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AT&T's website raising the price every time I refresh the page
- TechBro8615 5y agoIt’s funny, this is exactly what weev went to jail for doing to AT&T. Apparently it’s okay if you increment a number in every HTTP response, but not if you do it in the request!
- woah 5y agoIntent is very important in the law
- rolph 5y agook so the price goes up on page refresh, ok lets just assume thats now a given, and wonder just how high can the price go? Can we for instance jack the price up to thousands, perhaps millions of dollars? most importantly when contacting ATT to purchase at such price, will sales think that is reasonable, or will they have a different price in front of them?
- mring33621 5y agoDefinitely a bug. I JUST NOW experienced the opposite of this with an airport parking website. I double-checked my reservation dates (maybe hit the back button in doing so) before pulling the trigger on the order button and it applied my $19 'free day' discount twice. And, yes, my credit card was charged the post-double discount value!
- someotherperson 5y agoAvianca -- a Colombian airline -- does this too. It's really irritating. They also jack up the prices if you're viewing it in COP vs USD, to the point where the price can vary by >50%.
- colinmhayes 5y agoEvery airline does price discrimination.
- InitialLastName 5y agoLots of places do price discrimination, but there's an honest way and a dishonest way to do it. Honest way: "Here's a base price for the product; here are some extras (even if Veblen) that you can also get by giving us more money". Lots of video games do this (buy the presale premium edition, get some merch); streaming sites also do this (see Netflix's pricing tiers). Dishonest way: "Here's your price." (Unsaid: it's different than Chad's price, but there is no way to know what factors make that distinction).
- deathanatos 5y agoThere's price discrimination, and there's airlines. Airlines will tell you "An economy seat on this flight costs $100. There is 1 ticket left at this price." ; you'll think "Great!" and proceed to click into it, with the intent to buy at that price. You'll get to the part where you need to choose your (specific, not simply class of) seat on the plane, and the diagram will show no seats available: your only option will be to "upgrade" to a costlier seat. So, in reality, there weren't any seats at that price, and the whole "There is n seats at this price" thing was simple bait & switch meant to just wear you down into purchasing the more expensive seat.
- toast0 5y agoI'm sure some of this is just scumminess, but there's also the possibility of concurrent access, and someone else booked while you were thinking. There's also the more likely issue where airlines often outsource inventory management[1] and they have to pay a fee per search for realtime inventory (and those searches are slow), so they cache a lot of things and only get realtime inventory when you're very close to booking; then they often do a very poor job of cache invalidation (because it's hard) There's a lot of ways you could organize the data so it's less terrible, but all of those involve a lot more IT involvement than airlines want to invest it. [1] often to Sabre or Galilelo or similar
- docdeek 5y agoI seem to recall that there was a proposal in Europe where such pricing practices were to be - if not outlawed - then made more transparent by having websites explain that they were offering different prices for the same service/product, and why the price might differ (currency, referring site etc).
- mushyhammer 5y agoEasy. Add an asterisk and nobody will follow it. Problem fixed. That’s actually how we got legal copy longer than the content.
- gruez 5y agoIt doesn't even need to be an asterisk/fine print. All you need is enough companies doing it for CYA reasons that it becomes meaningless. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_California_Proposition_65
- ng55QPSK 5y agoThere was discussion in Europe that you also will see different/higher prices if you access pages by an iPhone.
- agilob 5y agoThis is very common with vehicle and house insurance. Getting a quote from iPhone results in a higher quote than using Firefox
- mushyhammer 5y agoI don’t know how it compares to Windows and Android, but in South East Asia I get “mobile prices” on my iPhone and they’re actually lower than on the desktop.
- capableweb 5y agoSouth America/Europe here. Booking.com does the same, cheaper prices on mobile than via desktop/laptop.
- sofixa 5y agoThat's what they advertise, but multiple times when checking the price is absolutely the same on desktop (from a different account). They've already been caught in false advertising so i don't see why they continue to do it
- mushyhammer 5y agoPrices are so flexible I usually find a hotel and then Google it to find a better price, even if I end up on the same site. The worst thing is when they advertise a price without taxes, which unfortunately is not illegal in most of the world. I think in Europe you’re required to show the final price.
- chrisBob 5y agoIf they are calculating the price in JS then maybe it is worth me spending a few minutes with the console open on their website to try and bring down my monthly bill. Yes, I would like to switch to the new $10 plan!
- rossdavidh 5y agoCan the number of refreshes be set to a negative number, perhaps?
- mywittyname 5y agoThis might be computer fraud & abuse.
- henriquez 5y agoIf the Javascript code is running on your own computer then you by definition have authorized access. By the same token, AT&Ts malicious pricing malware running in your browser could be construed of "unauthorized access" of your own computer, thus AT&T would be violating CFAA.
- dahfizz 5y agoYou could argue that you have access to their JS. But as soon as you modify that JS to do something they don't want to their backend servers, that's most likely unlawful.
- elldoubleyew 5y agoWhen I was in college my friend figured out a major fast food chain had a flaw in its API with the way it validated coupon codes. The server validated that the coupon code was legitimate, but the actual discount value of the coupon code was validated client side in JS for some reason. So he could turn any 10% off coupon into a 100% off coupon by modifying the API requests during the checkout flow. I'm sure this was illegal but he ate a lot of free fast food before they ever fixed it.
- chrisseaton 5y agoWow even the cheapest price is super expensive! Is that how much TV costs in the US?
- _jal 5y agoWelcome to the country that loves to shout about the virtues of the free market almost as much as it loves captured markets. Just wait until you see US medical bills.
- chrisseaton 5y agoMy mobile phone bill with unlimited data is £17.99 a month.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoMy mobile bill with unlimited (7.5g before being throttled) data is $25/mo. I could have gone with $15/mo if I didn't use so much data. You can spend more but you're basically just paying for the privilege of having a provider that more readily offers flagship phones subsidized via contract.
- chrisseaton 5y agoOh right I thought for some reason people often paid like $70 for phone contracts in the US.
- laptop-man 5y agoiirc we are paying 280ish a month for 3 phones. I think 2 are fully paid off. with "unlimited data" that is capped at 15g. unfortunately it's the only provider that works where we live in Michigan
- cebert 5y agoI live in Michigan too. Have you tried Visible, Verizon’s discount carrier? It works great for me in Greater Detroit region, the thumb, and up north. I pay $25/mo for unlimited everything.
- axg11 5y agoThis is most likely a bug rather than malicious intent or predatory pricing. This type of pricing makes zero sense from a conversions point of view. Don't get me wrong, every telco in North America is an oligopolistic, stagnant, rent-seeking, anti-consumer pile of crap, but I doubt this is intentional.
- rambojazz 5y agoThis thing with these "bugs" is, they always favor the seller. For example they never decrease the price.
- Raicuparta 5y agoBugs that make things ridiculously cheap (or free) happen all the time.
- mortenjorck 5y agoAgreed, though I wonder what the original intent was. My guess is there was still a variable pricing scheme, but probably only varying by $10, with the display code not expecting its value to get saved locally.
- phkahler 5y ago>> This is most likely a bug rather than malicious intent or predatory pricing. Hahahaha. It takes more code to add $10 to a price. It takes a cookie or something to remember how much they quoted you last time. This explicitly programmed behavior can NOT be a bug, it's a feature that someone took time to implement. The "feature" might be buggy in the sense that's its too obvious and perhaps was only supposed to increase the price once or something, but the overall implementation is almost certainly not a bug.
- axg11 5y agoDo you work in software development? I have, on multiple occasions, introduced bugs that are orders of magnitude wackier than this.
- gruez 5y agoIt's hilarious how most people in that thread are jumping on the hate train and taking the post at face value, despite not a single person confirming they can reproduce it. Surely there's somebody with an at&t account that's reading this thread that could take 60 seconds to check themselves?
- temp8964 5y agoThe thing is, with AT&T's design, even if you can't reproduce it, doesn't mean it is not real.
- gruez 5y ago1. it's not necessarily that nobody successfully reproduced it, it's that nobody even tried and everybody's gobbling it up at face value. 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot seems relevant here
- shakezula 5y agoExactly this. There are people in that Reddit thread claiming that using a Mac will make companies charge you more too, with absolutely zero proof of any of these claims. People will go to endless lengths to justify their spending habits.
- temp8964 5y agoYes. The person produced the video should share his AT&T account or even his desktop account and open for remote, so that everyone can login to try it out.
- gruez 5y agoAgain, you're missing the point. The problem isn't with the OP, it's that everybody else didn't bother to reproduce it, and is uncritically believing it despite the lack of replication.
- NetBeck 5y agoThe packages increasing by $10 have an extra $10 DVR charge. The only static price to the left doesn’t mention a DVR fee.
- jp57 5y agoAppropriate that this is posted in /r/AssholeDesign, as AT&T is a company that seems to have embraced AssholeDesign as a mission and organizational philosophy.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bdcravens 5y agoAnytime I've had to interact with any AT&T website, it's not uncommon for a clicked link to result in a dozen or so redirects in the browser. I suspect their tech is just layers upon layers of legacy goo.
- voussoir 5y agoSame here, this was one of the reasons I cancelled ATT and picked an mvno carrier. They need to wake up.
- reaperducer 5y agoA couple of years ago, I watched the traffic when I logged in to AT&T. IIRC, there were almost 60 redirects involved in paying my bill. At some point "technical debt" becomes "incompetence."
- cbm-vic-20 5y agoOften, it screams "overly powerful product management that ignores engineering concerns".
- cbm-vic-20 5y agoI worked on AT&T web stuff many years ago. "Layers upon layers of legacy goo" was accurate, probably still is.
- RajT88 5y agoLast I was on AT&T (~6 months ago) it was a total crapshoot if I could log into my account without some layer erroring out. I had about a 50% success rate of just frickin' logging in.
- dylan604 5y agoIt also happens when trying to verify your account through the various streaming apps. I'd say it's also 50/50 if you can successfully authenticate your account to get access to the streaming app.
- 5y ago
- rlewkov 5y agoThe QA manager should be proud.
- specialp 5y agoThey raised the price of their products $10 recently (I cancelled). So they might have done something like price = price + 10 but this had the unintended effect of incrementing the price every time rather than just once
- Cerium 5y agoTheir other services might be hell, but I'm now three years in on AT&T fiber internet. It has been a great experience. They charge a round dollar amount with all fees included and have only changed the price once ($10 more) after the first year deal.
- Loughla 5y agoAs a contrasting experience - AT&T owns the rights to supply internet via overhead lines where I live (it's rural here), with a contractual agreement to provide high speed access. Because they're a multi-billion dollar corporation and we're a township of around 500 people (and our town council are fucking morons) it's a forever agreement, and high speed is defined as dial-up. Meanwhile, the local co-op ISP just finished running underground fiber to the township. Full gig connection for $250 set-up fee (with a 1000yd drop to your house if necessary) and $80/month forever.
- dylan604 5y agoIn a township that small and moronic council members, have you ever been tempted to run for council position yourself? I'd have concerns that I'd become a moron in that sense as usually there are such deep rooted moronic decisions that non-morons can't do anything. So now the non-moron comes across as moronic as well. But that's just my own personal fear.
- Loughla 5y agoThe problem in small towns is that the idiots in charge, generally, haven't ever left the small towns. Therefore, they are blissfully unaware of their ignorance. They don't even know what they don't know. They apply lessons their fathers and mothers learned in the 50's and 60's about how business is done with a handshake and a friendly disposition to today's world. And if you don't have the right last name or the willingness to defer to their ignorant authority, you can't get anything done. It's frustrating to see the same people from the same families making the same stupid mistakes for literally generations. It's more frustrating to be excluded from that process that you know you can help fix just because you dared to leave the community for any period of time regardless of whether it was for fun or for advanced university studies or your last name is tainted because your grandpa was a complete shithead, regardless of how you turned out. A bit of a rant. But. I have been tempted to run, and I have been elected to the council. And I couldn't get anything done, because I was purposefully excluded as an outsider with too much education, regardless of what I tried. It was frustrating.
- gaius_baltar 5y agoTheir strategy seems to be: "user is probably comparing prices, hike so they sign up before it raises even more". That's one reason I have zero regrets on torrenting TV shows.
- hereforphone 5y agoI just ordered AT&T Internet a week ago. Because the building I'm living now has a deal with them and I get a cheap package. They demanded my SSN for a credit check, and they spent almost every call trying to upsell me. It felt very trashy and unprofessional. They also hijack DNS and point all unresolved domains to their own search page. Very scummy. I wouldn't use them again if I had a choice.
- TAKEMYMONEY 5y agoThere's no way this persists through the whole payflow, likely a bug on the client/view layer. Pricing is subject to multivariate testing all the time on e-commerce sites, this is likely supposed to show x for Segment A and x+10 for Segment B. I'd be shocked if OP could check out with the inflated price. Otherwise I'm opening up web inspector and getting myself a $0.00 AT&T monthly plan...
- antgiant 5y agoAdditional fun on AT&T’s website. The phone number to call and complete the order changes on every session. So you can often get a new phone number by refreshing as well.
- whoopdedo 5y agoMy question is if these prices are algorithmically generated, and borderline pseudo-random, will they actually honor the quoted price? What if I tried to sign up but injected some javascript that created my own imaginary price. Would I be able to convince the system to accept this number, and what proof would AT&T have that their frontend didn't actually show it to me at some point? Cynically, I suspect that the fabricated number will be disregarded when it comes time to signing a contract, and you will always be presented with one of the same small number of rate buckets. That may be higher or lower than what you saw on the website. If you complain a service rep will be able to drop you into a lower bucket, but they predict that most people will either not care or not notice the price. Not until you get your first bill.
- twistedpair 5y agoUsed to be checkouts for things like hotel wifi passed the price as an unvalidated URL param. All you had to do was change `&price=9.99` to `&price=0.01` and you got cheap wifi.
- dmtroyer 5y agoas an AT&T customer, I can confirm that their websites are some of the jankiest I have ever seen. The number of redirects and different loading gifs you get when logging in to your account is comical. I need to capture this sometime.
- Lamad123 5y agoWait a little longer and then refresh!! The price might go down!! I once was trying to use Lyft because I missed a bus.. I searched again for the ride and the price went up like crazy, tried again and it stayed high.. Then I decided to just wait for the bus. After some 15 minutes I searched Lyft again and the price was back to normal if not lower!!
- karmakaze 5y ago...or delete your cookies and make sure you're not using Safari.
- exikyut 5y agoI guess this is gonna wind up at the bottom so oh well, but I'm pretty sure the URL (reading it out of the video) is https://www.att.com/acctmgmt/dtvlander https://www.att.com/acctmgmt/dtvlander So all it takes is someone with AT&T to go pop open the devtools. (It apparently requires a login, and I'm kinda in Australia so that won't work)
- zeruch 5y agoWeirdly, this may be an unintentional bug, but it certainly READS as on-brand for AT&T.