The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday proposed a rule to ban any hidden and bogus junk fees, which can mask the total cost of concert tickets, hotel rooms and utility bills.
President Joe Biden has made the removal of these fees a priority of his administration. The Democrat’s effort has led to a legislative push and a spate of initiatives aimed at helping consumers. Administration officials have said these additional costs can inflate prices and waste people’s time.
“The proposed rule would prohibit corporations from running up the bills with hidden and bogus fees, requiring honest pricing and spurring firms to compete on honesty rather than deception,” FTC Chair Lina Kahn said on a call with reporters. “Violators will be subject to civil penalties and be required to pay back Americans that they tricked.”
The FTC proposal is being coupled with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announcing that it will block large banks from charging junk fees to provide basic customer services.
While we’re at it, can we get them to make stores include tax in the price listed as well? I’m happy to pay tax because we benefit from it but having tacked on at the end seems like a hidden fee to me.
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Stores change posted prices without tax more often than the taxes change, and they can handle the taxes in their point of sales, so they can easily include the taxes in the posted price by using the point of sale price.
Apologists: “it would be too hard for stores to post the prices!”
Meanwhile, stores be like:
(In case it’s not obvious, that’s an electronic price tag.)
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They don’t have to calculate at checkout, and even if companies were forced to it would be within a few cents. Still better than needing to estimate ahead of time to know if you have enough tmfor tax.
I live in the US and several businesses have tax included in their listed prices. It really is not that hard.
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Bars frequently sell drinks at a price that includes tax, and people frequently purchase more than one.
Most concession stands sell food with tax included in the price per item.
It is called sales tax because it is from items being sold, not whether they are sold together or individually.
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When you have a tab at a bar you pay for multiple at the same time when you close out the tab. Same thing.
There’s also intermittent tax holidays for various classes of items (school supplies in the late summer, certain foods, infant supplies), which can apply at the municipality, county, or state level - or any combination of the three.
With regard to retail stores, especially ones that sell groceries and sundries, the tax landscape is just too complicated and ever-changing for stores to be retagging shelves all the time.
Posting prices on store shelves isn’t a big deal. We do it every week.
And presumably. Taxes don’t change very often, so including tax into the price wouldn’t be hard to do.
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I think youre fundamentally misunderstanding how math works…
Sales tax is percentage based… purchasing 1 item at $10 pays the exact same amount of sales tax as purchasing 2 items at $5 or 10 items at $1 regardless of if the tax is applied “per item” or “total sale”.
Regardless how sales tax is charged, the items can be priced to cover tax and sold at that price, tax included. Other parts of the world already do this, and it is the business that reports the numbers to the gummint and pays their tax bill. Profit margins can be optimised to fix the little sway in the sub-cent variance of percentages, and only a real penny pincher would care. You sell this much, you pay this much, every month. It’s how it works in the end.
And businesses already re-print/price their items frequently, sometimes on every purchase order received, which can be several times a week, because prices go up.
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