9 ms·

You're getting lots of replies from (I presume) Americans, who are used to much scammier business behavior than what I know from Germany and you describe in Aus

You're getting lots of replies from (I presume) Americans, who are used to much scammier business behavior than what I know from Germany and you describe in Australia. One related example is the pervasive practice in America of displaying a price without fees (like "resort fees" for hotels that can be +50%) and of course taxes, with the actual price only becoming apparent after additional effort is invested in the checkout process.

Mandatum 5y ago
True, my views are non-American. For example when I go to a convenience store, I pay the price listed on the item. I don't have to do math in my head that's +x% sales or state tax. That type of practice just isn't acceptable anywhere else.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  > I don't have to do math in my head that's +x% sales or state tax. That type of practice just isn't acceptable anywhere else. Oblig: sales/retail taxes in the US vary city-by-city. While just like the rest of the world: US companies put their MSRP on products - but it would be unfair to expect retailers to charge the MSRP and eat the tax themselves because some areas have zero sales tax but others have a 10% tax. That's bigger than the profit-margin on many items sold at retail - and the simplest solution is just to have everything understand that the price on a box is the pre-local-tax price. And everyone (most people? or just most people on HN...) know roughly what their local sales tax rates are anyway (mine's around 9%) and as everyone pays by card having exact change isn't an issue.
  - inetknght 5y ago
    > but it would be unfair to expect retailers to charge the MSRP and eat the tax themselves because some areas have zero sales tax but others have a 10% tax. I disagree. If you want to sell something to a market then you should tailor your product to that market. That means doing some basic research about what the local taxes and laws are.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      If you travel even 10 miles (16 km), sales tax changes. It is at the county level. The manufacturer cannot afford to analyze this level of granular market and the associated sales tax. Ideally, the seller should list the price + tax if it is physically sold in a store. This should be fixed (along with the tips culture in US). Online retailers still have this problem. Sales tax is literally based on the zip code you enter during the checkout page. So how can this problem be solved? The only solution I see is a federally controlled fixed sales tax similar to EU. But, that would be unconstitutional in US. States hold the power and additional municipal taxes are at the county level. I think you're trivializing the matter. I've had several conversations with Europeans about it and we eventually come to an understanding that its not easy. On surface, it sounds simple if we assume is a simple nation-wide VAT tax.
      - burnished 5y ago
        Its because your argument fundamentally does not hold water. "It would be too hard for manufacturers..." just is not true. You are trying to tell us that the only way to price something is printed on the original box (not even the product! just the box) and that it would be too onerous to expect them to price at each location accordingly. Are you really trying to insist that a sticker is too hard? Too onerous a task?
        systemvoltage 5y ago
        Perhaps you're mistaking seller vs manufacturer? If the former, I already said: > Ideally, the seller should list the price + tax if it is physically sold in a store. This should be fixed (along with the tips culture in US).
      - wst_ 5y ago
        You could pay consumer tax not by the place you live in but by the place where business is located. Any additional taxes could be added by independent institution. Something like customs, just on local scale. Living in couple of countries In EU and Asia, I can't imagine not knowing total price up front. It's pushing legislation problems on the end customer.
  - DominikPeters 5y ago
    Lots of other things also vary city-by-city, like rent and income or business taxes. Equal MSRPs impose an unfair burden on retailers in expensive places in pretty much the same way as local sales taxes. Businesses everywhere else manage these difficulties without cognitive burden for customers.
  - metafunctor 5y ago
    The seller decides on the price, and labels the goods accordingly. Whatever "recommended retail price" may be printed on the box is of course covered with a sticker with the actual price. It's about consumer protection. Buyers must know exactly how much they will need to pay to purchase an item BEFORE they pay. It would be unfair to expect consumers to calculate these things.
    - stuaxo 5y ago
      In Europe and the UK that won't fly. If it came with a price printed on the box, that's the price they should sell it at.
      - bmsleight_ 5y ago
        Not a lawyer not legal advice. Not correct. The price on the 'Box' is the invitation to treat [0]. The price you pay in the UK is the verbal Offer at the checkout. They may/should sell it a the RRP, but it is not correct in law. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat
      - Acinyx 5y ago
        Or less, as the store is allowed to discount (officially the reverse: the manufacturer is not allowed to set prices of anyone except themselves, so if a store takes almost no margin or even sells below price, the manufacturers is forbidden to even talk about it.
  - vertex-four 5y ago
    I’ve lived in the UK and Germany and it’s incredibly rare that I’ve seen prices printed on the goods themselves. There’s a label on the shelf with the price. Even when there is a price on the box (usually much smaller stores - never supermarkets), the label on the shelf is often a different price.
    - Loic 5y ago
      To complement, in the EU, if you have two prices, one on the shelf and one on the box, the cheapest one is the right one. The only goods where prices are printed on the "box" are not in boxes, they are books or clothes. When items get individual prices, they are usually small sticker prices and effectively only in small shops or discount prices in bigger stores.
      - Macha 5y ago
        It's not entirely that simple - if there's a store branded price on the shelf or a sticker, that takes precedence over any MSRP printed on the product itself by the manufacturer. Otherwise people could just rip off store branded stickers and opt out of the store's markup. Maybe it's just not become an issue since the MSRP on most product packaging here is in £ or $ as they just reuse the UK or sometimes US packaging so it's clear that price is not aimed at Irish consumers.
  - oblio 5y ago
    So you mean the seller doesn't know the final price before selling? They can't relabel products themselves or they can't mention the final price on the shelves? They just don't want to do it.
  - disgu 5y ago
    Having lived in the US this reasoning makes absolutely no sense. It's not like every store charges MSRP or that stores don't have sales. Every store pretty much has its own pricing and they have no problem showing this specific store's pricing without the added tax. It would be ridiculously simple to show that specific price with taxes added.
- hansvm 5y ago
  It's even enshrined into law in some states and locales. A few businesses have tried to market themselves as "no-nonsense, no-bullshit" and put the right prices on things, but that's totally illegal in parts of the US.
  - patates 5y ago
    It's illegal to put on the price the customer is actually going to pay? My search attempt failed ("illegal to put price with VAT" neither g nor ddg liked it), please tell me more!
    - gberger 5y ago
      In the US it's called sales tax, not VAT, that may be why you're not getting results
    - TomSwirly 5y ago
      In fact, there was a wine store in New York City that tried to post the real prices and had some legal issues, so they would post _both_ the "price before tax" and the actual price (in some format that allowed them to evade the laws, so stupid). I now live in the Netherlands. All prices are what you pay, _and_ the receipt breaks down how much of that goes to taxes, which I think is completely logical.
      - NotEvil 5y ago
        Same way it is here in india too
      - csunbird 5y ago
        I think, showing the taxes separately is a very good idea in principle, so that you know how much tax you are paying. I usually hate the fact that I can not see how much tax I am paying, although, in Germany, the amount of tax is shown in the checkout pages.
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
forgingahead 5y ago
This is precisely why it's unlikely any regulation will occur to stop this at the source. As long as American customers are happy to bend over to shady business practices by dominant American businesses, the rest of the world will keep experiencing the knock-on effects of this behaviour.
- dmingod666 5y ago
  In your country if you get into a yearly contract to rent a place and then break the contract in 2 months. Are there any consequences for the person breaking the contract?
  - Maxion 5y ago
    Of course, if there is no real reason to break the lease. E.g. if you're moving to a different city for work or starting to study. Further, if something is advertised as XX Eur/mo it's implied it's a month-by-month thing. Situations you described are very very clearly marked as being a contract with a start and an end date as well as a total including any and all fees as well as cancelation terms. You can't hide essential terms deep within a several page legalese document.
    - dmingod666 5y ago
      The first word of the product name is "Annual". If someone proceeds to buy an "Annual" product with a lower price and doesn't bother to understand the meaning of why it's "Annual", I have no sympathy for that guy. I am on the same plan myself, it was very clear to me what they were trying to sell. 3 options, 1 yearly, 2nd yearly with monthly payment and third pure monthly. I did not have to read any long contracts to understand this. If people don't do due diligence of 5 mins to find what is going on, it's on them..
      - Kudos 5y ago
        This is what dark patterns rely on, why the hell would you be in support of companies taking advantage of people? Have you never had anything like this happen to you? Maybe you were tired or in a rush and a dark pattern ended up costing you money you didn't intend to spend? It's happened to me, and I'd dare day most people reading this.
cbmuser 5y ago
> You're getting lots of replies from (I presume) Americans, who are used to much scammier business behavior than what I know from Germany and you describe in Australia. Berlin‘s public transport company has the exact condition in their terms of service. > https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/streit-ueber-monatskarten-in-coronakrise-verbraucherzentrale-fordert-kulanz-vom-verkehrsverbund-berlin-brandenburg/25790796.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/streit-ueber-monatskarten... („ Zudem sei eine Kündigung für Abonnenten unattraktiv, da sich für die schon genutzten Monate nachträglich der Preis erhöhe, hieß es.“) It‘s definitely not a scam or rip-off, just a case of someone not reading the contract before signing it.
phreeza 5y ago
The exact same thing (monthly fee, 12 or 24 month contract) is very common in Germany for mobile phone and home internet plans.
- nicbou 5y ago
  That's what I was thinking. If you want to get out of a contract early, you'll usually lose some money. That's true for rent, public transit passes, and many other types of subscription. If there are no consequences for bailing out of a contract, it makes them rather pointless.
  - vkazanov 5y ago
    But then there's always some kind of a cool down period, i.e. a time during which one can cancel a subscription without penalties. At least this is how I expect things to work here, in the UK.
    - nicbou 5y ago
      There's a 14 day cancellation period after you sign certain contracts, but I don't know the details. Beyond that, a contract is a contract.
- hnbad 5y ago
  True but this would indeed be considered very unusual and surprising for software if it wasn't indicated explicitly. I just checked and while they do only indicate "X €/month" on the product page, as soon as you enter the checkout process it says "yearly subscription, monthly payment - Y €/month" with the additional options "yearly subscription, advance payment - X €/year" and "monthly subscription - Z €/month". I'm not sure how they're getting away with the misleading prices on the product pages tho (usually there's at least an asterisk indicating this comes with additional conditions and obligations).
- p49k 5y ago
  The complaint here isn't that there is a contract; it's that the user is deceived by dark patterns into thinking they've entered a plan with no contract. By contrast, going to tmobile.de or blau.de, even without speaking German it's extremely clear that prices are based on 24-month contracts. Never is the monthly price mentioned without a clear label below it indicating 24 month terms. Blau even takes it a step further and places the text twice in the box, once in the UI and another time directly below the price.
p49k 5y ago
Also, let's be honest: a lot of replies from people who need to believe this is ethical because they want to reserve the right to use (or already use) this dark pattern in a product as a "growth hack". Or people who work for an employer who already uses dark patterns of this nature. Startups are rife with this kind of abuse.
- Macha 5y ago
  Yeah, I've noticed that on HN with some scammy business practices, there is a definite case of "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." People would rather this is allowed and it becomes a game of buyer beware, because in many cases they are the sellers and know the average buyer will not beware.
indymike 5y ago
American here. Adobe's actions are indefensible.
Tenoke 5y ago
>Germany What? ISP and similar contracts in Germany almody work exactly like this but with 2 years minimum not 1 and no cancelation in the last 3 months of the period.
trboyden 5y ago
This is a misconception of what is actually required by US state tax laws. The business is required to pay the tax on retail sales - they are not required to charge the consumer that tax. The fact that it has become common practice for retailers to pass the tax on to consumers to pay is the real issue at large. The same applies to regulatory fees that the consumer pays on utility bills or telecommunication services. The consumer isn't supposed to be paying those, the business is. One of the biggest complaints in current US tax law is that businesses don't pay their fair share. Taxpayers as consumers are directly responsible for that, by not demanding that businesses start eating these taxes that they are supposed to be paying, by putting pressure on politicians to make that the law. Yes, it would be difficult to enforce (business adding tax into product price), but not impossible, as businesses have to track COGS (cost of goods sold).

Mandatum 5y ago

True, my views are non-American. For example when I go to a convenience store, I pay the price listed on the item. I don't have to do math in my head that's +x% sales or state tax. That type of practice just isn't acceptable anywhere else.

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
> I don't have to do math in my head that's +x% sales or state tax. That type of practice just isn't acceptable anywhere else. Oblig: sales/retail taxes in the US vary city-by-city. While just like the rest of the world: US companies put their MSRP on products - but it would be unfair to expect retailers to charge the MSRP and eat the tax themselves because some areas have zero sales tax but others have a 10% tax. That's bigger than the profit-margin on many items sold at retail - and the simplest solution is just to have everything understand that the price on a box is the pre-local-tax price. And everyone (most people? or just most people on HN...) know roughly what their local sales tax rates are anyway (mine's around 9%) and as everyone pays by card having exact change isn't an issue.
- inetknght 5y ago
  > but it would be unfair to expect retailers to charge the MSRP and eat the tax themselves because some areas have zero sales tax but others have a 10% tax. I disagree. If you want to sell something to a market then you should tailor your product to that market. That means doing some basic research about what the local taxes and laws are.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    If you travel even 10 miles (16 km), sales tax changes. It is at the county level. The manufacturer cannot afford to analyze this level of granular market and the associated sales tax. Ideally, the seller should list the price + tax if it is physically sold in a store. This should be fixed (along with the tips culture in US). Online retailers still have this problem. Sales tax is literally based on the zip code you enter during the checkout page. So how can this problem be solved? The only solution I see is a federally controlled fixed sales tax similar to EU. But, that would be unconstitutional in US. States hold the power and additional municipal taxes are at the county level. I think you're trivializing the matter. I've had several conversations with Europeans about it and we eventually come to an understanding that its not easy. On surface, it sounds simple if we assume is a simple nation-wide VAT tax.
    - burnished 5y ago
      Its because your argument fundamentally does not hold water. "It would be too hard for manufacturers..." just is not true. You are trying to tell us that the only way to price something is printed on the original box (not even the product! just the box) and that it would be too onerous to expect them to price at each location accordingly. Are you really trying to insist that a sticker is too hard? Too onerous a task?
      - systemvoltage 5y ago
        Perhaps you're mistaking seller vs manufacturer? If the former, I already said: > Ideally, the seller should list the price + tax if it is physically sold in a store. This should be fixed (along with the tips culture in US).
    - wst_ 5y ago
      You could pay consumer tax not by the place you live in but by the place where business is located. Any additional taxes could be added by independent institution. Something like customs, just on local scale. Living in couple of countries In EU and Asia, I can't imagine not knowing total price up front. It's pushing legislation problems on the end customer.
- DominikPeters 5y ago
  Lots of other things also vary city-by-city, like rent and income or business taxes. Equal MSRPs impose an unfair burden on retailers in expensive places in pretty much the same way as local sales taxes. Businesses everywhere else manage these difficulties without cognitive burden for customers.
- metafunctor 5y ago
  The seller decides on the price, and labels the goods accordingly. Whatever "recommended retail price" may be printed on the box is of course covered with a sticker with the actual price. It's about consumer protection. Buyers must know exactly how much they will need to pay to purchase an item BEFORE they pay. It would be unfair to expect consumers to calculate these things.
  - stuaxo 5y ago
    In Europe and the UK that won't fly. If it came with a price printed on the box, that's the price they should sell it at.
    - bmsleight_ 5y ago
      Not a lawyer not legal advice. Not correct. The price on the 'Box' is the invitation to treat [0]. The price you pay in the UK is the verbal Offer at the checkout. They may/should sell it a the RRP, but it is not correct in law. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat
    - Acinyx 5y ago
      Or less, as the store is allowed to discount (officially the reverse: the manufacturer is not allowed to set prices of anyone except themselves, so if a store takes almost no margin or even sells below price, the manufacturers is forbidden to even talk about it.
- vertex-four 5y ago
  I’ve lived in the UK and Germany and it’s incredibly rare that I’ve seen prices printed on the goods themselves. There’s a label on the shelf with the price. Even when there is a price on the box (usually much smaller stores - never supermarkets), the label on the shelf is often a different price.
  - Loic 5y ago
    To complement, in the EU, if you have two prices, one on the shelf and one on the box, the cheapest one is the right one. The only goods where prices are printed on the "box" are not in boxes, they are books or clothes. When items get individual prices, they are usually small sticker prices and effectively only in small shops or discount prices in bigger stores.
    - Macha 5y ago
      It's not entirely that simple - if there's a store branded price on the shelf or a sticker, that takes precedence over any MSRP printed on the product itself by the manufacturer. Otherwise people could just rip off store branded stickers and opt out of the store's markup. Maybe it's just not become an issue since the MSRP on most product packaging here is in £ or $ as they just reuse the UK or sometimes US packaging so it's clear that price is not aimed at Irish consumers.
- oblio 5y ago
  So you mean the seller doesn't know the final price before selling? They can't relabel products themselves or they can't mention the final price on the shelves? They just don't want to do it.
- disgu 5y ago
  Having lived in the US this reasoning makes absolutely no sense. It's not like every store charges MSRP or that stores don't have sales. Every store pretty much has its own pricing and they have no problem showing this specific store's pricing without the added tax. It would be ridiculously simple to show that specific price with taxes added.
hansvm 5y ago
It's even enshrined into law in some states and locales. A few businesses have tried to market themselves as "no-nonsense, no-bullshit" and put the right prices on things, but that's totally illegal in parts of the US.
- patates 5y ago
  It's illegal to put on the price the customer is actually going to pay? My search attempt failed ("illegal to put price with VAT" neither g nor ddg liked it), please tell me more!
  - gberger 5y ago
    In the US it's called sales tax, not VAT, that may be why you're not getting results
  - TomSwirly 5y ago
    In fact, there was a wine store in New York City that tried to post the real prices and had some legal issues, so they would post _both_ the "price before tax" and the actual price (in some format that allowed them to evade the laws, so stupid). I now live in the Netherlands. All prices are what you pay, _and_ the receipt breaks down how much of that goes to taxes, which I think is completely logical.
    - NotEvil 5y ago
      Same way it is here in india too
    - csunbird 5y ago
      I think, showing the taxes separately is a very good idea in principle, so that you know how much tax you are paying. I usually hate the fact that I can not see how much tax I am paying, although, in Germany, the amount of tax is shown in the checkout pages.
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago

forgingahead 5y ago

This is precisely why it's unlikely any regulation will occur to stop this at the source. As long as American customers are happy to bend over to shady business practices by dominant American businesses, the rest of the world will keep experiencing the knock-on effects of this behaviour.

dmingod666 5y ago
In your country if you get into a yearly contract to rent a place and then break the contract in 2 months. Are there any consequences for the person breaking the contract?
- Maxion 5y ago
  Of course, if there is no real reason to break the lease. E.g. if you're moving to a different city for work or starting to study. Further, if something is advertised as XX Eur/mo it's implied it's a month-by-month thing. Situations you described are very very clearly marked as being a contract with a start and an end date as well as a total including any and all fees as well as cancelation terms. You can't hide essential terms deep within a several page legalese document.
  - dmingod666 5y ago
    The first word of the product name is "Annual". If someone proceeds to buy an "Annual" product with a lower price and doesn't bother to understand the meaning of why it's "Annual", I have no sympathy for that guy. I am on the same plan myself, it was very clear to me what they were trying to sell. 3 options, 1 yearly, 2nd yearly with monthly payment and third pure monthly. I did not have to read any long contracts to understand this. If people don't do due diligence of 5 mins to find what is going on, it's on them..
    - Kudos 5y ago
      This is what dark patterns rely on, why the hell would you be in support of companies taking advantage of people? Have you never had anything like this happen to you? Maybe you were tired or in a rush and a dark pattern ended up costing you money you didn't intend to spend? It's happened to me, and I'd dare day most people reading this.

cbmuser 5y ago

> You're getting lots of replies from (I presume) Americans, who are used to much scammier business behavior than what I know from Germany and you describe in Australia. Berlin‘s public transport company has the exact condition in their terms of service. > https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/streit-ueber-monatskarten-in-coronakrise-verbraucherzentrale-fordert-kulanz-vom-verkehrsverbund-berlin-brandenburg/25790796.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/streit-ueber-monatskarten... („ Zudem sei eine Kündigung für Abonnenten unattraktiv, da sich für die schon genutzten Monate nachträglich der Preis erhöhe, hieß es.“) It‘s definitely not a scam or rip-off, just a case of someone not reading the contract before signing it.

phreeza 5y ago

The exact same thing (monthly fee, 12 or 24 month contract) is very common in Germany for mobile phone and home internet plans.

nicbou 5y ago
That's what I was thinking. If you want to get out of a contract early, you'll usually lose some money. That's true for rent, public transit passes, and many other types of subscription. If there are no consequences for bailing out of a contract, it makes them rather pointless.
- vkazanov 5y ago
  But then there's always some kind of a cool down period, i.e. a time during which one can cancel a subscription without penalties. At least this is how I expect things to work here, in the UK.
  - nicbou 5y ago
    There's a 14 day cancellation period after you sign certain contracts, but I don't know the details. Beyond that, a contract is a contract.
hnbad 5y ago
True but this would indeed be considered very unusual and surprising for software if it wasn't indicated explicitly. I just checked and while they do only indicate "X €/month" on the product page, as soon as you enter the checkout process it says "yearly subscription, monthly payment - Y €/month" with the additional options "yearly subscription, advance payment - X €/year" and "monthly subscription - Z €/month". I'm not sure how they're getting away with the misleading prices on the product pages tho (usually there's at least an asterisk indicating this comes with additional conditions and obligations).
p49k 5y ago
The complaint here isn't that there is a contract; it's that the user is deceived by dark patterns into thinking they've entered a plan with no contract. By contrast, going to tmobile.de or blau.de, even without speaking German it's extremely clear that prices are based on 24-month contracts. Never is the monthly price mentioned without a clear label below it indicating 24 month terms. Blau even takes it a step further and places the text twice in the box, once in the UI and another time directly below the price.

p49k 5y ago

Also, let's be honest: a lot of replies from people who need to believe this is ethical because they want to reserve the right to use (or already use) this dark pattern in a product as a "growth hack". Or people who work for an employer who already uses dark patterns of this nature. Startups are rife with this kind of abuse.

Macha 5y ago
Yeah, I've noticed that on HN with some scammy business practices, there is a definite case of "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." People would rather this is allowed and it becomes a game of buyer beware, because in many cases they are the sellers and know the average buyer will not beware.

indymike 5y ago

American here. Adobe's actions are indefensible.

Tenoke 5y ago

>Germany What? ISP and similar contracts in Germany almody work exactly like this but with 2 years minimum not 1 and no cancelation in the last 3 months of the period.

trboyden 5y ago

This is a misconception of what is actually required by US state tax laws. The business is required to pay the tax on retail sales - they are not required to charge the consumer that tax. The fact that it has become common practice for retailers to pass the tax on to consumers to pay is the real issue at large. The same applies to regulatory fees that the consumer pays on utility bills or telecommunication services. The consumer isn't supposed to be paying those, the business is. One of the biggest complaints in current US tax law is that businesses don't pay their fair share. Taxpayers as consumers are directly responsible for that, by not demanding that businesses start eating these taxes that they are supposed to be paying, by putting pressure on politicians to make that the law. Yes, it would be difficult to enforce (business adding tax into product price), but not impossible, as businesses have to track COGS (cost of goods sold).