• Hathaway@lemmy.zip
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    1 year ago

    I could be wrong, but, that feels like a weak position to run on. I’m not sure I want the government worrying about the unexpected fee at the hotel I cannot afford to go to.

    Isn’t there a way to spend the money you’re going to spend on that to spend it on like food availability, or affordable housing, or education…?

    Idk. Seems like a waste of resources but, I suppose they probably have a massive team figuring out what the country is worried about. Just seems like a weird thing to underline, it feels like a back burner issue.

    • YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      It isn’t spicy but junk fees are a big deal when it comes to fleecing the American people. Adding a take out fee at a restaurant for example, I have a fee to get my own food?

      • Hathaway@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, I can definitely see it. Idk, at that point, a lot of places are just going to increase prices I would imagine. Again, could be wrong. But, there is definitely merit behind going after it, especially after your reply and the other I got. I suppose I didn’t think through to the entire scope.

        Though, if it is bipartisan, and basically an easy win… why not just do it? I hate politics lol.

        • utopianfiat@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s not really bipartisan. They call things “bipartisan” now because there’s a handful of Republicans who are willing to come to the negotiating table and extort pork or deregulation for your goals, and it doesn’t cross the filibuster-proof majority in order to pass in a Republican house. The majority of Republicans are going to default to opposing any kind of consumer protection legislation just because their fundamental ideology favors large corporations cheating individuals and families repeatedly.

          Why do you think every American gets 15 robocalls per day and the government refuses to do anything about it? Republicans are getting their kickback from the robocallers.

        • ChildOfAphrodite@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Lol go check out mildly infuriating. Someone posted a receipt with the added 18% service fee. The “gotcha” fees are annoying, and if you need to raise the prices on your food, then raise the prices on the food. That’s how you know if your food is worth it if people are willing to pay for the actual price of it.

      • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I work in a business that owns a hundred restaurants or so, we charge a to-go fee of a couple dollars since our restaurants are there to keep you at the property, not really to make money themselves. If this becomes illegal then we’ll just raise prices to make the difference, this won’t make things cheaper, just less sneaky.

        • YoBuckStopsHere@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 year ago

          The point is that they should not be sneaky. Raise your prices so people know what the actual cost is. That is the point of the law. People want to shop for the best rate but these fees hide a lot of the cost. Once passed all prices will reflect the final cost, taxes included.

        • JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          I’m confused by what you mean “keep you at the property”.

          Obviously the business is there to make money, or it wouldn’t be a business. Servers wages are hardly an overhead concern, I’m saving you the table space for other paying customers, and I’m still paying full price for a product that now cost you less to sell me.

          Unless you’re implying that your business sells food at a loss and only makes money on alcohol served on site. Maybe that’s a problem by itself, but it’s not a problem to foist on the customer by charing more for a to go order, that’s absurd.

          • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I work at a casino, we only have restaurants so you eat there and go back to gambling

            • JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca
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              1 year ago

              Why would I ever order take out from a restaurant inside a casino?

              We’re getting farther from sense here.

              • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                You’re kidding right? Just because we’re a casino doesn’t mean the food sucks, plus you can use your reward points for those take out orders. We get tons of take out and door dash orders out of our restaurants despite the fee

            • Hathaway@lemmy.zip
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              1 year ago

              Then why offer takeout? Also, who are these people ordering take out from a casino? Regardless, if the food is really just there so you don’t have to go to another place to get it, and their primary business is gambling, I really don’t understand why they’d have to offer takeout as an option anyway? Especially if it costs them money.

              • JJROKCZ@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                It doesn’t cost more money for us to do takeout, but it’s accepted f&b industry practice to have a fee so why not?

    • blackbelt352@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      I kinda see where you’re coming from but junk fees are really something that affects everyone, especially those near the bottom of society. Stuff like cell phone fees inflating phone prices, online commerce fees making transactions more expensive, credit card/banking fees, overdraft fees a literal tax on being poor, convenience fees because they can, maintenance fees. It all adds up to tens of billions of dollars annually.

      • Hathaway@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        Okay, see, this is a much better list than “concert tickets, hotels, and cellphone bills” lmao. Now you can get me to care and see the merit.

        Not sure it still should be an underlined campaign promise, but, as stated, it’s bipartisan, everyone hates them. Then you add your reasoning in there too, and I could get behind it.

      • GingeyBook@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        What’s going to stop the companies from just rolling that convenience fee into the price of the service though?

        • utopianfiat@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The fact that if they’re not baiting and switching people, folks might actually be able to shop around for the best listed price rather than getting swindled by the “cheapest” up front. Particularly for poorer people, surprise fees can really hurt your ability to treat yourself once in a while and still meet your financial goals.

        • blackbelt352@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          Thats part of the point, It makes the upfront pricing more visible. Clear, easy to understand information means better purchasing decisions are made by consumers.

          It’s a lot harder to sell a $1500 phone than it is to sell a $1000 phone with $500 in extra fees tacked on at the time of purchase.

          If you’re purchasing a phone ABC phone company and XYZ phone company might both offer the latest iDroid model for $1000+tax and fees, but you have no idea what the specifics of those taxes and fees are until you actually get to the point of sale.

        • Pennomi@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          There’s nothing wrong with that, because it’s the advertised price. It’s unethical to say that something costs $1 and then charge them $2.

      • Hathaway@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        I didn’t say it wasn’t. I said it’s a weird issue to underline and run a campaign on.

    • Ech@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      “Small” inconveniences like this (among other things) are how asshole capitalists win. They nickle and dime us in ways that aren’t “worth” pushing back against. We tell ourselves “It’s just a little bit extra. Not worth pushing back just for that.”, but there are countless little bit extras and they drain us without resistance. And it’s not like individuals are going to be able to change any of that, so it’s entirely up to our governments to address those issues. Of course there are big things to work on too, but fixing some things doesn’t mean we can’t work on the big things too.

    • utopianfiat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I see you’ve bought into the Republican myth that the reason Americans have a shoddy social support infrastructure is due to budgetary tradeoffs. It’s not. It’s a failure of will of the American people to do what’s necessary to stop preventable innocent casualties.

      • Hathaway@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        Care to elaborate? I probably have, I was raised in that environment, though, I wouldn’t call myself right leaning on most things.

        • utopianfiat@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Isn’t there a way to spend the money you’re going to spend on that to spend it on like food availability, or affordable housing, or education…?

          I think this sentence is what I was trying to point out. Basically, it’s not a question of “pay for X or Y” but a question of “do we have the votes for X, will Americans reelect us for Y”. Let me detail:

          Americans don’t care about or understand the deficit

          There has never been a true austerity party in the US. Bush Sr. ran on cutting taxes. Bush Jr. ran on massive tax cuts. Trump’s taxation policy was a massive billionaire tax cut. Every single time a Republican has been in office for the past three decades they’ve exploded the deficit by cutting revenue without substantial enough spending cuts. They still win reelection.

          Americans “concerned about the deficit” typically fall into two camps: those who erroneously compare it to a household budget, and those who engage in vague pronouncements about its “impact on our children”. So one who seems to have a concrete idea of what will happen but is wrong, and one who seems not to know what the consequences will be but are worried sick about them.

          The reality is that the immediate and long-term impacts of the deficit are small, and the immediate and long-term impacts of failing to invest in infrastructure and social spending are very high

          What Americans should be concerned about vis. the future of our children is producing a new generation that is healthy, educated, productive, housed affordably, expanding in size, and comfortable in illness and old age. We should care about being able to get around the country fast without boiling the oceans. We should care about being able to survive natural disasters, global pandemics, terrorism, war, and resource shortages. These are all things worth creating deficit for. The adage “you have to spend money to make money” makes sense here.

          In summary

          I agree that we should be spending money on social support- but the failure to do both isn’t because there’s a limited amount of money we have to spend on one or the other, it’s a lack of control of the levers of power and a failure of will.

          • Hathaway@lemmy.zip
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            1 year ago

            Okay, I see where you’re coming from. I agree with it too. Thank you for typing this out! (So beautifully too. I’m on mobile so expect abysmal editing and a wall of text. Sorry not sorry.) I will say that I was definitely coming from it from the perspective of “you’re allocated x number of $ to do your work.” Which, as you’re getting at, really isn’t the true issue. It’s a systemic one.

            Interestingly, a lot of my “politically charged conversations” basically end up going down this path. But, how does one fix a systemic problem? Every time I try to come up with any sort of solution it basically turns to “damn I hope someone smarter than me has ideas cause mine are ‘burn it down’”.

            • thesohoriots@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              You’re not totally wrong with “burn it down” in the sense of bureaucracy. The sociologist Weber felt they were actually efficient systems up to a point, and even necessary for democracy, but then became the worst nightmares that we could never undo. And as we see much more recently, Graber argued that any time you asked the government to streamline, it would just increase regulations, paperwork, bureaucrats needed for the aforementioned, etc.

              So we have this necessary evil to start the kind of system we wanted in place, it’s only getting worse, and any candidate with smart ideas who wants a chance gets sucked right into it. “Reform” only reproduces the problem in a slightly different direction. Like Akira or a T-1000 I guess.

              • Hathaway@lemmy.zip
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                1 year ago

                Interesting. Okay, so let’s say, we do “burn it down”. Is it just the human condition? Are we doomed to repeat everything even if we could start anew tomorrow?

                I guess what I struggle with is, while I hate current status quo, I don’t see a situation where things are better if we did burn it down. In fact, they’re exponentially worse after all structure is hypothetically burned.

                • thesohoriots@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  You’ve hit the nail on the head here: we’ve been conditioned to believe there is no alternative. And frankly, reimagining an entire way of life is really intimidating. But the current way of living is not sustainable either.

                  I think of this as akin to Moses wandering the desert for 40 years (the ins and outs are contested among scholars, of course) — the purpose of wandering was to shed the lived memory of Egypt and allowing a new generation to start over with the knowledge of what happened before, but not the suffering of it.

                  Ultimately I’m against retreating into nihilism, nor do I think rationalizing cosmetic changes to the status quo as truly progressive is a solution either. We are forced to work and live in the “wrong state of things” so to speak, and we can either try to drag this out for generations or have some kind of “snap” that allows for a significant do-over with the fresh wounds of The Now very much on our minds.

    • Zoboomafoo@yiffit.net
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      1 year ago

      How many resources do you think it takes to ban junk fees?

      Because it’s nowhere comparable to the cost of any of your alternatives

      • Hathaway@lemmy.zip
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        1 year ago

        I get where you’re coming from but, if it’s such an easy win, why not just do it? Why campaign on it. He’s already in office lol. I hate politics.