Pay No Attention to the Fee Behind the Curtain

I think I've just invented a new cause that I want to take up. There is something about the idea of sales tax and tipping that has always bothered me. No, I'm not going to host my own Tea Party and no I don't have some kind of Mr. Pink philosophical objection. I've just always been uncomfortable with the whole idea of "this item or service costs X, but to actually obtain it will cost you X + Y". It seems to me that if I go to the Apple Store for a new iPod and my credit card gets charged $217.84, then $217.84 is its price. Yet it gets advertised for $199. Why?

And every time a fast food comes out with a 99 cent value menu, they always run a commercial with a guy walking in and pulling out one crumpled up dollar bill from his pants and leaving with a 99 cent item. And every time I see that I think "Bullsh*t!", but then again maybe I take my Taco Bell commercials a little too seriously. And speaking of Taco Bell, who knew 2 weeks ago that the "Bell" came from founder Glen Bell? I sure as hell didn't. But I digress . . .

In any case, it was always something that just generally annoyed me but over the last 5 years or so I think it's really been elevated to an actual problem worthy of significant attention.

Let's set aside the issue of sales tax for now. Apart from that, I don't think that you should be allowed to advertise a price for something when it's impossible to procure the item for that price. But that's exactly what cell phone companies do. They will advertise a phone for $199, contingent on you agreeing to a 2-year contract. I'm fine with that stipulation (relatively speaking). But the problem is that you go in to purchase it and right at the end of the process they tell you "oh, there's also a $30 connection fee to set the phone up on the network." Wait, so if I don't sign a 2-year contract the phone will cost me $399, and if I do sign the contract it will cost me $229, so who is it that can buy the phone and walk out with it for $199? No one! So why do they get to advertise that as the price?

Ticketmaster is even worse. If you buy 4 tickets to an event you end up paying at least one more ticket's worth of fees. Again, setting aside the truly asinine labels like "convenience fees" (wow, isn't it so convenient that I actually received the tickets I paid for?) they use to describe these blatant price gouges (I've always just lovingly referred to them collectively as "horseshit fees"), they are another example of complete dishonesty in pricing. I used to assume that all the money was going to Ticketmaster and thus there was some form of legitimacy in that they were acting as a middle man between the venue and the purchaser and thus were charging a fee (granted, a ridiculously high fee) for their service in much the same way that Fed Ex charges to get a product from producer to customer. Yet I recently discovered (thanks to an article in The Economist) that most of the money from these fees goes back to the promoters and the artists. But wait, I thought that was what the face value of the ticket was for? Basically it's just a big racket whereby an artist can claim that they are keeping ticket prices low for their fans while at the same time pocketing the extra money. True, there are some instances where you can go to the venue and purchase the tickets without paying the fee, and in that case I'm fine with it. But there's also plenty of situations where tickets are available online only and that's just another example of an item that has a "price" at which the item can't be purchased.

And I'm not even gonna get started on car dealers . . .

So now we get to my cause that I'm going to take up - total price transparency. All brick and mortar locations will be required to display (and advertise) the price at which the good or service can actually be procured for. Can't be done you say? Lots of places already do it! When you go to the movies, the price on the ticket and the price displayed for the popcorn and soda (exorbitant as they are) are the prices you actually pay. Same thing when I go to my barber, or to a bar. Why can't other businesses do this? It's not like they don't know the sales tax amounts and it's not like they change all that often.

Online pricing is a little trickier, since by their nature they serve many different geographic areas. Still, it's not an insurmountable problem. Just make it clear that what's being displayed is the "base price". And you know how practically every site makes you create a profile when you buy something? Well, when you're signed in they know where you live so they should be able to update the prices accordingly. But I'm flexible about that. The key is to eliminate those nasty little extra fees they are going to charge everyone at the end that has nothing to do with where you're located.

To me, this is really just an extension of the concept behind the Freedom of Information Act. I think we're entitled to know, before the absolute last second before purchase, exactly how much out of pocket a product is going to cost us. And businesses should not be allowed to advertise anything other than that amount. To do so is dishonest and does a tremendous disservice to all consumers.