"But I'm curious, how would you suggest businesses handle the lost revenue from banned surcharges without raising prices?"
By keeping prices the same as they are. The current price is the price the customer pays at the end of the day. By making that the advertised price, the revenue per purchase is completely unchanged. Additionally, studies have shown that hidden fees turn customers off and are ineffective. Therefore, sales should increase for compliant businesses as well. If anything gross revenue would increase due to increased sales.
As a libertarian, I understand that you… Read more see government intervention as both a moral and practical wrong. There is force implicated, which could be seen as doing wrong. However, this is a simplistic view of ethics. It weighs only the moral cost of an action without considering its return on investment. By regulating certain aspects of the economy based on sound reasoning and research, the economy can function more efficiently and have a greater benefit on society. By and large, free markets operate more efficiently than command economies. However, there practically exist no examples of either, because they are both impossible, and a market which is mostly free can be helped to operate better through specific interventions. Similarly, by and large, a person is healthy without drugs. However, there are cases where drugs or medical interventions improve health (often these cases are more rare than our profit-motivated medical system might have you believe). In any case, none of these appearing false equivalencies are presented by me to prove anything to you, simply to provide a background for understanding the crux of my real argument which is as follows: advertising the final cost of an item or service limits temporal inefficiency in the economy. Temporal inefficiency is a topic rarely discussed in politics. The cost of any societal standard must include its opportunity cost, which can be measured in man hours multiplied by the difference in benefit of that activity and some more fruitful activity per hour. This can't be quantified without a subjective analysis of the value of the activities, however the man hours certainly can. Add up all the man hours that go into a customer dealing with hidden fees and tips per year (i.e. reconsidering the final price or calculating something or other) and multiply that by the 332 million Americans. Let's say, 30 seconds per tip and one tip per day, six days of the week to be conservative. Let's say a minute per hidden fee and one hidden fee per week, which is again, a conservative estimate. That adds up to four minutes of wasted time per week, or 208 minutes per year. Multiplied by 332 million Americans, you have wasted 69,056,000,000 minutes per year, which is 1,150,933,333 man hours. The average life span in America is 77 years, which is 674,520 hours. That means that 1,706 American lifespans are spent on dealing with tips and hidden fees per year. Is this a manner of existence which is better than not existing? I'd argue that a complete lack of any appreciable experience, which is equivalent to not being alive, or to being dead, is preferable to mild annoyance (after all the only reason that most people don't kill themselves is that there are other experiences in life than mild annoyance). It may be dramatic, but allowing tipping and hidden costs to be a major aspect of American culture is ethically equivalent to killing 1,706 people per year.
Also, tipping may be fun for some people but not when it's essentially expected and pretty much involuntary. Dropping a quick 18 or 20% is nothing more than something kind of annoying that people do because it's expected of them. Instead, employers should be forced to add that to the cost of the items and simply pay their employees more. It's much more efficient. Tipping isn't friendly. It isn't fun. It isn't good for the economy. It's just annoying and inefficient. Pretty much every other country on Earth operates just fine without any expectation of tipping.
"Also, including taxes and fees in the advertised price might sound straightforward but it could actually lead to more confusion. Taxes vary from state to state, and sometimes even city to city. A business would have to advertise different prices for the same product or service in different places. That could be quite a logistical nightmare, don't you think?"
That's a ridiculous argument. Businesses already advertise different prices for the same product or service in different places because the cost of running that business differs based on location. If they choose to run with a round number and keep it consistent for marketing purposes, it's already because they have calculated it to be profitable overall despite variations in the existing cost of doing business from location to location.
"Take tipping for example. In industries like hospitality, tips can make up a significant portion of a worker's income. Removing this could lead to financial hardship for many. I have a friend who works as a waiter and he often says that his tips make a big difference to his earnings."
Tips making up a significant portion of a worker's income is another major problem with tipping, not a benefit. If a workers salary is inconsistent and depends on how much they smile at you, it's hard for them to make good economic plans for the future. The wage needs to be a wage, not a tip. They are servers, not strippers. And no, tipping doesn't improve service. I much prefer the service in southern Europe where you are served excellent food with a frown than America where you are served hot dog **** on a plate with a fake *** smile and expected to pay them an extra 18% for not **** ing anything up beyond how **** ed up it already was from its conception in the mind of an underpaid alcoholic "chef" or worse, a corporate flavor laboratory.
