It's everywhere. Order food and there's a handling fee, a delivery fee, a packaging fee, misc. restaurant charges, tax...I never know what the final price will be. I've abandoned so many shopping carts because I just don't want to pay an unexpected price.

In North America I hate buying anything, anywhere. Currently whatever I'm buying is 13% (tax) more than the sticker price, not including an arbitrary service charge and tip amount.

Whatever tip I give will be either too little and I'm guilty, or too much and I'm annoyed, or zero and I'm a monster.

It's exhausting. Just put a number on the sticker and let me either take it or leave it.

> Currently whatever I'm buying is 13% (tax) more than the sticker price, not including an arbitrary service charge and tip amount.

And tipping on the after tax amount too!

>Just tell us the fucking price.

American hospitality taking a page from American healthcare.

American business culture is:

* There’s always a middleman

* It is expected that you will be grifted as much as is legal

* And then a little more in the categories of “wage theft” and “inflation.”

This has been tried and its very difficult to do if your business is already addicted to these revenue streams. The problem is when you don't include fees after the initial price, you have to raise the initial price. A large enough percentage of customers decide to do business at the initial price (excluding addons/fee/tips,etc). So raising the initial price, reduces volume ordered. In the end it hurts their bottom line to raise the initial price and exclude tips.

What I don't understand is why they are going to larger tipping percentages. The only explanation I have is they are doing this to try and retain employees in a tougher market.

The only thing Americans hate more than car dealers is the image of themselves as the sort of suckers who would ever pay a sticker price.

You might go so far as to say Americans don't really buy cars; they buy the feeling of having gotten good deals on their cars.

What? I’ve yet to meet an American younger than my grandfather who haggles at all on anything.

Interesting, almost everyone that I talk to will negotiate on a car.

I’m also the kind of person to negotiate on lots of other things too. You can definitely save money on random things if you ask. Subscriptions for phone/tv/internet, electronics, furniture. Maybe not at ikea, but at a more local showroom

Bought a bike on Craigslist for less, too. In fact, as far as I know, everyone prices things on Craigslist higher than they actually think the thing as worth. Because they know the buyer will offer them less than they post.

I’m a young millennial.

It's pretty mixed among the people I know. Some will haggle, some will accept the offered price. I'm usually in the latter camp, though I might haggle for something like a Craigslist sale, as the cost/value of used goods is more subjective.

I'm a xennial, so a bit older than you. I continue to be skeptical that our arbitrary generations matter for all that much.

Craigslist is a special case. Big ticket items like cars are very, very special cases. Neither of them indicate anything about Americans' appetite for haggling in general. Personally I'd rather not.

If craigslist and big ticket items are special cases, what does it take to not qualify as a special case?

You can't think of any other major areas of the economy? What fraction, by item count (since prices are usually decided per item), of people's commercial activity do you think takes the form of buying used stuff from private sellers or buying cars/houses/boats/etc?

Well, no one haggles at McDonalds, or Kroger.

you should check out online marketplaces more.

It's not paying sticker price that's the issue; it's paying more than someone else. If everyone always had to pay sticker price, nobody would have a problem with it.

As someone growing up rebuilding cars with my da as an income, the automobile industry is an atrocity. Dealerships are a virus borne of a bygone era, now they're no more than concert ticket scalpers justifying their existence through a forgotten relic of bygone law being middlemen.

Come to Europe :-)

In Germany showing the final price including taxes is a legal requirement.

Where the cars are twice as expensive and the paychecks are half as large.

The comment above is on-topic. Europe has laws about price tags including all taxes and fees.

Your knee-jerk reaction is not.

I don't think it's off topic. zoover2020 is inviting Americans to Europe because the prices are honest. eurocars is giving a reason why moving to Europe is not a good idea (salaries are atrocious).

and the other reason is that "cars are twice as expensive", which ignores the context completely, otherwise it would specify whether the cars are twice as expensive on paper, or twice as expensive in reality.

Though most of the cars also are half the size, so maybe it balances out

And yet, people are twice as happy.

We are getting way off topic here, but I don’t know how anyone with even a touch of SAD manages in Europe. London is as far north as the southern tip of Alaska.

Hello from Helsinki. I have a therapy lamp on my breakfast table and on my desktop at work, and it helps a tiny bit but not much. People clearly have different reactions, and I guess mine is worse than that of most people. But of course, I mainly meet people who are still capable of functioning.

Suicide rates peaks during summers, not winters. Some things are worse during winters, but other things are worse during summers, so SAD is just a preference thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_effects_on_suicide_ra...

Ok. So sub out SAD for “people that hate long, dark winters where the sun barely shines even for the few hours it’s up” and the question stands.

This largely depends on where you live on either side of the pond. Moving from Canada to Germany, the biggest problem was not the lack of daylight, but the lack of winter sports. Winter here is just a worse summer.

I teach people to schedule their vacations for January-March, not the pleasant summer months.

Even from Canada, you probably moved north. Toronto is as far north as Nice, on the French Mediterranean. Of all the major Canadian cities, only Vancouver is as far north as southern Germany.

I did, but it's still a minor issue compared to the lack of things that make winter enjoyable.

Well, imagine you are walking by a restaurant, you see the menu. A dish that you are interested in is $15.99. "Not bad", you say. You walk in, finish your meal, get the bill, and realize that with all kinds of taxes and fees it came out to be pretty much $20. Then you have to leave a tip, and since the minimum is really 20%, you go "it's tough times for the service workers, fine, here is $25".

At least that's how it always goes for me, but the point is, the price you see for entrees in the U.S. is pretty much +$10. If the advertised prices were this high, I wager fewer people would be walking into restaurants.

The industry as a whole is probably interested in this systematic bait-and-switch, and to get from there to the real, "service included" prices would be too much of a shock to the system. The price of being served food is actually higher, and people need to get used to that.

If you think about it, it should really be illegal - it's a legalized way to fool people into becoming customers, but in the United States the interests of a business almost always come before the interests of the public. The only exceptions are extreme dangers to health and safety.

> the price you see for entrees in the U.S. is pretty much +$10.

Generalized, I just add 30% to whatever I see. Sales tax is 8.something% here (and if it's food service, there's often a "Healthy SF" fee of a couple percent), so adding 30% ends up being roughly accurate, or even an over-estimate. I'd rather over-estimate and end up seeing a lower final bill than the opposite.

> it's a legalized way to fool people into becoming customers

Pretty much. People are calibrated to expect certain things at certain quality levels to cost a certain amount. If laws changed and businesses were required to report the final cost of everything on menus, price stickers, etc., that would likely -- at least for some amount of time -- cause patronage to drop. People would get sticker shock and pass on things they'd usually buy, even though the final prices are actually the same.

And of course few to no establishments will buck the trends and include all costs, because then -- at first glance, at least -- they'd appear more expensive than their competitors, even if they're the same.

Here in NYC (and I’m sure elsewhere in the US) there was a movement to end tipping policies for all of the reasons noted here.

For a short time it succeeded for well known and established restaurants. Prominent restauranteur Danny Meyer signed all of his (mostly high-end) restaurants on. However while it worked at known entities that catered to very price insensitive customers and whose employment was considered a stepping stone, lesser known establishments couldn’t make it work. Employees left for jobs where they’d make more from big tippers and customers balked at higher service included prices.

The pandemic shattered pretty much all traction when even the most elite restaurants had an impossible time finding and retaining talent. In 2020 Meyer’s Union Square hospitality reversed their no tipping policy [0].

Long story short tipping is baking into US hospitality culture and very hard to change on a restaurant by restaurant basis.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/dining/danny-meyer-no-tip...

This sounds like a coordination problem that a government could solve. One of the three I’m paying (NYC, NYS, USA) should take a crack at it.

Sounds like an impossible task if you account for customers not wanting to pay more for food. People who don't make a livable wage would just opt to work somewhere else or move away from the hospitality industry altogether.

How does requiring honest pricing on menus imply paying more?

Just make the sticker price include median tips and people pay the same amount as before. Everyone are happy.

Yeah it is really strange to go from Australia to the US. Australia the price is what it written, includes all taxes (no state taxes, just a VAT/GST sales tax at federal level), no tipping culture.

I wouldn't mind the itemized fees if I could opt out of them. But when they call it a "convenience fee" on a theater ticket, and they don't actually offer an inconvenient way to buy the ticket, or a business charges a "transaction fee" so that you can... pay them, then I don't see how the posted price is anything but a lie. If someone can't actually buy the thing for that price, it's a lie.

(Taxes are different. I wish those were required to be included in the posted price, but since they really are diverted to a separate entity, I understand how we arrived at the itemization. Don't get me started, though, on "regulatory fees" that are actually a business's claimed cost of complying with regulations, which somehow lets them bury it among the real taxes...)

If it was just taxes I could live with it. But given the proliferation of hidden costs, we might as well fix it right and require all-in prices and ban soliciting gratuities (including facilitating them via credit card.)

Spirit airlines advertises one price but when you go to book it online they slap you with a convenience fee. But in this case they do actually offer the ticket at the advertised price if you are willing to go to the right airport during the right hours to purchase it at the desk.