2001connections-article0006 Deceptive pricing should be prohibited.

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2001connections-article0006
Deceptive pricing should be prohibited.

Deceptive pricing, such as 99 cents, should be outlawed. Items listed at 95 to 99 cents ought to be raised to $1 or higher, or lowered to 94 cents or less. Merchant’s choice!! Higher or lower!! Let the grey area of 95 to 99 cents remain a prohibited zone. “Under a dollar - wow”. What a cheap trick. You see the price and you begin to look in your pocket for a single dollar. But then you realize you need to add a few cents to that sum, which will in effect raise the actual price payable. After you add sales tax to a 99 cent item, the resulting cost to you, the consumer, is definitely over a dollar.

A truly decent, honest retailer might display a price in the following manner.
“87 cents + applicable taxes of 15%, 13 cents, = $1.00”.

Shown above is a semi-fictitious, approximate example. Please replace the numbers and percentages with the actual amounts applicable in your area.
Ideally, the forbidden zone could very well encompass a greater range: the amount from $0.88 to $0.99 if, as in our simple example here, adding sales tax to a price in that range would raise the total payable price to just over $1.00.

As well, every retailer should be obliged to post appropriate information, in plain view, as to where and how to complain about pricing problems and other abuses. Improving recourse for consumers becomes more significant as the marketplace has transformed itself into a more treacherous and tricky environment. Merchants have devised dubious schemes for disguising the full cost of consumer goods to you, the buyer. Perhaps the most notorious deception ever inflicted by sellers upon customers is the omission of sales tax and/or other applicable levies in the price of products and services.
We have grown so accustomed to tolerating this hoax, that most of us would probably not even consider complaining about it. But we should object, particularly since new financial impositions are constantly added to prices. For example, where a product or service may previously have been subject to the addition of two types of sales tax, maybe now the same item caries three or more such charges or similar. Surprising the buyer with higher and higher costs has become too common and too stealthy. And to make matters worse, the add-on charges are almost routinely hidden in small print. For the above reasons, I favour obliging every seller of a product or service to quote the full actual price payable, including all sales tax and any other applicable charges and levies, whatever they may amount to.

Why, there ought to be a law!! And I hope there will be!! In most, ideally all, nations of the world. For now, I simply wish that some legislators in several or more countries around the globe would see what I have written here and feel inspired to pass new laws to ensure consumers get a better deal. If my elaborations on this page do motivate authorities in at least 1[one] jurisdiction to compel merchants to clean up their act, the result will have been worth my modest effort here.

End of
2001connections-article0006
Deceptive pricing should be prohibited.

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