> Where's the law preventing stores from imposing an accounting fee for multi-item purchases, conveniently totaling a few cents?

Where’s the law preventing someone from doing this right now? I don’t think this cynicism is justified.

Similarly, if places are willing to price stuff at $1.03 for the few extra cents they’ll collect some of the time, then they can just raise prices on 99c items right now to $1 to collect the extra cent, which they don’t do because such prices have a psychological effect on the consumer that outweighs the small gain.

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jacobgkau 11 hours ago | parent [-]

> Where’s the law preventing someone from doing this right now? I don’t think this cynicism is justified.

You don't think businesses take advantage of situations for more profit?

Take this year's tariffs as an example. As you may've heard, UPS is charging customs brokerage fees of dozens or hundreds of dollars on top of the actual tariff payment; identical shipments sent via FedEx or DHL are only charged a few dollars for the service of customs brokerage, so we know UPS's actual costs for providing that service aren't that high. They saw a situation where consumers would be confused about prices and took advantage of it to make a lot more money by simply charging a lot more than they need to.

"But where's the law saying they couldn't have just raised their prices by hundreds of dollars without tariffs? Where's the law?!" There wasn't one, they could've raised their prices for international shipments before the tariffs happened. But consumers would have noticed a lot more and accepted it a lot less. They took advantage of the situation because the situation allowed them to get away with it.

> Similarly, if places are willing to price stuff at $1.03 for the few extra cents they’ll collect some of the time, then they can just raise prices on 99c items right now to $1 to collect the extra cent, which they don’t do because such prices have a psychological effect on the consumer that outweighs the small gain.

I'm not sure what you're arguing here. You admitted the $0.99 number has a psychological effect that outweighs the $0.01 gain of charging the extra cent. That would be the reason they don't do that. It's not super relevant to the discussion of whether rounding can/will be gamed.

	▲	ivanbakel 9 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>You don't think businesses take advantage of situations for more profit? That's not the point. Businesses are obviously happy to raise prices under the confusion of other changes, but I find it very hard to believe "accounting fees" are a plausible way to do so. People know that the register machine can do the calculations easily - it already does so. And there is a good reason for businesses not to introduce such fees, because they are directly visible to the consumer who is going to complain and shop elsewhere. The UPS example is apples to oranges. Tariffs are poorly understood, and consumers rarely shop around for shipping - they tend to take the service given by the merchant. The agency people will show on 2 random cents on every shop is way higher. >It's not super relevant to the discussion of whether rounding can/will be gamed. It's very relevant. How are consumers going to react to a price like $1.03? Especially since that's almost certainly something that would previously have been priced at $1.
	▲	munk-a 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> UPS is charging customs brokerage fees of dozens or hundreds of dollars on top of the actual tariff payment To reinforce this point... UPS just does this all the time. I had to have a number of personal effects[1] shipped up from the US to Canada that I requested self-declaration forms for them and never received them - UPS decided to brokerage the shipment themselves. We then spent the next three months fighting a six hundred dollar charge[2] that should have never existed. UPS is going to defraud customers on brokerage fees regardless of the scenario - it's just what UPS does. You've got bigger problems to worry about - the impact of dropping the penny will be unnoticeable in the sea of general corruption and fraud. 1. Items that you own in one country and are shipping to Canada for personal possession are exempt from most normal tariffs. 2. To really add icing to outrage - this was more than double the original shipping price and, considering we delivered an itemization with the shipment for customs UPS could calculate their BS fee upfront and show the actual cost to the customer but they don't because the US doesn't force them to.