Given the proliferation of BS fee companies love to pile on, I have a certain amount of sympathy here. We've got restaurants sneakily adding a "COVID 19" fee to bills,
Some eateries are charging new fees to help make up for the rising cost of food and operating costs.
www.today.com
Or saying they're adding an "Economic Recovery Fee." What?
Economic times are tough for all of us. It is unfair to put the burden of an extra five dollars on people paying 155 for their artisanal macaroni and cheese.
I haven't been able to find exact details (I suspect they don't exist yet) but the bill is called the Junk Free Protection act and is meant primarily to target resort fees, airline fees to sit together on flights, ticket fees to buy a ticket, credit card late fees in excess of eight dollars, and early termination fees for cable.
That seems bizarrely narrow and tailored... as in these are mostly fees the rich are paying for luxury goods, not fees that are getting paid for by the poor minorities he's supposed to be worried about. Over half the list refers to vacation stuff and only credit card fees are really going to hit anybody below the upper middle class. I've come up with a possible set of fees Biden could target more easily and will less legal pushback, and which would affect more Americans:
More seriously, were I to want to honestly hit back on fees, rather than trying to make fees illegal I might try to push an upfront pricing act where companies, all companies, are required to bundle all their fees together* and give the customer a complete and full price upfront. Do this to stuff like hospitals too. For things like credit card late fees that depend on customer behaviors, the company is
required to assume the worst-case scenario and present the customer with the highest possible charge, but is allowed to actually charge less for "good behavior" so to speak. Companies would be allowed to print different prices for different bundles of services provided everything is properly spelled out for each and the total price is the maximum the customer will pay for that bundle.
That would actually force some competition into the ring. The problem with many of these fee arrangements is that they're designed to let the company present a low price to a customer, then suddenly raise it with unavoidable "fees" after the customer's already too sunk into the process to easily pull out. The customer can
never actually get the low price they were advertised at the beginning. It's dishonest, anti-free-market, and anti-competitive because it prevents the customer from making a rational decision, a customer can't pick the best option for them if they cannot tell what the costs are until it's too late. That COVID-19 fee above is a perfect example, the restaurant is trying to recover the increased costs of food but doesn't want the customer to know, so the
menu shows a lower price but, oops, when the waiter drops the
bill off too late you find you're paying more than you agreed to at the beginning.
This would have knock-on effects in that companies would instead try to hide that they are providing fewer services for the same charge. That would need addressing down the line.
As an addendum I feel this really isn't something that should be done at the national level, regulation of fees feels like it should be a state-level issue.
*There are specific edge cases where this could be impossible, writing a 6,000-page legalese act of congress to cover them is beyond what I'm willing to do for a couple of likes on the board.