The Wall Street Journal Wonders Why There Are Suddenly So Many Sleazy Fees
from the dumb-questions,-asked-unseriously dept
I cut my teeth as a telecom reporter, so I spent a lot of time writing about how broadband monopolies and cable TV giants rip off consumers with sleazy, misleading fees. I also spent a lot of that time writing about how lobbying and regulatory capture have ensured that big companies see no meaningful penalties should they falsely advertise one price, then sock you with a bunch of spurious surcharges.
The Biden administration, for its faults, at least tried to tackle some of this. The Biden FTC considered new and popular rules outlawing “junk fees”. The Biden FCC also implemented rules that didn’t ban sleazy fees (unfortunately), but forced broadband ISPs to clearly list them out at the point of sale (something recently dismantled by the Trump administration).
The Trump administration (and its courts) has taken an absolute hatchet to U.S. consumer protection on regulatory autonomy, ensuring that the problem of predatory fees is much worse across every sector you interface with. So it was funny to see Wall Street Journal reporters recently openly wondering why there are so many shitty fees all of a sudden (non-paywalled alternative):
“An extra 3% for paying with a credit card. A 5% involuntary contribution to a restaurant’s employee wellness fund. $25 a month in addition to rent for trash collection.
Consumers already weary of rising inflation are now contending with a new crop of costs that are hidden in plain sight. New fees or surcharges are popping up everywhere as companies search for ways to recoup their own rising costs while blaming outside pressures.”
The WSJ reporters and editors decided to cover soaring sleazy fees, but at no point in the article do they mention (even in passing) that Trump has dismantled most of the (already fleeting) efforts to rein in such predation. Or that the Trump Supreme Court has issued numerous rulings effectively making it almost impossible for regulators to fine corporations or hold them accountable for bad behavior.
The article mentions that the Trump FTC did grudgingly implement the Biden-era plan to ban junk fees, but they don’t think it’s worth mentioning that the Trump administration refuses to enforce it:
“The Federal Trade Commission banned drip pricing in short-term lodging and live-event ticketing in 2025, citing research showing that consumers were manipulated by low initial prices even when the full cost was eventually disclosed.”
They also don’t think it’s worth mentioning that the worst offenders of this kind of stuff, like Ticketmaster, were recently let off the hook by the Trump FTC via a piddly settlement (that left states, which had partnered with the FTC legally, high and dry). They’ve chosen to cover consumer protection, but not really. Not with any sort of interest in full, contextual reality.
While this particular instance is the Wall Street Journal, you’ll notice this same habit across most of corporate media. They’re dedicated to an alternate reality where Trump isn’t historically corrupt, and the regulators you’ve historically trusted to be at least semi-present to police the worst offenses are still dutifully on the beat protecting the public interest.
It’s of course a reflection of ownership bias seeping into editorial (most media owners are affluent Conservatives or Libertarians who like tax cuts, rubber stamped merger approvals, and mindless deregulation). But it’s also a form of weird normalization bias, where the reporters assume that because regulators have always been there (with natural partisan ebb and flow) they’ll always be there.
But they’re not there anymore. The damage will likely be deadly and permanent, impacting far more than just shitty, sneaky fees. And the press is doing a terrible job informing the public of that fact.
This is particularly amusing because the Wall Street Journal’s own reporting recently highlighted how even the semi-consistent folks within MAGA who sometimes supported things like functional antitrust reform have been easily ousted by lobbyists, but the reporters exploring “why are we getting ripped off more than ever by predatory corporations” aren’t willing to make the obvious connection.
Filed Under: antitrust, consumer protection, corruption, fees, ftc, hidden fees, junk fees, regulations, surcharges, trump
Comments on “The Wall Street Journal Wonders Why There Are Suddenly So Many Sleazy Fees”
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That’s pretty much just the fee the CC companies charge retailers.
See, the problem with you commenting on economic policy is that you don’t understand anything. (which is also, coincidentally, why you’re a communist)
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That’s a quote from the wall street journal, you do understand that, right?
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Yeah, it was stupid of the WSJ to mention it, it was stupid of Karl to quote it.
What part do you not get?
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In 2008, the average fee was 2%, only two-thirds of the quoted 3% amount. I don’t believe it’s gone up, although a business could have a large-than-average share of customers with really good cash-back cards (which charge higher fees).
And it’s not as if other methods are free. Cash handling costs quite a bit: counting, armored trucks, and so on. Open envelopes and scanning checks is not typically an automatic process either, and corporate bank accounts often charge transaction fees.
I’m not entirely against fees for particularly expensive payment methods, but there needs to be a reasonable way to pay exactly the quoted cost.
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Some charge 3%, I don’t think you really understand the point you are making.
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Sure, but so what? If a business charges 3% to every credit card user, they’ll be charging more (in aggregate) than they actually pay to the credit card companies. It’s their average (or total) that matters, not the hypothetical maximum that a provider could charge.
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That’s pretty much just the fee the CC companies charge retailers.
See, the problem with you commenting on economic policy is that you don’t understand anything. (which is also, coincidentally, why you’re a communist)
Speaking of which...
…one of my long-time colleagues, someone who’s been on the Internet since before it was the Internet and who has contributed quietly but repeatedly to its development and operation, told me over the weekend that his host is now starting to charge a fee for every IP address he’s using. He’s already paying a large fee for hosting, and now they want to nickel and dime him over a handful of addresses.
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If those are IPv4 addresses, I wouldn’t count that as nickel-and-diming: the world ran out of such addresses 15 years ago, the costs to obtaining recycled addresses are considerably higher than a dime, and there’s benefit in pushing people toward IPv6.
Nevertheless, it’d be a nice loyalty reward to exempt long-time customers from new fees like that. A lot of businesses focus on customer acquisition, and don’t do a damn thing for retention until someone tries to cancel. “Churning” is actually a popular way to save money for telecommunication services (switch from A to B when B advertises a good “new customer” offer; switch back to A when they make an offer; repeat annually—the “loyal” customers are basically paying for this).
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There’s still plenty of available IPv4 addresses. What there isn’t, is plenty of UNALLOCATED IPv4 addresses.
The difference is that a small minority of stakeholders own the majority of the IPv4 space, with many of those netblocks going unused. So to actually use an IP address, you must first rent it (or more realistically, a block of them) from one of the existing owners, who then demand them back to rent to others when others are willing to pay them more than you are.
Churning is how ISPs save money, by renting some of these netblocks at reasonable prices, and then when the term ends, renting different lowest-cost netblocks to replace them. Older ISPs of course own a core set of IPs, and use those for static assignments.
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Not really “plenty”. There are about 3.7 billion addresses total, for 8 billion people. And I have little idea how much of that is available, but, as you say, it’s mostly held by long-time networking companies. Also, some of it’s “polluted” due to having been used by spammers or other criminals, making it unusable for certain types of services (probably fine for a web server, but could never be used to send e-mail or browse the web).
One used to just be able to build a data center, then request and get 65000 addresses with minimal cost or effort. Similarly for expanding a network. It makes sense that costs have gone up, now that everyone’s competing for the scraps that remain—even if it’s not really good customer service to introduce new fees on old customers. Are you sure about the “churning” by ISPs, though? It seems silly to return any IPv4 addresses they manage to acquire.
Labor board, gone, ftc, gone. Laws that prevented another 2008 crisis, gone. Consumer protections, undercut. Pay day loans? Explicitly protected. Monopolies? Explicitly protected. Hidden fees? Explicitly protected. Gambling? Explicitly protected.
Those are just some of the things I know republicans or trump have done at the state and federal level. They always step in to defend the worst and most blatantly corrupt or fraudulent behavior because that is where they make their money from.
Hell, they directly scam their own voters, or partner with companies who do.
They know exactly why. They’re spinning up the machinations to pretend it’s due to something other than their sleazy president gutting the regulatory agencies.
A while back, somebody went to court and won a settlement because “I didn’t know what was included in the bill”.
Now, this settlement is being abused as items are being itemized, but outside of the bill, or actually, the price originally quoted.
What seems to be actually happening is in some cases, business are viewing charge cards as an optional cost that customers have to pay. What they are forgetting is why businesses were so eager to go to charge cards in the first place. There is no “shrinkage” in charge card payments. There is no cost of counting cash from the drawer (usually at least three times (twice by the cashier, once by a manager, and recounts if there is a discrepancy) to make sure it is correct and that none of the case from the drawer has walked away (or rather into somebody’s pocket). There are no errors counting change remember the old arguments about “I gave you a twenty, no, you gave me a ten” and the ensuing hard feelings. Could have been an honest mistake by the cashier, or it could be the ‘customer’ trying to get an extra ten as change.
However; now businesses see it as a way to add an extra, after the purchase, charge that should be just a cost of doing business, to a customers final bill.
Next, there’s going to be an add-on, by every business, for a “lease payment recovery charge”, a “telecommunications cost recovery charge”, a “website cost recovery charge”, an “advertising cost recovery charge”, and so on, as the normal cost-of-doing-business expenses are going to start showing up on consumers’ bills.
Personally, I’ve started my own protest for restaurants (mostly, but other businesses also) that add a 3% charge card fee. I’ve started carrying cash again. If enough people started doing this, they are going to end up with many thousands of dollars in the till at the end of each day that is going to have to be counted multiple times, secured during the day to avoid robberies (they have become a non-target since charge receipts can’t be spent), and then somehow safely transporting thousands of dollars in cash to the bank every day.
I guess then, they will have to add a cash surcharge to the bill also.
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I once had a business offer to waive the fee when I pulled out several hundred dollars in cash. On the other hand, a local bike shop owner will round the total down to make a more convenient number. (“That’ll be fifty-one sixty. Oh, cash? Cash is king; fifty will do.”) I suppose if it’s rare enough and the amounts are not huge, they can feed it to the self-checkout machine at the grocery store across the street.
I think the bigger benefit is not having a dossier built about you. Trump’s government is buying data like that from brokers, and who else knows where else it goes. If someone uses credit or debit cards everywhere, that’ll produce a pretty complete record of everywhere they go.
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There’s nothing wrong with what you’re doing, but I wouldn’t call giving them cash like they ask for a protest
Bring back pollution
Just wait until rivers catch on fire. Make America Great Again! Trump will say, “We have the best fires!”
As long as someone is getting rich, it’s all good…
Thought there were Already consumer laws about this?
I like the one where you Pay for a service, but UNDER that is another company that has to be Paid, THEN another..
Irony
Does anybody else see the irony in the fact that a publication that caters to Wall Street, is wondering why there are all these fees that are designed to cater to Wall Street?
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What I personally found ironic was that it was paywalled. Printed publications are famously abusive of customers; including via sleazy fees, plus outright selling of personal data (I’m not 100% sure about newspapers, but one should never subscribe to a magazine). The big thing for newspapers is time-limited offers with automatic renewal at high prices, and being difficult to cancel.
One might sign up on impulse online—it only takes a minute and might be like $50 for the year, and then it’ll take an hour on hold and a bit of an argument to cancel and avoid the $300/year renewal.
Why so many fees?
I was going to tell them why but my check hasn’t arrived yet.
They're as 'confused' why those fees showed up as I am the pope
‘We cheered on the arsonists for head of the fire department and he’s been doing great! … in totally unrelated news half the city is currently on fire and we have no clue how that could have happened.’
Travel fees
Marriott Hotels: Hold my beer!
(At least their website has a checkbox where you can see the real price. Of course it’s not checked by default).