Aww … poor little ISPs.
As a European I’ll never cease to find it mind blowing that it is normal for a Americans that the cost to them of damn near everything is more than the cost initially shown to them.
You’re completely right to feel that way. As an American, it’s mind blowing to me, too. I really don’t like the fact that “hidden fees” have become normal.
Traveling in the US it can often feel like everyone wants to scam you or take advantage of you if you don’t pay attention.
Heck, even store prices and restaurant prices aren’t the real price.
Store prices are without sales tax/VAT, and restaurants wants you to tip 20% so they can keep not paying their “employees”.
The tax drives me crazy. The excuse for not displaying the total price after tax is because it’s different for each state. …yet the cash register seems to be able to handle that perfectly fine. So it can’t that hard to figure it out.
Edit: after a quick look into it, the main problem is tax in a lot of places is based on the Total amount sold, not on each item. So that could definitely be impossible to display before hand.
after a quick look into it, the main problem is tax in a lot of places is based on the Total amount sold, not on each item.
I’m actually confused, aren’t taxes a percentage? The sum of a percentage of all items should be the same as a percentage of the sum, no? Or is my brain not do math good? Can someone smarter than me explain?
The sum of a percentage of all items should be the same as a percentage of the sum, no?
Suppose you buy two items costing
xandy, and there’s a constant sales tax oft(say 10%, or 0.1). You’d payt * x + t * y, ort * (x + y). You can even generalize this toΣ(t * x) = t * Σx(forx ∈ X, whereXis the set of prices you’re paying).In other words, yes.
In case you want the math name for this property, it’s the distributive property.
I think the issue they were bringing up though is that tax is not applied equally to all items, and that tax may be determined by number of items sold. I don’t actually know if this is true or not, but if it is, the distributive property doesn’t apply anymore.Edit: I re-read the comment, that doesn’t look like what they were saying actually. Either way, if tax is weird like this, distributive property may not apply anymore.Hopefully someone can. Me no math good either.
!SeaJ@Lemm.ee shared this:https://www.taxjar.com/blog/retail/can-retailer-include-sales-tax-in-the-price
Say you list a table lamp on your website at $100, tax included. Well, if you sell that table lamp to a buyer in Connecticut (where the tax rate is a flat 6.35%) then you’re required to remit $6.35 in sales tax to the state of Connecticut on that transaction.
But if you sell the same table lamp to a buyer in Aberdeen, Washington, where the sales tax rate is 9.08%, then you’d be required to remit $9.08 in sales tax to the state of Washington.
As you can see, you are cutting into your profit margin by including tax in your pricing.
Further, US customers are accustomed to paying their local sales tax rates. We’re so accustomed to paying odd amounts in sales tax that paying a flat rate might surprise us or leave us a little confused.
This is anti-consumer bullshit nonsense. All they did was hid their only real “con” behind a wall of text. “As you can see, you are cutting into your profit margin by including sales tax”
And the last paragraph is fucking stupid too. People are too used to seeing numbers, so other numbers will confuse them!
100% agree
I’m not aware of anywhere in the US where the tax is variable depending on total amount sold. Sometimes some things are excluded from sales tax. But that’s per-item and not variable.
In the vast majority of the US there’s no reason they can’t just display the price with tax.
Granted, prices on consumer items are so fucking out of control retailers and etc just charge whatever the fuck they want and people are expected to pay it. They’re gouging at 80%, 100%, 150% markups on food, clothing, services, etc versus 2 years ago and people seem to just accept it (tough not to when everyone is doing it)
Initially they got away with it because “COVID supply problems”, which was frequently a lie or exaggeration. Now there’s no excuse given typically; people quote “inflation” but that’s a tiny fraction of it. It’s just gouging companies have learned they can keep getting away with more and more.
In Ontario Canada there is no provincial tax component on meals costing less than $4. This dates from the time you could get a simple lunch for < $4. Unfortunately it’s never been adjusted for inflation.
No reason not to show amount with tax and give people a pleasant surprise though
Check out the article linked below. I’m interested in what you think after that. Especially with the states that forbid including tax in displayed prices (and why they don’t).
I didn’t know about that until I just read it.
When I make price signs at work I make sure the price shows taxes and bottle deposits. I think my store is the only one to do that. I manage a liquor store
You’re a hero. I hope your customers notice what your doing for them.
And that’s why I am a misanthrope… hard to love humanity when they’re penalized for not being out to get you
It’s actually only a few things. The vast majority of the goods we purchase are clearly priced. Most states (and some local jurisdictions like big cities) do have sales tax applied to purchases of non-essential goods, but those rates are generally much lower than the national sales taxes in most European countries.
Sales tax is the most obvious example of adding to the cost I’ve been shown, but it’s everything. Here if there is a price on something that is the price you pay. Period.
If I have €5 and the price on the shelf is €4.90 we are all good, and I don’t even need to know what country I’m in!But is is more than that, if I take my car in to be fixed, they have to agree every cost they want to charge me in advance at no point can anything cost me more than I expected and agreed to up front.
Airline tickets, theatre tickets, hospital bills, TV ads, you name it, the price they state or advertise is what I pay, no ifs-no buts.Bragging <.< Trying to make us all jelly.
Or jam, or marmite, or whatever bread-spread-stuff.
I think they spread tea on crumpets or something
Last I heard it was beans on tea. Or was it bread on beans, I can’t remember.
Idk. But I think if you say crumpets three times fast they break away from your continent.
It’s actually almost everything unless you live in one of the 4 States without sales tax.
Which, in the case of Oregon, means income tax rivaling federal, and you’re paying that on rent. The money always comes from somewhere, and I despised it far more than I worried about coming up with $1.07 for a 99-cent burger.
Yeah, I don’t have a problem with sales tax either (on non essential goods). I do have a problem with it not being included in the price shown on the product.
It’s not about having a sales tax applied to some or all goods or about how much that’d be. It’s about not listing the final price including the tax right until you’re supposed to pay for it. How dumb is that?
I love oregon, no sales tax so the listed price is the price. Now all these idiots moved here and are making changes as to why this place was nice. Like trying to implement a sales tax and getting rid of the urban growth boundary
Now we have to pump our own gas, it was nice having someone do it for ya… if they add a sales tax and create urban sprawl like LA or Phoenix I’ll loose my mind…
Just responded above about the downside of all income being taxed at far higher rates than sales tax. That said, my god the amount of ink we spilled on the Ashland UGB.
That’s why you live in Vancouver and shop in Portland! No income tax or sales tax!
My college roommate was from Washougal. He taught me the even finer art of retaining all deposit items in Seattle for my next visit, at which time I’d pop over the 5 bridge first and then show up with an empty car.
This is why the ISPs don’t want to do it. The FCC told them:
Providers are free, of course, to not pass these fees through to consumers to differentiate their pricing and simplify their Label display if they believe it will make their service more attractive to consumers and ensure that consumers are not surprised by unexpected charges.
The ISPs refuse to eat the costs of doing business. They know people will shit when they see all the fees that customers do not need to pay are being charged to them.
There will be lawsuits when the fees are listed.
Difficulty doesn’t make sense, because if they can charge you for it, then they can list it out on your bill.
Unless it’s a “we need to show profit growth to our shareholders” fee.
Exactly.
It’s not really about eating the costs of doing business. A restaurant doesn’t charge you $1 at the end of your bill for washing your fork, it’s just part of the cost of serving the dish and so your Salmon Rice dish is $18 not $17.
The point is that the listed prices for services should either have these fees be built right into the price…as pretty much all businesses do…or if you’re going to put it at the end of the bill then it needs to be clearly defined per FCC.
It’s a transparency problem. Not only is your $60 cell phone bill not actually $60 but then they also don’t tell you about the additional fees very well when they tack them on at the end. It’s gotta be one or the other, not neither.
Restaurants also don’t have a line item on their bill to make you pay for their anti-unionization efforts. ISPs, on the other hand, do often have a “regulatory recovery fee,” the purpose of which is to pay their lobbyists to fight regulators so they can continue to screw you.
Why does everyone try to prove everyone else wrong? That entire first paragraph is completely unnecessary. You can simply add to a discussion without being "well actually " about some detail you want to nitpick. The other two paragraphs are spot on.
Because it’s a meaningful distinction. The issue isn’t them passing the cost to their customers. It’s them lying about their prices instead of telling you what they’re going to charge you.
They government is charging them those fees. And the government has said that they do not need to pass those fees onto the customer.
In order to operate they must pay those fees. They do not need to charge the customer those fees. But they do anyways.
Thus, they are passing the cost of doing business onto the customer.
Read the quoted text.
Is it the only issue? No. It is part of the issue. And the FCC called them out on it.
They will literally always pass all of their costs of doing business to their customers. That’s what businesses are and it is impossible to function any other way.
It is not in any way part of the issue. There is exactly one issue here. It’s adding these fees on top of the price you advertised to the customer with absolutely zero way for the customer to find out the actual price they’ll be charged. That’s the only thing the FCC cares about here and the entire issue. Anything else is a lie and a misdirection.
Ok yeah I can see that. Thank you for breaking it down like that.
Not trying to prove you or anyone else wrong… that’s a really odd and unnecessarily defensive take.
It’s just a discussion.
It’s really one of the worst things brought over from reddit
I like to imagine people doing that in an every day conversation. It’s ridiculous. No one would ever talk to them lol
Aww it’s too hard… well make it simpler by not charging shitty little fees.
If it’s too hard to list them, it must be even harder to charge and bill them.
Here’s a wild idea, simplify your pricing. Anyways, it’s cool to see the FCC stand for the citizens every now and then.
If they can charge for something then they can adequately explain what the thing is they’re charging for
So we finally got rid of Ajat eh?
Based FCC
I love when FCC at least appears to do something, not like under Shit Pai.
Frankly though they should revise Title II classification for the Internet and remove exception from the requirement to share last mile to competitors. This is the main reason there’s almost no competition. It doesn’t make sense for every single ISP to run lines to every home. Those lines should be leaseable.
based administration in the WH
Of all the technical challenges involved in doing what ISPs do, updating their billing process should be among the least “hard” things on the list. They just don’t want to do it.
Soon there will be a new fee, the “listing fees fee”
Stop charging the fees that are too hard to list. Problem solved.
deleted by creator
They could always remove those complex fees and make the bill simpler…
For those of us not American, can someone explain what fees are root talking about? Isn’t it like one fee of $X/month?
Suppose you buy an Internet plan for $50. On your bill, it’ll be $50, plus usually 5-10 other fees probably totaling around $5-10. Some examples from my cell phone bill are
- Fed universal service charge
- regulatory charge
- admin & telco regulatory charge
- gross receipts surcharge
- state public safety comm surcharge
- local public safety comm surcharge
- state sales tax
That’s 7 additional fees, whose names vary from somewhat comprehensible to uselessly vague. And you won’t find these prices until you get your bill. They’re not advertised directly, instead you’ll see that $50 advertised price, and a little asterisk that points to tiny text “additional fees may apply” that somehow make this all legal.
The FCC is saying if telcoms are going to add all these fees, they need to be part of the ad and not hidden.
It’s all going to be fabricated bullshit anyhow, I don’t see why they don’t just lump it all under one bullshit fee and call it a day. They’re still going to rob people blind with or without this.
