The United States is the absolute king of searching for ways in which you can suck just enough of the enjoyment out of doing something that it creates the most profit without alienating people to the degree that they stop paying for it. That's the topic of the article <a href="https://passingtime.substack.com/p/perfidious-pricing" source="Passing Time" author="Michael Bateman">Perfidious Pricing</a>, which deals with a practice he says is called <i>Drip Pricing</i>. I suppose it's what the inventors deem to be a clever way of describing a process whereby, instead of being presented with a single price, the customer sees a small price that entices the original purchase, but that grows as more fees and surcharges "drip" into it until the customer has to pay a completely different---and invariably much higher---price than originally imagined. <h>Manipulative Naming</h> In the author's case, it was a 20% "Fair Wage and Wellness Fee". <img attachment="2_percent_surcharge_for_staff_recruitment.jpg" align="right" caption="2% Surcharge for Staff Recruitment">Which, of course that's what they're going to call it, right? They're not going to call it the "Selling Children into Sex Slavery Fee" because no-one would even consider paying it. But if you call it something that guilts people into thinking that employees are going to go without adequate pay if you don't pony up, then you might slip it by without complaint. And it has to be something, something feel-good like that because no-one would pay a 12.5% fee like "Electricity, Heating, and Water", would they? And how high can they make the surcharge? In one place I've seen, it was 3%; in the linked article, it's 20%. Could it be 50%? 100%? 200%? Where does it end? Could they just advertise free food and then charge you fees and surcharges before you're allowed to leave the establishment? What happens if you don't pay these arbitrary fees? Do they call the police? And why is everything a percentage? Why doesn't it cap out at a fixed fee? If you spend a lot on a meal, say $200, then the staff gets $40 on top of that? Is there no limit to scaling up the salary? Literally everyone else has a cap on their hourly wage, but tipped labor fluctuates not only on the downside, but also on the upside. What an absolutely ridiculous way to run things. What about people who can’t afford the meal with the surcharge? They would have walked away from a restaurant that’s too expensive for them if the restaurant had been honest about the prices. Instead, the restaurant lured in customers with a “bait” and then “switched” the prices on them. The purely psychological nature of what the fee is called and how high it's allowed to be makes it very suspect. It doesn't matter what you want to call it, though, because we already have a word for this kind of practice: it's called "Bait and Switch". This practice is illegal in many, many commercial endeavors because it <i>wastes everyone's time</i>. The customer invests time in a transaction, <i>trusting that</i> the parameters of the transaction will not magically change before it's completed. The prices are supposed to let you choose whether you want to exchange that amount of value for the advertised product. If the advertised price is no longer the one that you're charged, then this deal is broken. <h>Tipping 2.0</h> But the system is already broken---at least in the U.S.---because this is already how tipping works, right? Restaurants get away with advertising lower prices because they externalize part of their labor costs into a magical fee that is applied afterwards. The only reason this works at all is the guilt induced by knowing that the waitstaff will simply be <i>vastly underpaid</i> if people don't include a generous tip. But what the hell is that all about? Why am I, as a customer, involved in the minutiae of a restaurant's bookkeeping? This isn't the case in many, many other places. Can you imagine if, as the owner of a software-consulting company, I would offer my customers a lower fee, but tell them that they can volunteer to pay 20% more or my employees won't be able to pay their rent or feed their children? This concept feels so outrageously inappropriate in every other context that it's only familiarity that lets otherwise-sane-and-reasonable people argue in favor of it. In the U.S., they don't even include tax in their advertised prices---even though there is <i>no way to avoid paying them</i>. How is it legal to advertise prices that don't include mandatory fees in a country that is so congenitally arithmetically challenged that making them figure out 8.25% of $6.59 amounts to torture? <h>It's not like that everywhere</h> All of these tacked-on fees, taxes, and surcharges are, of course, bullshit. As you can well imagine, none of this nonsense happens in Switzerland. The price is the price. If you want to buy something on a menu that's CHF20.-, then you drop a pretty little pink note with a "20" on it on the table <i>and you walk away.</i> Sure, sometimes you round up if it's CHF19.-, but you don't have to and no-one expects you too. It made more sense in the old days of cash, when you didn't want to watch the waitstaff grub around in their giant wallet to find a 50-cent piece for your change, so you generously told them to "keep it". It was kind of embarrassing because waiting to get 50 cents back felt like you were being cheap---but it also felt kind of weird giving an otherwise gainfully employed person 50 cents and then having them thank you for it. With cards, you just wave your card in the direction of the pay terminal and get on with your day. You ordered some food, they brought it, you both said hi, said have a nice day, and you all got on with it. It works because it wasn't a transaction between a noble and a servant. They are paid to find out which product you want, bring it to you, and collect the fees for it. When you get back from your lunch break, your job will be to use a power-wrench to tighten bolts or to enter data into an Excel spreadsheet. They're all just jobs that need to be done. There doesn't need to be a more complicated system than wages for that. People are trying like hell to more firmly establish the ludicrous practice of tipping, though---even in Switzerland. The reason is almost certainly something like: people are gullible morons easily guilted into making their own lives worse if doing so might make complete strangers think that they're slightly more decent human beings. It's largely how confidence games work---and society tends toward being a confidence game if we're not vigilant. <h>What are wages?</h> Could we get away from a wage-based system? Absolutely! But let's not pretend that's what we're doing with these fees and tips and surcharges. All of these complications of an otherwise simple system are proposed and promulgated by those who want to move costs away from themselves---externalizing them. In the end, our society needs people to do things in order for it to function. When you work on anything other than providing your basic needs, then you're trusting that society will value this labor enough that it provides your basic needs for you---or compensates you for having not taken care of your basic needs by providing you with something that you can trade to those who <i>can</i> provide you with your basic needs. That is, if I don't spend my time growing food for myself, then I have to trust that what I do spend my time doing will be compensated in some chain of purchasing with food or I will starve to death. I absolutely understand that there are many other facets that are of interest to society in this relationship---things that end up complicating the simple formula outlined above. I want to emphasize that the system outlined above is the <i>reason we started doing this in the first place</i>. We want, as a society to benefit from productivity that isn't directly associated with the production of basic needs, so we agree to take care of the basic needs for some so that they provide us with value at a higher level than basic. We just can't forget that this is the reason we're doing this because, otherwise, we can be fooled into believing that secondary or tertiary knock-on goals are actually the primary goals, in which case we continue to believe in a system that is no longer providing the basic needs for everyone. Which is kind of what we have, right? Almost no-one reading this article is involved in production that satisfies basic needs, and almost all of us are aware that at least some---if not many---of those who do provide those basic needs are not making ends meet---but we manage to ignore that we've broken the original deal because doing so is personally beneficial to us. God help us when we start to believe that, for example, keeping the labor force insecure and scared is actually beneficial for society. It's not beneficial for society, it's beneficial for an <i>elite segment</i> of society. If you happen to be in that segment and have no ethics, then you'll support a system that exploits those who can't defend themselves for your benefit. Consider the article <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/01/24/unemployment-inflation-janet-yellen/" author="Jon Schwartz" source="The Intercept">In Confidential Memo, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen Celebrated Unemployment As A “Worker-Discipline Device”</a>, where she's, <bq>[...] making the case for, as she writes, the positive “impact of heightened job insecurity.” A rise in worker insecurity in the mid-1990s meant everyone was too scared to ask for raises, which meant businesses wouldn’t need to hike prices, which meant even with the falling unemployment at the time, the Fed didn’t need to raise interest rates to slow the economy and throw people out of work.</bq> Once you get to that level of twisted justification, you really need to get back to basics and think about why we're doing what we're doing. Otherwise you end up in a place where 99% of your system is built to benefit an elite, while keeping the 99% of everyone else just simmering enough to continue to play along, but not angry enough to actually do something about it. Which takes me back to my original topic sentence above<fn>, <bq>The United States is the absolute king of searching for ways in which you can suck just enough of the enjoyment out of doing something that it creates the most profit without alienating people to the degree that they stop paying for it.</bq> Society started off with a decent idea and then forgot about it. Instead, we let what was originally a sound system be buried under layers of parasitic bullshit that funnels value away from those who've actually earned it. <h>Do you have to pay it?</h> I think you're justified in refusing to pay the surcharge and letting the restaurant know what you think by having a conversation with the manager publicly. People, we've already addressed this problem. There are laws against it. Just enforce them. Or rise up and refuse to pay. Resistance has to begin somewhere; maybe here? <hr> <ft>Did I just quote myself from the same article? You're damned right I did.</ft>