-20% of what they pay goes to the country coffers depending on the product being bought.

I can think of at least one reason where tax calculated on the final total vs each price is better (for the consumer), rounding. With tax calculated on the final total, you pay at most $0.01 extra in rounding “errors”. However with tax calculated on each price you pay at most number of items times $0.01, which is more and could add up over time. I personally want to give the gov as little of my money as possible.

That depends on whether they're rounding, or taking a floor or ceiling :). With proper rounding, it's a wash. I just did some back-of-the-dev-console calculations on a random groceries receipt I found on my desk, and I discovered that if the tax was calculated per item, I'd pay 0.01PLN less of it!

Regardless of the rounding method, the fair way is to sum up purchases and compute tax on the total, precisely to minimize the loss of precision on rounding.

Curiously, as far as I understand the Polish tax code (IANAL), the choice of the method to use is actually given to the vendor! The law recommends[0] that you calculate the tax by multiplying the rate with the total taxable amount, but also allows[1] the seller to choose to calculate per-item tax, and sum that. In both cases, mathematical rounding (half-up) is used[2].

But in practice, there's little to no difference unless you're doing a single purchase of a lot of items with weird pricing bias.

--

[0] - Dz.U.2020.0.106 t.j. - Ustawa z dnia 11 marca 2004 r. o podatku od towarów i usług, art. 106e., ust. 7.

[1] - ibid., ust. 10.

[2] - ibid., ust. 11.

> That depends on whether they're rounding, or taking a floor or ceiling :). With proper rounding, it's a wash.

Agreed! If they are actually rounding it will be a statistical wash.

> Regardless of the rounding method, the fair way is to sum up purchases and compute tax on the total, precisely to minimize the loss of precision on rounding.

Again, agreed, this is why we do it this way in the US.

> Curiously, as far as I understand the Polish tax code (IANAL), the choice of the method to use is actually given to the vendor! The law recommends[0] that you calculate the tax by multiplying the rate with the total taxable amount, but also allows[1] the seller to choose to calculate per-item tax, and sum that. In both cases, mathematical rounding (half-up) is used[2].

US tax code, at least as far as income taxes go, uses the same rounding method (nearest decimal) however sales tax is can be quite a bit more complicated [1].

Also somewhat related, we quote our fuel prices to 3 decimals.

[1] - https://blog.taxjar.com/rounding-issues-sales-tax-returns/

This assumes VAT is always rounded up, which is not the case in e.g. Germany where it is rounded to the nearest cent - so the average rounding error cancels out to 0.

Note i said generic tax, not VAT. And I’m specifically talking about the US

There are a few details with that:

Does the sticker have to show all taxes or just the sales tax/GST/VAT? I know that pretty much every country in the world has an alcohol tax that is applied to things like wine. So should the sticker also include that?

In the USA they have a particular hatred of making tax easier to pay. There's a political affiliation whose goal is to make filing a tax return harder and more complicated to do so that people will complain more about it and hate the process. So that has created the tax return filing industry and associated lobby groups. So having sales tax need to be applied on top fits within this world view.

But yes I completely agree that the sticker price should include what you actually end up paying for that item. I also like it in some countries where there's a unit or weight cost with the item, so you can more easily compare different branded products. Though they usually make this number comically small on the price tag to make it harder to compare.

> In the USA they have a particular hatred of making tax easier to pay. There's a political affiliation whose goal is to make filing a tax return harder and more complicated to do so that people will complain more about it and hate the process. So that has created the tax return filing industry and associated lobby groups. So having sales tax need to be applied on top fits within this world view.

Which political affiliation and what gives you this idea?

There's been a few articles here on HN relating to free filing and automatic returns and how the tax filing industry is fighting it.

One name that popped up after a quick search inside a long article was Grover Norquist. From his Wikipedia entry he is part of a political association which wants to prevent any rise in taxes. From another article I read long ago it was mentioned that this includes preventing automatic filing since the government could introduce new taxes without people knowing.

Ah so it's not actually this:

> In the USA they have a particular hatred of making tax easier to pay. There's a political affiliation whose goal is to make filing a tax return harder and more complicated to do so that people will complain more about it and hate the process. So that has created the tax return filing industry and associated lobby groups. So having sales tax need to be applied on top fits within this world view.

It's actually this:

> since the government could introduce new taxes without people knowing

Along with increasing gov size, increasing gov expense, and destroying another industry.

I'm all for increased competition in tax filing software, and you're starting to see open source competition here as well. But spreading opinion as fact, and in this case in particularly, is called "misinformation" or "fake news"

It's an opinion I have based on outside observation of the political culture surrounding tax in the USA.

There are groups of people (political association) and vested interests (lobbyists) who want to make tax harder to pay than it needs to be so they can profit from it, either politically or financially.

In addition you need to manually calculate the sales tax for every different county in the USA on top of the sticker price. It has been suggested that this is enshrined in law and/or done by the stores themselves, but the net effect is that this sales tax is at the forefront of people's minds when going shopping.

Nearly all other countries have tax systems where the VAT/GST/Sales tax is already included in the sticker price, so you don't need to know which country has how much sales tax and manually add it on. Additionally lots of other countries have income tax systems where the authority already has all your information and can easily provide you a pre-filled tax return.

Given that the USA does not do these things and people actively block them, then my opinion is that the country as a whole has a hatred of making tax easier to pay. Most people may not want that, but they are either unwilling or unable to change it.

> There are groups of people (political association) and vested interests (lobbyists) who want to make tax harder to pay than it needs to be so they can profit from it, either politically or financially.

NOPE! That's the misinformation. They don't want to make it harder to tax, they want to make it harder for the gov to add taxes. That's it.

> In addition you need to manually calculate the sales tax for every different county in the USA on top of the sticker price. It has been suggested that this is enshrined in law and/or done by the stores themselves, but the net effect is that this sales tax is at the forefront of people's minds when going shopping.

It is enshrined in law in some states, not all. And again the reasoning is so that tax cannot be hidden. Not to make it more difficult.

> Nearly all other countries have tax systems where the VAT/GST/Sales tax is already included in the sticker price, so you don't need to know which country has how much sales tax and manually add it on. Additionally lots of other countries have income tax systems where the authority already has all your information and can easily provide you a pre-filled tax return.

I'll need some evidence of this, as this is not my experience having traveled to many different countries. Some do, not most.

> Given that the USA does not do these things and people actively block them, then my opinion is that the country as a whole has a hatred of making tax easier to pay. Most people may not want that, but they are either unwilling or unable to change it.

Again NOPE. It's a hatred of ever increasing taxes. The gov must prove it needs the money, not just have their hands in our checkbooks whenever they're dry.

So ultimately you have a different view on taxation, and that's fine. What's not fine is lying about why the other side is doing it. This is where that divide is coming from.

The end result of these things is that it makes it harder to account for and pay taxes. More of a cognitive burden on everyone for no real gain.

Same way it is here in india too

In the US it's called sales tax, not VAT, that may be why you're not getting results

In the US, sales tax rates vary by state, county and even city. Some states have no sales tax. It would be impossible to advertise a price for a product when it would be so many different numbers depending on where you are. For example, if a big grocery store chain wants to advertise the price of a 6-pack of Coke, do they list 20 different prices or do they eat the difference in taxes and make the end price the same?

Not saying that this will work in US, but India is also like US, federation of states, with federal tax, state tax, city tax all over the spectrum over the length & breadth of country. All advertisements of car, butter, biscuits, house, anything which can be priced over TV/Media advertises its MRP (maximum Retail Price), which is also printed on product itself too. Retailer use stickers on shelf or on product itself to tell what is the actual price, which by law should not be more that its MRP. The taxes along the route, physically & supplier/trader wise affects the price, but it is illegal for anybody retailer to sell anything more that its printed MRP.

Yes, same packet of potato chips costs R20 at capital R25 at hill stations (but its MRP shows R25).

Forcing after-tax price displays make tax revisions harder to notice so there are pros and cons to that

Aren't tax revisions in the local news?

Where I live (Poland), prices on shelves are displayed in full (more than that, there's the price you'll pay for an item and price per unit of mass/volume, to enable comparisons), but on the receipt, there's always a per-product sales tax summary printed. So if I cared about sales tax revisions, I could easily notice it on the receipt. But most of the time, I just learn about revisions from a news article.

Also not everyone pays the sales tax so it's probably easier to show price without tax and then on checkout you apply the needed tax rate.

Surely most people pay the sales tax, in which case you're optimising for the less common scenario.

In places where including VAT/GST/BTW/whatever is normal, shops (usually targetting resellers or contractors etc) where a significant amount of people don't have to pay the tax, I think generally both prices are listed and it's required to be very clear about what's going on.

That sounds like regulation - except anti-consumer one.

Funny. I find this to be something I appreciate and look out for when buying things or services in Germany, even if it's more expensive.

> I don't have to do math in my head that's +x% sales or state tax. That type of practice just isn't acceptable anywhere else.

Oblig: sales/retail taxes in the US vary city-by-city. While just like the rest of the world: US companies put their MSRP on products - but it would be unfair to expect retailers to charge the MSRP and eat the tax themselves because some areas have zero sales tax but others have a 10% tax. That's bigger than the profit-margin on many items sold at retail - and the simplest solution is just to have everything understand that the price on a box is the pre-local-tax price. And everyone (most people? or just most people on HN...) know roughly what their local sales tax rates are anyway (mine's around 9%) and as everyone pays by card having exact change isn't an issue.

I’ve lived in the UK and Germany and it’s incredibly rare that I’ve seen prices printed on the goods themselves. There’s a label on the shelf with the price. Even when there is a price on the box (usually much smaller stores - never supermarkets), the label on the shelf is often a different price.

To complement, in the EU, if you have two prices, one on the shelf and one on the box, the cheapest one is the right one. The only goods where prices are printed on the "box" are not in boxes, they are books or clothes.

When items get individual prices, they are usually small sticker prices and effectively only in small shops or discount prices in bigger stores.

It's not entirely that simple - if there's a store branded price on the shelf or a sticker, that takes precedence over any MSRP printed on the product itself by the manufacturer. Otherwise people could just rip off store branded stickers and opt out of the store's markup.

Maybe it's just not become an issue since the MSRP on most product packaging here is in £ or $ as they just reuse the UK or sometimes US packaging so it's clear that price is not aimed at Irish consumers.

The seller decides on the price, and labels the goods accordingly. Whatever "recommended retail price" may be printed on the box is of course covered with a sticker with the actual price.

It's about consumer protection. Buyers must know exactly how much they will need to pay to purchase an item BEFORE they pay. It would be unfair to expect consumers to calculate these things.

In Europe and the UK that won't fly. If it came with a price printed on the box, that's the price they should sell it at.

Not a lawyer not legal advice.

Not correct. The price on the 'Box' is the invitation to treat [0]. The price you pay in the UK is the verbal Offer at the checkout. They may/should sell it a the RRP, but it is not correct in law.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat

Or less, as the store is allowed to discount (officially the reverse: the manufacturer is not allowed to set prices of anyone except themselves, so if a store takes almost no margin or even sells below price, the manufacturers is forbidden to even talk about it.

> but it would be unfair to expect retailers to charge the MSRP and eat the tax themselves because some areas have zero sales tax but others have a 10% tax.

I disagree. If you want to sell something to a market then you should tailor your product to that market. That means doing some basic research about what the local taxes and laws are.

If you travel even 10 miles (16 km), sales tax changes. It is at the county level. The manufacturer cannot afford to analyze this level of granular market and the associated sales tax.

Ideally, the seller should list the price + tax if it is physically sold in a store. This should be fixed (along with the tips culture in US).

Online retailers still have this problem. Sales tax is literally based on the zip code you enter during the checkout page.

So how can this problem be solved? The only solution I see is a federally controlled fixed sales tax similar to EU. But, that would be unconstitutional in US. States hold the power and additional municipal taxes are at the county level.

I think you're trivializing the matter. I've had several conversations with Europeans about it and we eventually come to an understanding that its not easy. On surface, it sounds simple if we assume is a simple nation-wide VAT tax.

Its because your argument fundamentally does not hold water. "It would be too hard for manufacturers..." just is not true. You are trying to tell us that the only way to price something is printed on the original box (not even the product! just the box) and that it would be too onerous to expect them to price at each location accordingly. Are you really trying to insist that a sticker is too hard? Too onerous a task?

Perhaps you're mistaking seller vs manufacturer?

If the former, I already said:

> Ideally, the seller should list the price + tax if it is physically sold in a store. This should be fixed (along with the tips culture in US).

You could pay consumer tax not by the place you live in but by the place where business is located. Any additional taxes could be added by independent institution. Something like customs, just on local scale.

Living in couple of countries In EU and Asia, I can't imagine not knowing total price up front. It's pushing legislation problems on the end customer.

It creates a massive market force to drive down sales taxes. You could imagine that most companies would want to be established with lowest sales tax so as to increase their profit margins or to beat the competitive price of goods and services.

So, now, you have a new problem. Top counties with lowest sales tax in the US will massively attract more businesses forcing the rest of the counties to reduce their sales tax too.

The entire problem boils down to federal vs. local control. US is structured with a balance between local, state and federal powers.

I don't see the problem here.

I think you're being disingenuous. It's not on the manufacturer to make sure the product has the right price tag on it, but on the seller or shop. European shops put price labels on the shelves and their own tags on discounted or specialty goods.

The online retail problem is also trivially solved. If I got to the US version of any online shop as a EU resident I'm usually first greeted by a "which version do you want to browse" popup asking me if I really want the US version and not a different country. This affects the default language, currency and locale as well as pricing. There's no reason they couldn't ask for your zip code if they already have to do these calculations at checkout anyway.

The problem is that there's no reason US companies should do this because there's no competitive advantage in having transparent pricing. This would require legislation (probably at the federal level) but once there's regulations, you'd see these solutions pop up everywhere overnight.

It's funny to hear Americans lament about how it's hard to do business in the EU because of the many differences between countries and then turn around and use state or county differences as an excuse why it's "just too hard" to do what companies are doing in the EU. At this point I wonder if Californians are seeing the same "sorry, we can't figure out how to show you this website without harvesting your data" error pages on US news sites given how strict their new privacy laws are.

>Online retailers still have this problem. Sales tax is literally based on the zip code you enter during the checkout page.

Can't you ask the zip code before checkout, a popup like "If you want to see the real price enter the zip code now"

On the physical store don't you have in US prices printed on paper stickers? Are prices printed on the bottles and boxes and all stores will have the exact same prices? So if this is something you never seen in US let me explain how is done, some products have a recommended price printed on them but shops can put their own larger or smaller price. You will see also labels with full prices s tricked through and discounted prices printed under.

I also seen shops rotating the prices daily, like if they have 2 products A and B , you have prices like

Monday A: 10$, B:20$ Tu: A:11 , B:19 We: A:12 , B:18

so on, I am surprised that the US does not use this scummy price rotating tactics. The "scam" is that the shop will put an ad on radio and say "bananas only X$" , next day the ad will say "milk only Y$" , and each time you will hear the ad you think "this shop has cheap products, I should buy from there" but when you visit the banana will be cheap but in that day mil is expensive, 3 days later will be reversed.

Lots of other things also vary city-by-city, like rent and income or business taxes. Equal MSRPs impose an unfair burden on retailers in expensive places in pretty much the same way as local sales taxes. Businesses everywhere else manage these difficulties without cognitive burden for customers.

Having lived in the US this reasoning makes absolutely no sense. It's not like every store charges MSRP or that stores don't have sales. Every store pretty much has its own pricing and they have no problem showing this specific store's pricing without the added tax. It would be ridiculously simple to show that specific price with taxes added.

So you mean the seller doesn't know the final price before selling? They can't relabel products themselves or they can't mention the final price on the shelves? They just don't want to do it.

Also, let's be honest: a lot of replies from people who need to believe this is ethical because they want to reserve the right to use (or already use) this dark pattern in a product as a "growth hack". Or people who work for an employer who already uses dark patterns of this nature. Startups are rife with this kind of abuse.

Yeah, I've noticed that on HN with some scammy business practices, there is a definite case of "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." People would rather this is allowed and it becomes a game of buyer beware, because in many cases they are the sellers and know the average buyer will not beware.

This is a misconception of what is actually required by US state tax laws. The business is required to pay the tax on retail sales - they are not required to charge the consumer that tax. The fact that it has become common practice for retailers to pass the tax on to consumers to pay is the real issue at large. The same applies to regulatory fees that the consumer pays on utility bills or telecommunication services. The consumer isn't supposed to be paying those, the business is. One of the biggest complaints in current US tax law is that businesses don't pay their fair share. Taxpayers as consumers are directly responsible for that, by not demanding that businesses start eating these taxes that they are supposed to be paying, by putting pressure on politicians to make that the law. Yes, it would be difficult to enforce (business adding tax into product price), but not impossible, as businesses have to track COGS (cost of goods sold).

>Germany

What? ISP and similar contracts in Germany almody work exactly like this but with 2 years minimum not 1 and no cancelation in the last 3 months of the period.

This is precisely why it's unlikely any regulation will occur to stop this at the source. As long as American customers are happy to bend over to shady business practices by dominant American businesses, the rest of the world will keep experiencing the knock-on effects of this behaviour.

In your country if you get into a yearly contract to rent a place and then break the contract in 2 months. Are there any consequences for the person breaking the contract?

Absolutely. In Australia, the Critical Information Summary will detail the contract cancellation fee and the total minimnum cost (i.e. if you cancel it immediately after the cooling-off period) is explicitly stated right next to the cost that the company really wants to display.

So in the case of $1000/mo rent, and a 1 month cancellation fee, the minimum total cost will be displayed as $2000. If it is the total remainder of the contract, then it will be displayed as $12000.

It's not that there's no consequences, it's that the consumer is clearly and without the need to navigate dark patterns made visible of those consequences.

In the US, it is exactly the same. There are absolutely zero dark patterns on housing leases, it is highly controlled.

I am not sure if apartment lease is a good example.

As a counter example, here are some shady practices and dark patterns in Australia (Internet Service Provider): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haImi4cWau0

What I describe is specifically shown on mobile and internet plans.

Regarding your linked youtube video (which as far as I can tell from skimming, is basically ranting about how ISPs penny-pinch on backhaul capacity and then fail to meet their advertised plan speeds during peak hours), I would encourage you to look at something closer to the present than from 4 years ago. All ISPs now report on minimum speeds during defined peak hours. I believe this is mandated by the ACCC. See the following URL:

https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/12/nbn-typical-evening-speed...

A typical ISP plan choice page [1] lists the following information:

1) Monthly price (e.g. "$79/mo")

2) Minimum total cost of the contract (e.g. "$158 if cancelled within the first month")

3) Typical evening speed (e.g. "48 Mbit between 7pm and 11pm" on a 50Mbit plan), which will change depending on which address you enter and thus which technology option you get (namely, if you are on FTTN you will see lower typical speeds reported than a FTTH address, especially for higher speed plans)

This was introduced specifically in response to this issue, where peak-hours congestion was a common complaint amongst consumers.

ISPs are also increasingly publishing their CVC graphs for each point of interconnect. This lets you see a historical utilisation of the network.

[1]: https://www.telstra.com.au/internet/nbn as an example

In the U.K. we actually have had these kinds of cases go to court and as a result those charges have to be presented clearly before the user has signed the contract. Some places even make you sign that specific clause to evidence that you’ve understood it. So there’s no chance of anyone engaging in a contract with termination charges without them understanding what those charges will be.

Of course, if there is no real reason to break the lease. E.g. if you're moving to a different city for work or starting to study.

Further, if something is advertised as XX Eur/mo it's implied it's a month-by-month thing. Situations you described are very very clearly marked as being a contract with a start and an end date as well as a total including any and all fees as well as cancelation terms. You can't hide essential terms deep within a several page legalese document.

The first word of the product name is "Annual". If someone proceeds to buy an "Annual" product with a lower price and doesn't bother to understand the meaning of why it's "Annual", I have no sympathy for that guy. I am on the same plan myself, it was very clear to me what they were trying to sell.

3 options, 1 yearly, 2nd yearly with monthly payment and third pure monthly. I did not have to read any long contracts to understand this.

If people don't do due diligence of 5 mins to find what is going on, it's on them..

This is what dark patterns rely on, why the hell would you be in support of companies taking advantage of people? Have you never had anything like this happen to you? Maybe you were tired or in a rush and a dark pattern ended up costing you money you didn't intend to spend? It's happened to me, and I'd dare day most people reading this.

I use this product and this plan. I knew what I was getting into when I bought it.

Scammy companies shouldn't be protected, but if people don't bother to do the most basic due diligence before buying products, it's on them - like forget reading a terms of service. He doesn't even read the product name or description. Gets into a yearly contract for a cheaper price and then complains about the cancellation fees.

At some point either people have to take personal responsibility or should have other adults buy things for them if they don't know what they are doing.

Why, though? What's the downside of allowing people not to be vigilant all the time? Presumably, all that businesses would lose out on is getting paid for not providing value to someone, which doesn't seem like it would stimulate a healthy market?

In this world there are people with less experience or understanding. There are people who have varying levels of cognitive or sensory ability. And there are people who are simply tricked by a company that does everything it legally can to fool them.

To suggest they either deserve to be tricked or shouldn’t be able to buy things themselves is revolting.

So you're in favour of people phone-scamming the elderly? They just need to take personal responsibility and do their due diligence, right? Or do you want to take away the ability to buy things of people you deem incompetent?

It is a basic necessity for beneficial trade to occur that the terms are made clear, not just technically available, to the people potentially wanting to undertake that trade, before anything legally binding occurs. The issue is not that there are cancellation fees, it's that they are not made clear.

The exaggerated, but still representative, example might be the Earth demolition plans in Hitchhiker's Guide, which were "available for 50 years in the local planning office in Alpha Centauri." Totally fair, right? Anyone could have just gone there and read them.

Demanding "personal responsibility" as a solution to avoid bad deals is the same as accepting that it's OK for some people to be scammed. No one is perfectly on guard all the time. If it is permissible for companies to engage in scammy behaviour, and scammy behaviour increases profits, then in order to be competitive, companies will engage in scammy behaviour. So it will be everywhere. Since, as noted, individual humans aren't perfect all the time, eventually someone will get scammed.

The obvious, morally superior, and more economically beneficial solution is simply to not allow scamming to be profitable. That, among other things, means ruling in favour of the consumer when companies perform shady practices.

Postscript: People with this kind of "libertarian" stance really annoy me. To give the benefit of the doubt, I'll assume that "personal responsibility" isn't just thinly veiled personal exceptionalist elitism. If that's the case, the only reason you can even have these beliefs is because you take so much about the modern world for granted. There is a lot going on in order to create an environment where mutually beneficial trade can happen.

In the absence of strict, neutral enforcement of fair trading rules, people scam the shit out of each other. It's way easier, and more profitable, than actually creating something of value that people want to buy. The total effect of this, if it were allowed to occur, is that it creates an environment of distrust and uncertainty, which means mutually beneficial trades that would otherwise happen won't happen, making everyone poorer. Advocating for "personal responsibility" as a solution to avoiding scummy business practices is directly advocating for this situation.

Historically, before commercial law was explicitly codified, the means of ensuring that merchants were trustworthy was essentially reputation. The way this scaled was with merchant groups, where the reputation of one member going bad affected them all, so they all had incentive to police each other (or alternatively, collude). Plus the fact that people in general were much less dependent on markets for necessary goods, the labour force being mainly agricultural. However, this made opportunity for trade highly exclusive, and largely only available to the privileged ("merchant class").

I guess my question for you is, do you want to have to read every single EULA, thoroughly scan the terms of every transaction every time you buy something, and otherwise do a lot of work and research any time you have to make some vaguely commercial agreement to avoid getting into an agreement you, in retrospect, didn't want? If not, I suggest you carefully re-examine your beliefs and what they imply.

A final remark. The economics of scamming are highly asymmetrical. If individuals have to do a lot of due diligence even for routine transactions, that is a massive cost to that individual. In contrast, organisations willing to partake in scummy behaviour can spend almost endless resources optimising their ability to ensnare customers, because once the process is developed, the marginal cost is very low if not zero. So individuals cannot be expected to "keep up" in this environment.

The exact same thing (monthly fee, 12 or 24 month contract) is very common in Germany for mobile phone and home internet plans.

The complaint here isn't that there is a contract; it's that the user is deceived by dark patterns into thinking they've entered a plan with no contract.

By contrast, going to tmobile.de or blau.de, even without speaking German it's extremely clear that prices are based on 24-month contracts. Never is the monthly price mentioned without a clear label below it indicating 24 month terms. Blau even takes it a step further and places the text twice in the box, once in the UI and another time directly below the price.

True but this would indeed be considered very unusual and surprising for software if it wasn't indicated explicitly.

I just checked and while they do only indicate "X €/month" on the product page, as soon as you enter the checkout process it says "yearly subscription, monthly payment - Y €/month" with the additional options "yearly subscription, advance payment - X €/year" and "monthly subscription - Z €/month". I'm not sure how they're getting away with the misleading prices on the product pages tho (usually there's at least an asterisk indicating this comes with additional conditions and obligations).

That's what I was thinking. If you want to get out of a contract early, you'll usually lose some money. That's true for rent, public transit passes, and many other types of subscription.

If there are no consequences for bailing out of a contract, it makes them rather pointless.

But then there's always some kind of a cool down period, i.e. a time during which one can cancel a subscription without penalties.

At least this is how I expect things to work here, in the UK.

There's a 14 day cancellation period after you sign certain contracts, but I don't know the details.

Beyond that, a contract is a contract.

American here. Adobe's actions are indefensible.

> You're getting lots of replies from (I presume) Americans, who are used to much scammier business behavior than what I know from Germany and you describe in Australia.

Berlin‘s public transport company has the exact condition in their terms of service.

> https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/streit-ueber-monatskarten...

(„ Zudem sei eine Kündigung für Abonnenten unattraktiv, da sich für die schon genutzten Monate nachträglich der Preis erhöhe, hieß es.“)

It‘s definitely not a scam or rip-off, just a case of someone not reading the contract before signing it.

To me this is a very intuitive presentation of pricing, so not sure what you are referring to as a dark pattern. There are three clearly laid-out options:

1. No contract, pay monthly

2. Annual contract, pay monthly (cheaper than 1)

3. Annual contract, pay in one go (cheaper than 1 & 2)

You pick one of the three options and check out. Where exactly is the confusion?

The first screenshot in the comment you're replying to says the price is "$52.99/mo". A reasonable person would look at that and conclude that if they purchased the product for 1 month, they would pay $52.99. But it seems (from the other, subsequent screenshots) that the actual cost Adobe would charge is $635.88. (That $52.99/mo, for a year.)

It is only on subsequent screens that the bait and switch becomes visible. A customer should not have to pay attention at each screen to ensure such a bait and switch does not occur.

Automobile leases, apartments, and the like are listed with monthly rates, but your commitment to pay is longer than one month. What's the difference?

Here in Australia you need to list the minimum contract term too. So if you're listing for $x/mo but require 1 year lease - the listing will say 1 year lease (unless it's been data-scraped by a Real Estate website and relisted for referral fees, but they end up in trouble all the time for this).

Phone plans for instance will have monthly with "minimum amount owed" underneath so even phone plans advertised for $20/mo will say something like "minimum owed $720" because people kept advertising shady 3-year contract plans with steep cancellation fees.

An apartment (at least in the US) is well understood to be a yearly lease. Software purchasing not. Similar software may be priced monthly, annually, everything upfront, or even free. If you put a price and list it as monthly and neglect to mention anywhere that it requires a year agreement, then it's an obvious dark pattern. You know it is because they easily could add "annual contract required" underneath, like most others do when they show annual pricing as a monthly rate (IME).

In other countries you don't need the "well understood" part, it's all up front info.

When you lease an apartment or a car, the monthly rate stated is usually the actual month-to-month cost. They don't demand a full year in advance to get the stated cost, or increase the monthly cost because you didn't pay for a year upfront.

That's why this pricing feels dishonest, even if it's technically true. Other companies handle it much more fairly. If you want to subscribe to World of Warcraft, Blizzard makes it clear that it's $15 per month. With discounts offered if you pay for 6 months at a time. That type of pricing feels honest, with a reward for paying for multiple months. Makes the customer feel better than Adobe's presentation, even though it's essentially the same type of pricing scheme as Adobe.

> They don't demand a full year in advance to get the stated cost, or increase the monthly cost because you didn't pay for a year upfront.

In my experience, typical apartment leases are offered on a 12 month basis. Month to month is usually substantially more expensive.

If you break a 12 month lease early, you're legally on the hook for whatever the contract specifies (typically the entire year in my experience). Most landlords will "generously" agree to let you out of the lease for the equivalent of a couple monthly installments though (again, just my personal experience).

I've personally never heard of a case where you'd pay out the year's lease. Usually you just forfeit a portion of your deposit, which half a month's rent or so, in Canada at least.

I had that once, in an apartment I rented in the US (TX). If you broke the lease early, you were on the hook for the remainder of the lease, UNTIL the apartment was rented again. This was called "rent acceleration" as I remember it. This was also ~25 years ago so maybe it is different now, but it definitely existed and I was subject to it.

At the time I bought a house so I broke the lease to move in. Fortunately, the apartment rented within the month so I didn't owe additional fees.

Out of curiosity I googled "rent acceleration" and see it is a hot topic now - mostly with commercial real estate and businesses break their leases due to the impact of covid on them. See https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/what-landlords-need-to-kno... for a summary. Also interesting is some US states make residential leases exempt from rent acceleration.

I think that's the typical outcome in the end. I've never actually heard of anyone being charged the full amount (not that I would have any way of knowing though). Also sometimes local law will place an upper limit on the size of the fee.

Several of my past leases specified that if broken I would be responsible for monthly rent on a prorated basis until a new tenant moved in.

In my current province, it's regulated that after the first year's lease is up, it defaults on an ongoing basis to a month-to-month agreement, whereby only a month's notice is required and that's it, unless you explicitly agree to another term lease. That's what I'm on now. Our deposit is the regulated max of half a month's rent.

In Poland if you signed a contract for a set period of time and there is no clause about breaking the contract early, you are on the hook for the entire duration of the contract.

For rent specifically, you can arrange to have a mutual agreement with the landlord if you for example find a new tenant, but by law the landlord does not have to accept anything.

Some contract also have punitive clauses in it, saying that you can break the contract at any point with 1 months notice, but you have to pay 3 months' worth of rent.

Wow, I'm glad this isn't how it works where I live.

Ummm, leases definitely have variable terms depending on length and also have fees for exiting the contract early.

And even more so, I bet if you asked, they would give you a further discount for upfront payment (since it removes non-payment and early cancellation risk that’s priced in)

I guess I’m just unclear what you’re on about?

>And even more so, I bet if you asked, they would give you a further discount for upfront payment (since it removes non-payment and early cancellation risk that’s priced in)

Not a lawyer, but come from a family of bankruptcy lawyers. If your landlord went bankrupt after you pre-paid, it could get dicey. It's a risk, and probably a low probability of downside, but I encourage people to do more research if interested.

Mobile phone plans and car payments all display the total price here in Australia as well as the monthly payments.

I’ve never been in a lease where it would cost a whole year worth of rent to quit early. It just cost the deposit, which is usually 1 or 2 months worth of rent.

And this is understandable for renting an apartment. The landlord might not be able to find a suitable replacement immediately. The same logic doesn’t apply to Adobe.

> Automobile leases, apartments, and the like are listed with monthly rates

Where I live it it is illegal to display this without also including the total amount over the entire contract period.

It's not about the commitment, but the installments. Advertising "$52.99/mo" implies your will be paying exactly that amount, each month. But in reality, there is no option to pay $52.99 each month, you only have to option to pay $635.88 in one lump sum, or pay $79.49 each month.

That's scummy, and trying to apologize for such behaviour is scummy too.

Yeah, the US has become quite comfortable with disgusting advertising problems. It's normal to be a shady disingenuous company here, so what's the difference if Adobe is being shady and disingenuous too?

The dark pattern is the first page pretending it’s a $52/month rate when the actual monthly rate is priced much higher.

If they want to honestly advertise that price then it needs to say “billed monthly with annual contract.”

Or a minimum head-up time for cancellations that's not bound to some full year cycle. There are many established ways of adding friction to cancellations that wouldn't cause any outrage at all.

But if those ways weren't good enough for Adobe and they wanted to have it both ways, advertise "cancel any time" and but still have "(you can do that, but then you have to pay in advance for the remainder of the year to do so)" or something like that in the fine print then they deserve all the hatred. And maybe even lawsuits for deliberately misleading labeling, but they probably have a legal team tweaking that communication in each jurisdiction to the exact shade of dark grey containing enough white for discouraging lawsuits.

And I suspect that the pattern/scheme doesn't pay for itself at all, that it's just the unfortunate outcome of a bad compromise between one group in the company advocating for honest monthly and another group advocating for honest annual.

Absolutely. It's not a $52/month rate because it's not 52 dollars per month. The moment you click that buy button you're on the hook for $624.

IMO A less deceptive label would be $624, billed in monthly installments.

"Twelve easy payments"

It's only clear in 1 of the pictures I shared. That is on the "Plans and Details" page.

It's "clear enough" in the other. That is on the Buy Now page. The price is listed as annualized and the REAL monthly price is hidden from view under a drop-down. This is an acceptably deceptive UX practice for pricing. I can give some room for shitty tactics, this is it.

However - it's not clear at all in the first picture I shared. This is the first page and the main page people will see when deciding which product to purchase. This is the main one I have a problem with. If they said it was an annual price, that would be acceptable. But they don't.

They lie.

How deceptive is it from 1-10, if the name of the product starts with the word "Annual".

It doesn't on the first page so that's a 9 and it does on the second page after click through so that's a 1.

Agree

That's exactly the dark pattern is - the convoluted pricing and terms. Also, not everybody is a uckin lawyer, that's another problem.

The customer has already been paying more than they'd have paid if they went for a long duration contract.

You are stretching the definition of convoluted. Offering discounts for signing a longer-term contract is standard practice in every industry. Don't need to be a lawyer to figure that out.

That's not what they're doing though - they're advertising a monthly price with no mention that it's actually a discounted price only available if you sign up for > 1 month.

Only explaining that in fine print once you get further along in the sign up process is the convoluted/dark pattern bit here.

There is no reason to give billion dollar companies with a staff of thousands of full time workers which have meetings in which professional designers meet with professional decision makers to approve of each step in a web store before it goes live the benefit of the doubt instead of the customer who spends 2 minutes in a web form.

If it looks dishonest it probably is. On this page https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/plans.html I see an entry for all apps. The description is like so.

All Apps

US$52.99/mo

It has a big old buy now option that you are obviously supposed to click in place of the small text that says see plan and pricing details.

When you click buy now you are taken to what ought to be familiar to most people as a shopping cart pattern. On the entire left side is just a spot to put your email and a button designed to draw your attention below it that says continue to payment. Most people are going to read it from top down and not glance much at the item they have put in their cart.

If they do they may notice a drop down in the description of the item in their cart with black on grey text that says annual plan, paid monthly in the description of the item you are already buying where people are much less likely to attend to this detail.

If they click the drop down they may note the options but more likely we are already passed this screen and onto the next one.

If you put a nonsense email in and click proceed to payment you will notice, you know or not, text in 6 point font at the bottom.

In light text that on a 24" 1080p screen is 9 pixels high or about 0.098 inches tall

> By clicking "Agree and subscribe," you agree

In bold same size it says

> You will be charged US$52.99 (plus tax) monthly and at the end of your one-year term, your subscription will automatically renew monthly until you cancel (price subject to change). No annual commitment required after the first year. Cancel anytime via Adobe Account or Customer Support.

Now again in light text it says

> Cancel before Apr 26, 2021 to get a full refund and avoid a fee

If you had no economic interest and your job was to be as informative as possible you would allow the user to click the product which would take you to a product page wherein it would list 3 options with separate descriptions where you would add the desired item to the cart. This means that you would affirmatively choose that option instead of having the default in a drop down positioned so many wouldn't attend to it at all and you wouldn't mention the fee in tiny font on the payment screen. It would be fully specified in body text with a check box saying something to the effect. I acknowledge that if I cancel before the one year term I will be charged a fee of up to n dollars. If you check it you would be able to add the item to your cart and pay for it secure in that everyone knew what they are buying.

It doesn't work like this because deceiving people is good for business.

> It doesn't work like this because deceiving people is good for business.

I think it is a bit more nuanced than that. Business isn’t purely about making money, it is about exchange of value.

It doesn’t work like that because people don’t think Adobe products provide the value Adobe wants to charge for.

If adobe credibly believed that their annual plan for their products was worth what they’re charging, they would not hide the pricing.

So “it doesn’t work like this because deceiving people is good for” _accumulating capital_.

This is happening a lot.

The Burning Man organization used a dark pattern to attempt to withhold ticket refunds last year.

The burning man org made refunds something you had to request, then sign in, and opt out again in or lose all of it.

They increased the minimum amount you could donate during the refund period and said the money was to “save” the event.

Then they turned around and applied for the max PPP loans. [1] https://www.burn.life/blog/interview-with-the-ceo-of-burning...

WinRed, a political organization in support of the former president, used a series of increasingly deceptive interface patterns that have provably awful publicly disclosed refund rates. They also used increasingly deceptive interface methods and emotional statements to sell the idea. [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donatio...

If anything Adobe should be regarded for only using deceptive financial practices and not trying to sell some sad story if we don’t give it to them.

Even if you bother to read the small print, it appears to be written to be deliberately misleading. Instead of positively saying that one enters an annual commitment, it only says that there is "No annual commitment required after the first year". "Cancel anytime" suggests you can stop your contract, not that you have the option to pre-pay the remaining months and forfeit your access.

Correct, it's misleading if you chose to ignore the words "after the first year".

If four words alone can change the entire meaning then I would say that is likely to mislead people.

I am sure you can agree they didn't do their best in making the nature of the contract as clear as possible here.

“No annual commitment required after the first year” does not logically imply that there is such a commitment for the first year.

If you can proceed to buy something and not even bother to read the first word of the product name, which is "Annual" -- you can't claim to be cheated.

But, it also says "Cancel anytime", then turns around and asks you to cancel 1 month before renewal.

It doesn't say ANYWHERE near the $52.99/mo that it's for a 1-year commitment.

It should be clearly stated next to that, and not in fine print or faded text or buried in a ToS.

False advertising at best.

I think they have to display the total price for the contract here in Australia, not just the monthly payments.

The dark pattern is that "pay monthly" is just an installment option for the annual contract.

It's not a subscription per month, and it's not marked as such.

I'd expect it to be different if I've already spent a year in or not.

Cancellation periods can be random and unattached to when you actually stopped using a service.

So are you going to report them to the ACCC?

They are also advertising their Lightroom cloud storage as a backup, but it does not meet the Macquarie Dictionary (Australian English) definition for backup.

I would if I was their customer.

I don't think you have to be a customer to put in a complaint about their advertising.

When you click the "buy" button it's made clear

https://imgur.com/uUqd9ZY

Reminds me of car advertising. They don't show the full price of the lease. They show the monthly payments

Which, BTW, is illegal under most sane consumer protection laws, where the full price of the contract must always be shown. No annual price, no annual contract. Simple.

At the very least, if you are showing the instalment price, you have to show the number of instalments, and the fact that it is an instalment rather than a pay-as-you-go subscription.

You could certainly argue that describing the plan as $x paid monthly is outright false, when it should be "12 monthly instalments of $x".

It says one thing in the screen where you put the item effectively in your cart and another in the description of the item in your cart wherein its designed for people's eyeballs to hit the continue to payment before they attend to the fact that it says something different in the description of the item IN the cart.

It's beautifully criminal in design.

I'm not an american apologist by any means, and it is a dark pattern, but it is very clear at point of payment what you're paying, and what period it's for. The drop-down unexpanded clearly says "Annual Plan, paid monthly".

Yes it's a bait and switch, and adobe deserve to be called out on the bait and switch but thats not what this thread is about, it's about someone signing up to (clear at time of purchase) annual billing and wanting to cancel early.

There is a commitment drop-down that shows different prices for the same product. I think it's pretty clear. I hate dark patterns than any other guy on HN, but this is not even close.

I also initially thought I was in the wrong with the monthly but yearly. Thanks for screenshots

Look, if the "Annual" in the name is not clue enough for the person. They are just paying tax for not being able to read.

This is not 75th page on the user agreement, it's the first word in the product name he is trying to buy.

How is this a dark pattern? This seems pretty transparent to me.

You click see more details, it lists all 3 options, you hit next and it keeps the 3 options in a condensed list, but respects your selection.

"See more details" isn't the primary call to action --"buy now" is. If you click "buy now", you're taken to a page that doesn't show the three options side-by-side, and if you're not paying attention you could miss the new "annual plan" text that's been added.

I'm firmly in the "if you don't pay attention when purchasing something it's your own damn fault" camp.

I'm firmly in the "If your advertising materials are systematically designed to trick people, you should be in gaol" camp.

These are not necessarily mutually exclusive viewpoints.

How much deception are you ok with before it becomes an issue? Would it be ok if the second screen was also missing the "annual plan" text, and it only became visible on the payment-confirmation screen? What if was only visible in the fine print at the bottom of the page? Where do you draw the line?