>[Amazon] said it had absorbed costs whenever possible, and only increased fees to address permanent costs
I wish journalists would stop simply reprinting intentionally misleading company spin like this without any attempt to refute it. Fuel costs are one of the least sticky price increases imaginable and are already decreasing after they peaked last once. Plus no one knows what inflation will be like in a year. There is nothing close to permanent about these cost increases.
The most charitable interpretation of these comments is that past increases were only because of permanent issues and this new surcharge represents a change in that policy. However if that is the case, this comment should more clearly denote that change and explain why this temporary increase is different and requires a change in policy.
Once the airlines discovered the "fees" trick every company has been salivating to get onboard.
I hate it - I don't CARE where the money is going, just charge me the price and don't try to pretend that various "fees" are affecting it. It's bad enough with listing various taxes, but made up "surcharges" are just accounting trickery.
I was trying to book a cabin over the Christmas holiday last year. They would list the cabin at $200 a night, and then add $100 "service fee" and $50 "cleaning fee" for my 3 day stay. What?! Surprised I didn't get an electric bill with it. I was so pissed off, I said forget it.
If you want $250 a night, then list $250 a night. Don't try and pull a fast one with some bullshit fees at the checkout.
In the context of short term lettings, it is actually a fairly logical thing, because there's a fairly constant overhead per new letting (admin of a new customer plus the cleaning).
It also incentivises longer stays, which is obviously in they interests to make it disproportionate, so I'm not saying that there's no ulterior motive, but it's not axiomatically unfair to reward longer lets (or penalise shorter lets) that don't incur so many one-off costs.
I have no problem with per-stay fees, and agree they make total sense.
My qualm is that they sometimes aren't included in the advertised price of the listing, which makes comparing listings much more difficult, and incentivizes owners to create huge cleaning fees to artificially lower their advertised price-per-night.
At least on Airbnb, they do show the total alongside the nightly rate. The nightly rate is emphasized, for no reason other than that it's smaller - but the total is shown right next to it.
Can you sort by the real price though? Obviously not, because it’s an intentional dark pattern. If all fixed fees were identical across Airbnb this would be much less heinous.
Airbnb in the UK lists and sorts by the total price. You can see the breakdown between nightly and one-off when you click through, but the headline price includes it. I think this might be too avoid breaking a regulation under Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 and/or Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008.
I see your point and also the other side. If the fees are based on costs based on the changeover (i.e. cleaning up before you arrive, after you leave), then a fixed $250 would cost someone staying 6 nights $75 more than $200 nightly +$150 fees (n=6; totalNightly=200+($150/n);).
They do it because it works, so you must be in the minority.
People often lament the lack of practical training for things like personal finance and media literacy in schools. We should add consumer awareness to that list. We are raising kids to become obedient little consumers.
FTC/FCC are supposed to protect people from misleading stuff like this and level the playing field so that companies can remain competitive without resorting to dark patterns because their competitors are.
Alternatively, we could, as a country, ban the display of partial charges on advertisement. In Europe it's standard for sales taxes and other charges to be included in prices displayed to consumers. We just don't do that over here because... I guess we like charging a stupid tax? That's what it is in the end, if you think the broom for 19.95 actually costs 19.95 and budget for that we'll punish you for not properly doing advanced mathematics.
This happened to me a bunch of times as a child visiting US from Chile where they don't break out the tax, saying Oh I can get this 4.95 thing at the BullshMart, then you take $5 and you get there and oh you need to come up with 38 cents in tax, sorry, waste of a trip. I get it if you live in USA you can adapt, but if you're coming from a different country it's a burden and it's wrong.
And weirdly it's the same right-wing guys in each country including the tax in Chile and breaking it out in US. In USA of course they want the citizens to hate taxes because taxes in USA support democracy, and they figure by making it a painful hidden cost they will get me, for instance, to hate taxes instead of putting them first. And I did in fact hate them when I visited, the trick worked on me, despite being an excellent math student.
In Chile, it's because the state needs money from somewhere for concrete, courts and cops (the three things right-wing guys actually think taxes are good for) and also for incredibly shitty orphanages and "albergues" whose purpose is be able to construct arguments around that there are in fact
already orphanages and "albergues" to deny real assistance...So they have regressive taxes, mostly paid for by VAT. So poor people and to a lesser extent the middle class don't protest that they're the tax base, they hide the tax. And in fact if you look at fancy magazines like Ed, an interior design magazine in Chile, they do break out the tax to communicate that you can get out of paying it, tee hee, or split it with the seller, on a $4000 USD Ottoman.
> This happened to me a bunch of times as a child visiting US from Chile where they don't break out the tax, saying Oh I can get this 4.95 thing at the BullshMart, then you take $5 and you get there and oh you need to come up with 38 cents in tax, sorry, waste of a trip. I get it if you live in USA you can adapt, but if you're coming from a different country it's a burden and it's wrong.
It's more that if you're not a child you're almost never spending the exact full contents of your wallet.
Why bother with an already lost war like "consumer education"? Fuel charges, cleaning costs, etc. are all the cost of doing business. Require companies to list the out the door price. If your distributor switches from fuel to electric they can lower their prices and do more business.
This just sets up Amazon to charge a flat fee while they lower their costs and reap all the benefits.
I have here a UPS bill for customs, the total charge comes to 44.45, the GST + PST (taxes, for the non-Canadians) due on the package was 4.98 + 6.97 the charges are as follows:
Entry Prep Fee: 19.95 (Basically shipping and handling through the port, even though UPS has an automated system for this)
Bond Fee: 6.00 (A surcharge to get more money in case charging all these BS fees causes you to not want to pay the fees)
COD/Online Fee: 5.00 (An additional surcharge to try and cover the risk of charging you so many surcharges)
Customs GST: 4.98 (the real number)
CA BC PST: 6.97 (the other half of the real number)
Brokerage GST/HST: 1.30 (taxes on the majority of their BS fees)
COD GST: .25 (taxes on their COD surcharge)
When I'm being asked to pay taxes on BS charges your company isn't actually paying... that's when I get truly irate. (Just a PSA for anyone shipping to Canada, please send packages via USPS not a fancy package carrier, CanadaPost is amazing compared to all the private companies up here)
Las Vegas hotels are horrible at this. You now have resort fees which sometimes are as much as the stated room rate! Pay attention to those fees when booking resorts!
LV pioneered this for what's essentially just a hotel room, but now I'm seeing it everywhere. A three-star hotel in RandoCity will tack on a resort fee.
Kind of like how Door Dash and others show free delivery, or $1.99 delivery. Then when you checkout, you have a "service" charge as well as a request to tip (i.e. actually pay because we aren't paying them anything) the delivery driver.
Kind of what MercadoLivre does. The seller pay extra to offer "free shipping", the product is listed as free shipping but depending on what it will cost MercadoLivre they add a surcharge during checkout.
Sales tax is added at the register, not as part of the price tag. This is a good system, as it lets people be aware of what voting for sales taxes costs them.
C'mon - do people really vote with sales tax in mind? I'd take the EU system any day of the week. If prices for <insert regular thing I buy> go up substantially and i find out that VAT went up then I have a reasonable claim that the government is responsible for affordability.
They are specifically calling it a "fuel and inflation surcharge" and not an "inflation and fuel surcharge" or even simply an "inflation surcharge." Fuel costs are at least 50% of the public explanation for this fee and there is no reason to believe that fuel prices will be this high next month let alone permanently.
Exactly. I am not asking for the reporters' opinion. I am asking for the reporter to try to reveal the truth to the reader. That is their job. Their job isn't to reprint press releases. They should ask for clarification and evidence.
There needs to be a greater degree of skepticism in the way the media covers powerful people, companies, and organizations. Amazon saying something doesn't mean that statement is true. It is the reporter's job to determine if it is true before passing that statement along to the reader. When the reporter is unable to confirm it as truth, the reporter should denote that lack of confirmation before repeating the statement. When the reporter can confirm something is false, such as the implication that fuel price increases are permanent, the reporter should note that as a lie.
Flat Earth News is a good book that digs into why news outlets pushing PR statements verbatim (alongside other problems) became a thing.
Basically fewer journalists with more column inches to fill using syndicated pieces and barely editing them mean the same company release can appear across all the platforms with minimal contextualisation.
>> Plus no one knows what inflation will be like in a year.
I wish people would stop thinking inflation is some mythical thing that can not be predicted... We know what it will be... High... because the people controlling the policies making inflation high still believe they are not the cause and are busy shifting the blame
> I wish journalists would stop simply reprinting intentionally misleading company spin like this without any attempt to refute it.
I agree that it's annoying to see outlets printing company spin but they would need evidence to refute such claims, especially nowadays where everyone is being accused of spreading misinformation and having an agenda.
How could they go about that on a per-statement basis and what would such a refutation look like?
Make it clear this is an un-substantiated claim by the company. This isn't print media another sentence costs nothing. "Amazon refused to comment on specific costs," "no details of absorbed costs were provided," or just use language like "Amazon claims X." This would require thinking about press releases instead of regurgitating them though.
Have you noticed that gas prices generally just sit there at the same price for YEARS at a time. They take various excuses (like this one) and do their 5-10 year bump. We'll be talking about gas being JUST $6 in 2030 and then the next crisis will bring it to $12 and it will, stay there for many years.
>Have you noticed that gas prices generally just sit there at the same price for YEARS at a time. They take various excuses (like this one) and do their 5-10 year bump.
This simply is not true. For example, gas was generally cheaper in the stretch from 2015-2021 than it was from 2011-2014[1].
I wish journalists would stop simply reprinting intentionally misleading company spin like this without any attempt to refute it. Fuel costs are one of the least sticky price increases imaginable and are already decreasing after they peaked last once. Plus no one knows what inflation will be like in a year. There is nothing close to permanent about these cost increases.
The most charitable interpretation of these comments is that past increases were only because of permanent issues and this new surcharge represents a change in that policy. However if that is the case, this comment should more clearly denote that change and explain why this temporary increase is different and requires a change in policy.