this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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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.
An increasing number of restaurants are pulling exactly this sort of bullshit--little 3.5% fees at the bottom of the total check disclosed only in fine print on the menu (if at all) tied to COVID, paying their staff, processing credit cards, etc. It needs to end. Pricing should be upfront so customers can compare what they're actually paying, not snuck in at the end.
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
Seems like a friendly enough response was given to your comment and you automatically assumed they were only interested in saying you're wrong.
Having a discussion is not "proving everyone wrong"
That was my point, thanks.
I see what you mean too. I think a lot of people on Lemmy are just terminally online and so they don't have regular conversations with real people all that often.
Thank you.
What are you talking about? You are the one who ranted about people proving you wrong.
You made a big deal out of someone being perfectly pleasant replying to you.
Your viewpoint of anyone responding to you with anything other than agreement as an attack seems to be the real issue.
I'm not upset, you shouldn't be either, it's not that big of a deal.
Especially when they were wrong. They're obviously going to pass along any actual cost they have one way or another.
That's not what's shady or what's being addressed. It's the $60 ***(plus $100 in unlisted fees we literally won't even let our support provide or estimate on signup) to lie about prices that's the problem.
I recommend reading either the quoted text, or the article. Preferably both.
I did. "Passing on costs" is entirely irrelevant to everything.
The entire point of all of this is that service providers are using nebulous fee structures to lie about pricing. That's the entire thing. There is nothing else.
Um, do you only have conversations with people who agree with you?
People in real life don't nitpick every word you say.
No, that's fair. But also, when you're conversing in "real life", people probably aren't paying that much attention to every word you say and don't care enough to "nitpick".
I think it's worse here on Lemmy tbh
Edit: wait fuck did I just do it by accident?