No wonder Americans have no idea how the economy is doing.
and then pay % of your refund as a fee to CPA, so they help you maximize your refund.
It’s a real shame banks received 2-5% of most transaction for what costs them pennies. Sure, there are benefits, but their ask isn’t covering it.
Additionally, every single business owner I know complains that whatever it is they're selling, (1) it isn't worth the brain damage to sell to customers looking for the lowest price, (2) as long as people comparison shop in a harebrained way, hook pricing (aka up front pricing that looks low and turns out high) is only rational. It's not like they're providing a bad service for the cost.
Yes, many deceptive business practices are rational acts on the part of the businesses. That doesn't mean they should be tolerated.
The sales tax rate is different in different places. It costs a different amount to ship to Florida than Alaska and picking it up at the factory is free (even if nobody does). The advertised price is if you have your own modem, renting one from the cable company is more.
None of these are inherently wrong. You should be paying more if you're having it shipped to a remote location with high shipping costs, and the cost of that shouldn't be dumped on every other customer. But it's kind of a loophole if you want the advertised price to be lower than what people are actually going to be paying in practice.
There is no reason you can't show final price including tax on the label in a physical shop. There is no reason why a restaurant should be able to charge a 20% service charge instead of increasing regular prices by 20%. If you are buying a concert ticket or airline ticket the displayed price should include all mandatory fees. They can upsell you on additional services, but they can't suddenly notice in the last checkout step that your price is higher because the website you are using is charging a fee; that fee was known to them at the beginning of the transaction and should have to be disclosed at that point in time at the latest. If you want to go even further you can also dictate that shipping and handling fees are only allowed to include reasonable costs of actual shipping and handling.
All of these are normal common-sense regulations in most first-world countries.
Sure there is. When the price label is affixed by the factory/warehouse then you would have to track where everything is going and be unable to share inventory. Also, if the sales tax rate changes then all the labels become wrong. These would ultimately increase costs for consumers.
Adding sales tax is also not at all misleading because the customer is not going to be surprised by it and there isn't going to be a competing merchant across the street who can avoid charging it.
There are also business customers with their own sales tax ID and they can buy things without paying sales tax when they're being incorporated into a product where they collect the sales tax themselves.
> There is no reason why a restaurant should be able to charge a 20% service charge instead of increasing regular prices by 20%.
This is actually true. A mandatory undisclosed fee is BS. But it doesn't help much, because if they want to do it then they just make it "optional" where the way to avoid it is more of an inconvenience than paying the fee.
> They can upsell you on additional services, but they can't suddenly notice in the last checkout step that your price is higher because the website you are using is charging a fee; that fee was known to them at the beginning of the transaction and should have to be disclosed at that point in time at the latest.
The last step is where you disclose your address. Before that they may not even know which country you're in, much less the city/state, and there are a thousand legitimate reasons to have different prices or fees in different jurisdictions.
> If you want to go even further you can also dictate that shipping and handling fees are only allowed to include reasonable costs of actual shipping and handling.
That doesn't really help, they're typically charging the actual cost. They just don't include it in the advertised price because it makes you inclined to make the purchase online instead of saving $10 by picking it up for the same price but no shipping charge the next time you go to the competing local store.
There's a reason Amazon's major competitive advantage is free two day shipping, derived from having the scale to achieve low shipping costs themselves.
Price tags are pretty much universally handled at the stores. There are some goods where the price tag is attached, but that's more the exception and not the rule.
This is a solvable problem. So much so that if you've traveled in most nations you'll see that all prices include tax. Not including tax is a particularly weird aspect of US culture that simply doesn't exist in other nations, even those with a large amount of imported goods.
Advertising isn't. If the same ad is viewable by people in different states, what price are they supposed to put on it? Shouldn't this be the same price as what they show in the stores, or else people will have trouble knowing if the advertising was deceptive?
> This is a solvable problem. So much so that if you've traveled in most nations you'll see that all prices include tax.
Don't most of those other nations have a uniform tax rate?
Anyway, you can always advertise 9.99 + tax and show the actual price with tax in the store tags.
California has a 7.25% sales tax. Oregon has a 0% sales tax. A 7.25% difference is larger than the entire net margin on many products.
> Sales are mostly about moving items, so they are already losing huge margins at that point anyway.
It seems like we've now gone from "there is no reason they can't do this" to "the merchant can just eat the sales tax and go out of business"?
> Anyway, you can always advertise 9.99 + tax and show the actual price with tax in the store tags.
Which is basically what they do now. You see the final price at the register before you pay. You also know that there is going to be sales tax, no one is being misled.
Putting a different price on the tags than there is on the ad would just confuse people and make it harder to tell when you're not getting the advertised price because you have to do fractional arithmetic on every soup can and candy bar to see if it matches.
I was referring to city/county taxes, not state taxes. Tor example, a local city to me in the US had a total of 14% sales tax, while outside the city was 10%.
Anyway, a sale’s motivation is to move products off the shelf and make room for more profitable products; they’re already losing money.
California borders with Oregon. Radio waves cross state lines. People see highway billboards and then drive into another state. People use the internet and you don't know where they are.
> Anyway, a sale’s motivation is to move products off the shelf and make room for more profitable products; they’re already losing money.
A sale's purpose is frequently to bring customers into the store to buy other products, or get customers to try a product for the first time to drive repeat business.
There is also plenty of advertising that isn't discounts. Maybe your product is great and you want to inform the customer that they can get something better than the competition for the same price. Maybe you're just publishing a comprehensive price list for all your products.
And in all cases, "losing money" is not a binary result. Losing a small amount, or not making as much as you wanted to, is very different from losing so much that you go out of business.
This statement has always been BS. If you set the tax rate to a percentage of revenue which exceeds the business's margins, all businesses go out of business. "Maybe grocery stores shouldn't be in business" is so absurd that the statement seems designed to deliberately shut down reasoned debate by stunning people into silence or making them so angry they respond rashly.
And in this context it doesn't even apply. The issue here is that customers in Oregon are going to pay a lower price than customers in California because Oregon has lower sales tax and the tax is part of the price they pay. The business can't eat the tax in California so their only alternative would be to advertise the higher price. But if they have to advertise the higher price then many of them will just charge the higher price everywhere so all you're doing is screwing customers in the jurisdiction with lower taxes out of paying lower prices. This also reduces competition by making it harder for customers to compare prices, because a store that only operates in a state with lower taxes would then seem to have lower prices than one that operates in multiple states and has to advertise the highest price, even if it didn't charge you the highest price where you actually are.
> This isn’t a problem in the EU where countries border other countries and sales tax varies from 6-19-24%
Or it is a problem and you're just eating the cost of getting screwed by the law while defending it.
Unless I misunderstand, isn't this EXACTLY what the US does to ensure certain businesses are or aren't profitable in their smaller jurisdictions? This is how they entice businesses to come to their cities/states and they even compete on giving bigger tax breaks. I assume they also do the exact opposite to keep out businesses they don't want.
> The issue here is that customers in Oregon are going to pay a lower price than customers in California because Oregon has lower sales tax and the tax is part of the price they pay.
They're already doing this ... this just makes it so you can do simple addition in your head while you walk around the store instead of throwing in some multiplication -- and if you live in a state where certain kinds of items have different tax rates, knowing what those tax rates are.
This isn't rocket science, I don't understand why you are making it seem so complicated.
Traditionally this is called fines rather than taxes. The ostensible purpose of general sales tax is not to bankrupt every grocery.
> this just makes it so you can do simple addition in your head while you walk around the store instead of throwing in some multiplication
Why do you have to do any math in your head at all? The register will do it for you at the end.
You could as easily say that the marketing department not knowing the features of the product justifies them making whatever claim they want in an advertisement. Why should a company be permitted to advertise something they don't know to be true, let alone something they know to be false?
At small scales, annoying your customers is bad business. You only need to lose a few before it begins to hurt. Customer complaints are more likely to be a consideration in business decisions.
At larger scales, a business can begin to preferentially adopt practices intended to drive away some customers. Perhaps you don't want the "pathological" customers, to borrow one of Patrick McKenzie's terms. You can make more money with less effort by being more selective about your customers.
At extremely large scales, you largely stop thinking about groups of customers altogether. All of your decisions are driven by aggregates -- did all sales go up this quarter, or down? The effort required to do a deep dive into the behaviors and preferences of any individual market segment may not make sense anymore on a quarterly basis. At this scale, you might be able to afford to annoy tens of thousands of customers and still have a very nice graph next quarter.
So, when someone says a business practice shouldn't be "tolerated", that's a perfectly reasonable position, except it doesn't actually work for businesses operating at extremely large scales. It's too difficult for customers to organize a protest in a way that will influence that business's decision-making.
So much business has moved online in the last 20 years, while the US has leveled off at 80% urbanization over the same time period, along with more and more businesses congealing into BigCos, combined with the recent domination of private equity: lots and lots of things are now operating at a scale where customer concerns just aren't a part of the business model anymore.
Coffee shops, fast food, big-box retail, online retail, SaaS, PaaS: all of these can thrive while running on exorbitant pricing and abusive customer policies, because their volume of customers is so large that it's nearly impossible to be so bad that you'll piss off enough customers to impact your decision-making. (Unless you're Sony.)
It's actually very easy (in theory). You (vote for someone who will) ban fraudulent and anti-competitive behavior, sue the offenders and have them pay huge fines. The fact that this very rarely works out is a failure of the political system.
The problem in my mind is that the largest companies have too much efficiencies of scale to compete with on price.
When competition can't undercut on price, it is hard to argue that customers aren't being served by monopoly mega corps.
Chokepoint Capitalism is a pretty okay book that kicks the legs out from under both assumptions.
If people specifically want to break them up to drive down prices, I don't think that will always be successful.
I'm not really sure what you mean. The EU has managed to put together much better consumer protections in a lot of areas. There are large businesses there.
No more junk fees in CA.
- https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/sf-restaurants-junk-fees...
What do you mean by this? How would “people change” to get out of resort fees or confusing pricing systems?
People are capable of change.
The cheapest customers are always the most expensive to work with. It’s a sad reality.
I worked at several companies who for some foolish reason saw the cheapo customers as some untapped market and when they raced to the bottom they lost every time.
When it comes to healthcare, they absolutely are. The US spends more than double for the same outcomes as other developed countries.
And no, this isn't because of the cost to develop new and novel drugs (which aren't used in 99.9% of routine health care)
Hospitals are obligated to provide care regardless of your ability to pay in the moment, and of course they often take care of indigent and foreign patients, with the understanding that they won't be able to recoup their costs.
If you don't have your identification on you, then they simply give you a number to call and they usually ask to respond within a few business days because after that, it's harder to get insurance approval.
This all changes if you're admitted to the hospital and need surgery, because I think there's pre-approval required from your insurance carrier. Though since I worked in the ER, my memory is hazy on that.
If they believe you were deceptive and simply refused to be identified, then that is technically illegal, so they will put up your picture and will alert the police if they see you again. But if you never intend to visit the hospital again, it doesn't really matter. No one is going to hunt you down unless you're doing it on such a large scale that it can't be ignored.
This all said, I want to say that I still think it's an unethical thing to do.
They ignored all the threats, the department in charge of threatening seemingly didn’t talk to the department in charge of graduation, and to this day (5 years later) they still receive near-daily letters in the mail requesting payment. I can’t say I find my friend’s actions unethical in the slightest.
Ah! The UC system…
Aren't inmates technically supposed to get healthcare? Could be a last-ditch option I suppose if you can't get something covered any other way. Personally I'm trying to stay employed to keep my coverage, but sometimes you can't outrun the layoffs.
The American government spends something approaching a trillion dollars annually on Medicaid, "a government program that provides health insurance for adults and children with limited income and resources."[1]
Seperately, Obamacare[2] created a private health insurance market where low income people can obtain free or heavily discounted private health insurance coverage, according to their income.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act
I'm a healthy individual, not even 30 yet, never smoked, never broken a bone, and never even had stitches in my life. And when I last checked their prices, I was making only $45k/yr. For coverage with Obamacare, I would be paying $350/month for the "catastrophic" plan. Which includes no prescription copay, no dental, no vision, and only kicks in after I've spent $100,000 in one year, and it takes 6 months to take effect after signing up. It's only there for serious issues like losing a leg or cancer.
I've bought my insurance on the ACA marketplace since it opened ten years ago. There's no difference I can see between the plans offered on the health insurance marketplace and those offered directly from the websites of the same insurers that offer coverage in my state (Blue Cross, CVS Aetna, United, Ambetter, etc).
The very highest deductible "catastrophic" plan offered on the marketplace in California for a 29 year old has a $9450/year deductible, which is also the maximum out-of-pocket expense for the year if you have this plan. A $100K deductible plan does not exist, and when you enroll during the annual enrollment period or after a qualifying life event, plans take effect the day you make your first payment, not months later.
I'm 10 years your senior and pay less than $350 per month with a lower deductible than the plan quoted above, with no government subsidies.
I'm also in Georgia which may have different regulations regarding the deductibles. I remember looking at the plans around 2 years ago and realizing that there was no way I could afford the premium, let alone the yearly deductible.
I just took another quick look at a non-Healthcare.gov site. Insurance for me would be $313/month with a $9,100 deductible. But it does not cover doctor visits, generic drugs, or specialist visits until after I pay the full $9,100.
Why would I want to pay $313/month for essentially no coverage until I spend 20% of my income towards a deductible before I see any benefits?
I'm on healthcare.gov looking at Georgia's plans this year for someone with $45K of income. You have options starting at $129/month. Many of these sub-$200 plans get you doctors visits for $40-60, prescription drugs for under $25 each, mental health treatment for under $60 per visit. This is all without hitting your deductible at all, they're day 1 prices.
If you paid the cash prices for many of these doctors, specialists, therapists, they'd be many times higher than the insurance negotiated costs. Look under the "covered costs" estimates for things like mental health treatment, diabetes maintenance, broken bone treatment, etc and you'll see that the estimated annual cost for the insured is often half or less the plan's deductible -- which tells you that hitting the deductible is not when the savings start. I don't think my wife or I have ever hit our out-of-pocket maximums in a year, yet the insurance has saved us more than it's cost in most years.
You're going to start interacting with the healthcare system a lot more than you have in your 20s once you're in your 30s. We all do at that age. And if you have even the worst ACA plan, you'll start to understand what it's doing for you regardless of the deductible.
(You also get their negotiated rates when you go to the doctor, I assume.)
https://d3ul0st9g52g6o.cloudfront.net/2024/GA/sbc/2024_58081...
Why perpetuate crude and inaccurate stereotypes that smear and disparage America in general? America is spending a huge amount of money every year precisely on providing healthcare for the poor.
Besides which, it looks like Medicaid does indeed operate in Texas, which is discoverable in less than 10 seconds of Internet searching: https://www.hhs.texas.gov/services/health/medicaid-chip/abou...
And, seperately, Obamacare's marketplace works nationally, including in Texas: "More Texans than ever before enrolled in ACA health plans in 2024"[1]
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/24/texas-aca-health-ins...
From your own article (I knew this stat would be in there):
> Currently, Texas leads the nation in the number of uninsured residents with nearly 5 million people living here without health insurance coverage, nearly double the national average.
Why do you think so many are uninsured if it is so simple for them to get health coverage?
That is categorically false, and testifes to some sort of deep seated bias against our own country profoundly embedded in your worldview -- one which extends all the way to glib counterfactual promotion of verifiably false information about the country and its supposed moral shortcomings.
2) Texas has a much larger population than 49 of the other 50 states -- about 30 million, higher than any state but California. Of course the number of uninsured residents will be higher than the national average. You didn't control for uninsured per capita.
Why are so many uninsured if it's possible (I didn't say easy) for them to get coverage? Probably, a large part of the reason is people who go around promoting the (completely false) common trope that "poor Americans just can't get health coverage, the government does nothing for them."
As to point 2) I thought about including the info in my previous comment, but it wasn't in your own source material and I'm a bit lazy. So here, I'll do it in this one.
> Texas is still the state with the highest percentage of uninsured residents, at nearly 17 percent, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau survey released Thursday. [0]
[0]https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/14/census-bureau-texas-...
Speaking as a Texan (also pretty sure I'm American) who lives with some disability, I can tell you that I've looked at the systems and it's a real fear of mine that I'll end up as one of these statistics.
I’m pretty sure there is a moral to this story..
High numbers of people who have illegally immigrated and are worried about getting into programs subsidized by the government which might result in questions about residency status leading to deportation?
High rates of misinformation surrounding the costs of insurance and availability of welfare programs in the state?
I just looked up getting a plan in Texas. 40 year old male non-smoker in Texas earning $45k/yr can get insurance for $128/mo. They're eligible for an HSA, so they can put tax-free savings that roll over every year into an investment account to help cover the $7,400 deductible. PCP and preventative care visits are free. Generic drugs are $10. Urgent care out of pocket is $160. Other plans have slightly higher premiums but much lower deductibles, some have different co-pays.
Where Medicaid is expanded, the income requirements for Medicaid are far from sane. If you make over 100% to 138% of the federal poverty line, which is $15,060/year for an individual, you are not eligible for coverage. For example, someone who makes $16k to $21k a year, depending on where they live, is ineligible for coverage despite making poverty wages.
[1] https://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/issue-brief/status-o...
What’s funny is I’m probably one of the people whose paycheck is dependent on me not understanding that to paraphrase Upton Sinclair. When I started at my current employer, one of the devs straight up said the government should be doing what we do and we shouldn’t have a business.
But I think we need to up our game in this cat and mouse game a bit. For example, in aggregators -- like Expedia or Google Flights, etc -- why not try to capture some of these fees in the price? I can search for hotels with parking but what about sorting hotels by price and including the parking price? It's hard to compare when I see a $120 hotel that has a $50 valet vs a $150 hotel that includes parking. But that's the thing I'm actually after a lot of times. Or similar with flights and baggage fees. We should be able to collect a lot of this type of information and properly present it to the users and try to make these types of dark patterns ineffective (still will be cat and mouse and this is only a specific type of pattern, but still, I think there are things we can do)
Pay +10% for “priority” rides in Lyft, supposed to arrive in 1-5 minutes, whereas “regular” is 7-15. Car shows up in 18 minutes. Priority payment does not get refunded.
Honestly what’s even the point in caring anymore. Living in America is about getting grifted until you can hopefully figure out your own grift. The irony of posting this thought on this website is intentional.
I think lots of people go along with these as-you-go services because they’d rather deal with an unexpected bill, than having their servers shut off.
Not just the healthcare situation, but everything. There's nothing much more stereotypically American than "not knowing what you're going to pay for something until you're billed." Dozens of little fees on your cable or ISP bill, resort fees in hotels, service charges on your restaurant bill, fees on car rentals, fees from your bank when you so much as breathe on your account, and of course sales taxes which for some reason are never listed on the tag in any store.