this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
1081 points (99.0% liked)

News

23404 readers
4719 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] mechoman444 151 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Please! For the love of God! Get rid of tipping!

I hate tipping! As the consumer I should not be responsible for proving a living wage for someone else's employees!

[–] kameecoding 79 points 10 months ago (6 children)

as a European I have to say both the Tipping culture and the not showing the full price in stores with VAT included is just mindblowing.

It's literally a culture of hiding true costs, weird af.

[–] Raiderkev 24 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Hotels too. The advertised price is never accurate because their stupid resort fees.

[–] Paddzr 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What now? First I'm hearing of this. How much extra?

[–] Raiderkev 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Again, it's prevalent in the US market, not sure about others. They advertise say $199 / night, but when you go to check out, there's something like a ~$35- $50 /night resort fee to "pay for amenities like WiFi/ gym /pool". You can't reject paying the fee, so your hotel room is actually like 25% higher than advertised.

[–] Paddzr 8 points 10 months ago

Yeah, that'd be quite illegal down here. I spent basically half a year living in hotels straight due to work all across the UK and primarily London then continued for a few years after. So we're likely talking +300 nights. I have never seen an additional charge.

[–] CosmicCleric 21 points 10 months ago

It’s literally a culture of hiding true costs, weird af.

Makes me happy though in this day and age that people are waking up to this fact, and are starting to push back on it.

In the past corporations/governments thought people were a lot more unaware, than they are today.

[–] wieson 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's a culture of trying to get away with whatever makes the most profits. We also have that, but there are some reasonable laws working against that. One of my favourites is the duty to display per kg or per litre price. Before that, shops made the package sizes deliberately confusing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

We actually do have that in the US as well, but it's typically in very fine print and a lot of people don't even know about it.

[–] marx2k 0 points 10 months ago

I don't think there's any law like that in the US. If there were, 2 out of 4 national supermarket chains local to me are breaking the law and have been for years

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It's really not that weird at all. It's a simple consequence of the EU having better consumer protection laws. Unfortunately the far right in the US is a lot stronger than in most of Europe and has been since the post-war era.

We also, in the US, have an old and antiquated system that was deliberately designed to be difficult to change because the founders had to convince the slave-owning class that abolition couldn't be forced on them if they agreed to join the newly-formed union. How did they do that? You guessed it! By making the Constitution almost impossible to change, which is one reason why it required the bloodiest war in our history to end slavery.

Again, there's nothing especially "weird" about it. As is true of a lot of contemporary reality, it's largely a consequence of history.

Interestingly, tipping culture is also at least tangentially a product of slavery as well, but that's a bit more complicated so I'll save it for another comment.

And if you're starting to suspect that a ton of what ails the US can be traced directly back to slavery, here's a hint; you may be on to something!

That said, it was the European colonial powers who brought slavery to North America in the first place, which kind of brings us full circle.

[–] wolfpack86 -3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Have lived in both eu and us.

Agree, but the challenge on tax is that it's not harmonized across municipalities. This means that stores that are across the street from each other may have identical prices/profit margin and a different net price to the consumer. This would lead to consumer preferences biased by physical location and have lots of other weird side effects. You can see this in areas that border state lines when the tax is appreciably different.

Step one is a harmonized tax rate, but that's easier said than done.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

The true cost is different no matter how it's advertised, no? Harmonized tax is great and all, but lying about price is still bad, irrelevant of the actual price.

[–] TangledHyphae 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I was going to say this but fear of mass downvotes kept me quiet. Glad I'm not the only one. I've worked for tips but I'd rather just work for a reasonable wage instead, remove the guesswork and chances for abuse.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

One way or another, you're paying those employees wage. One of them doesn't get taxed or advertised is all.

[–] ME5SENGER_24 12 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yes and no. All tips are supposed to be reported to the IRS. Whether they are or not is not really relevant. What really matters is that the customers aren’t forced to do an owners job. If an owner needs their customers to prop up their employees then the owners shouldn’t be in business.

I used to make $2.35/h when I was in the service industry. Without my customers I would’ve been fucked. What’s worse is on a slow night, I really did get fucked.

[–] spader312 2 points 10 months ago

I used to make $2.35/h when I was in the service industry. Without my customers I would’ve been fucked. What’s worse is on a slow night, I really did get fucked.

I think that should be the point, employees should not be taking on the risk of a business doing poorly. That's the business owner's responsibility and risk, to be mitigated by them. Not screwing over a waiter because it was a slow night. Or because they were unlucky to work a tuesday night over a busy Saturday night.