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Comment by kevincox | Hacker News Reader

I think there should be a generic rule for everything that the advertised price is something that you can actually pay and get the product. No $50 concert tickets with $75 of fees, advertising that for less than $125 should be illegal.

Of course I'm sure people will get creative with "optional" upsells, the $50 ticket is in the building but highly obstructed, but I think this is at least a huge step forward.

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Nederlands has this rule in the law (as far as I know). You cannot sell a $50 ticket with a surprise $10 fee.

The product you sell must be fully usable at the advertised price.

I wonder how AirBnB gets around this. If you search for listings in The Netherlands you can see the service and cleaning fee not being added in on the map view, which seems like it’s a violation of the law you speak of.

They can apply it only for people either visiting from NL, or having their billing address in NL, or something like that.

I just went to airbnb.nl with my NL VPN active (I’m a US resident that was previously searching from airbnb.com) and sure enough the map prices show the actual price with all taxes and fees included when you visit airbnb.nl with a Dutch VPN active, unlike the American site. It also shows the price with all fees included if you visit airbnb.nl from the United States with no VPN active.

Interestingly, if you visit with the Dutch VPN active but instead on airbnb.com, you also see the price with everything included on the map regardless of whether the map search you are doing is in the NL or the USA. But if you visit airbnb.com from the USA without VPN and search for a destination in NL (or USA, but that might be obvious) you don’t get prices with fees included.

So it appears that AirBnB checks for either originating IP in NL or visiting via airbnb.nl to determine the behavior as of the time of this post. This is actually a great trick for me to learn as a States resident for when I want to browse AirBnB’s - I can just turn on my Dutch VPN for actual, non bullshit pricing on the map.

Isn’t this actually an EU wide regulation?

Hear hear, make it include tax and tip, too.

I live in Oregon (no sales tax), and it boggles my mind when travelling out of state that the $10 item at the store is suddenly $10.50 once tax is included. Why is it not included in the price?

I believe the logic is that it makes taxation something explicit that you are forced to notice. The idea being that an included tax would be invisible and allow for hidden changes and less recognition of the government's role.

That isn't a very compelling justification, since nothing stops businesses from continuing to include a tax estimate on the receipt even if it's included in the main price.

But you do include credit card fees, which is something that should be more explicit.

Exactly right. We should work to lessen the tax burden instead of incentivizing raising it by hiding the number.

> Exactly right. We should work to lessen the tax burden instead of incentivizing raising it by hiding the number.

This misses the point though. The problem exists at any tax rate greater than zero. Doesn't matter if it's a penny or 100% of the price, the issue is that the advertised price is not the monetary value that's expected to be exchanged for that product/service.

The point is that you shouldn’t _want_ it to include taxes, as that incentivizes worse behavior in governments. You should be reminded when you purchase something of how much is added on top by the locals.

There’s lots of exceptions, and it’s easier to compute a tax rather than figure out what taxable category something is and backing it out for tax exempt purchase.

More importantly, retailers don’t want to waste money and sowing confusion by advertising products with differing prices across jurisdictions.

IIRC you don't have to pay that in Washington, so you should still be paying the listed price :). Bit of an edge case though

Though not exactly a [citation needed], but certainly [implementation details needed]. Like, what, you're in a Target in Vancouver, WA, you pull out your OR driver license, and now they wave the sales tax? Or save the receipt and take it off your OR taxes later? In the case of the former, okay, I'd do that. For the latter, no, I'm not adding a piece of paper to the pile to save $0.50.

This used to be the case, and Target was exactly one of the companies that made it exactly like this. You'd show your Oregon ID card and the sales tax would be removed (the seller could claim against their sales tax due for a non-resident sale).

However, this was intended to benefit border cities--Vancouver, WA in particular really liked it--but Washington State has no income tax and so is heavily reliant on sales tax. So, as of July 1 2019, the exemption (on state sales tax; local sales tax isn't covered here) may only be claimed post-transaction by the buyer: https://dor.wa.gov/taxes-rates/retail-sales-tax/sales-tax-ex...

Lived in WA for over 20 years, and TIL...thanks for a quick follow-up.

State, County, and City taxes all vary wildly in different states. It's an annoyance for sure.

I would definitely try to include those.

Nathan is one step ahead of you

https://youtu.be/XbC0-tuYE2o?t=114

These are the kind of regulations that the government can introduce that actually help, not hurt markets.

When you take on a mortgage today, every mortgage has a standard coversheet that is identical between all lenders and lays out all the costs, interest rates and monthly payment in the exact same way.

That's a positive - increased transparency for consumers with minimal burden on businesses.

Australia has extremely strong consumer protections on things like this. It's really nice.

Shouldn't the same reasoning apply to search results? It should be illegal to claim "500000 results" but require additional spending of time, attention, data, and AI training work for each additional 200.

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