It's unclear whether this junk fee law will have teeth. In theory, California has the same anti-drip pricing law, but restaurants have a specific carve out [1] which is bullshit because the drip pricing that most people complain about is the X% "service charges" and "lifestyle fees" that restaurants have at the bottom of their menu in small print.
From what I can tell online, NYC rules won't have this carveout, but I haven't eaten there recently so I can't confirm.
The worst part of restaurant fees are the people (both owners and somehow the patrons) that will justify the existence of the fee as if it's too difficult to just print the final price in the menu.
I live in a touristy part of the world and effectively all restaurants above baseline level will have a "+7% service +11% tax" line.
> I live in a touristy part of the world and effectively all restaurants above baseline level will have a "+7% service +11% tax" line.
In Germany and Croatia, there is no % at all, the prices are final and include all taxes and fees by law and no one will bat an eye if you pay straight cash - however I personally always tip around 10%, simply because I was happy about that when I worked in hospitality myself.
When I was in high school my German teacher taught us to tip by default by rounding up and paying with exact change. Is that still a thing when everyone is paying with card?
I'm German and in the rare instance I eat out in an actual restaurant, I still do that "rounding up" if I've been happy with the service. Cash or card is not really an important factor for that scenario.
Let's say the bill says someting between 67€ - 72€, I would round that up to 80€.
Or sometimes (not every time though) when I'm getting a Döner kebab and it's ~7.50€ I'll round that up to the next full €.
DDOS attacks are only "simple" when you can easily coordinate all of the distributed peers. In this case one or two people doing it might be a small annoyance but they're going to have a hard time convincing all the other tourists to turn their trip into a political direct action.
This is an odd response. I've been to countries that have special tourist police trained in english who frequent tourist locations to prevent this kind of behaviour.
I've never experienced it personally but I've heard stories from other travellers who said that they actually went and got a cop to mediate a despite like this and the cop reamed the merchant out and made him apologize in front of other customers and hand the disputed money back.
Some places understand that perpetuating this kind of fraud against an evergreen pool of tourist marks while lucrative to the individual is ultimately damaging to the whole commons that is the tourist industry for the region.
The police are paid and trained to organise against crime. That's quite different than disconnected tourists beginning to organise, which was the idea I responded to.
I'm afraid that police wouldn't do a thing if a practice is widespread and accepted by most. Legally speaking it's not a scam because it's not a hidden charge.
The 3% credit card charge on the other hand... but I'd rather pay cash than confront the poor cashier.
Fees on one time services are not what this is targeting. This legislation is not meant to address that, and wouldn't apply to that.
They are going after recurring billing (that's what the headline means by "subscription"). It mentions things like gyms, online subscriptions etc.
It would be pretty wild if they had managed to get service fees at restaurants when they were not at all targeting service fees, restaurants or one time in person purchases.
> Rule from Mamdani administration ... targets ‘junk fees’
> The city is also targeting so-called “junk fees” that raise the final price of everything from apartments to sporting events, with a proposed rule that requires sellers to “advertise the total price for any good or service, including all mandatory additional charges and fees, up front”, according to a release shared with the Guardian.
> proposed rule that requires sellers to “advertise the total price for any good or service, including all mandatory additional charges and fees, up front”
This is going to be tough to enact, anywhere in the USA, even New York. There is nothing quite as American as "not knowing what you're going to pay for something until you have to pay." Whether it's your doctor bill, restaurant bill with tips and service fees, your hotel stay with a hidden resort fee, or just general purchases where tax is computed at the very end right before you pay... We are culturally so used to this abuse.
> This is going to be tough to enact, anywhere in the USA, even New York.
You followed the link to the poll in the article, right? I haven't seen poll numbers that high on any poll in my lifetime. It shows people of all political affiliations know what junk fees are, and they are all hungry to have them banned.
Keep in mind that Mamdani's first "press conference" was nearly[1] all questions from influencers. I'm sure they are hungry to publicly record themselves encountering a junk fee should this rule pass, starting with the fitness influencer.
1: I counted one journalist ask a question. For free fake internet points, name that journalist. (Hint: it was a three-part question, and it wasn't a soft ball.)
I mean culturally we're used to it, but it seems really easy to test for and therefore fine businesses doing it in NYC? Just go ring up some purchase and see if they add a tax onto the listed price, and if they do report it.
Agreed, this is totally solvable. You could even set up an email address for people to send pictures of their receipts to so they know who to investigate. Imagine if you could just screenshot a bill and send it to "junkfees@nyc.gov" and then they'd assign someone to look into it!
Not me. I always get the real information before I pay. But you have to be persistent and have a desire to know. Medial fees is the same you have to contact them and have them look up the code for the fees. We are in this situation because people don't challenge this shit.
When you're in your doctor's office and discussing the tests they want to order you're very unlikely to be able to get the cost right there during your appointment.
You would probably need to have the doctor print you a list and then after the appointment contact the hospital/provider to find out... which could be a huge delay in getting the tests done and involve a lot of extra travel time. And I can only imagine the effort required to shop around for the cheapest place to have your blood drawn that also orders from the cheapest lab for whatever tests and that also takes your insurance.
The best I get is my PCP will be like "I want to do this test for this reason but it is usually more expensive so I won't order it if you're worried about cost".
The latest one for me is renting a new apartment, getting told it cost $XXXX a month, then being told I'm required to have $XXXXXX amount of renter's insurance at $XXX a month and oh, by the way, click here to use ours.
It’s not your property they care about. They usually want this because it includes liability insurance if you damage their property or someone else’s, or your negligence causes harm to someone.
In Australia we have very strong consumer protection law, here it’s expected (by the bank usually) the landlord has at least a minimum “landlord insurance” that covers all that stuff.
For anything not covered, where a tenant does damage thats what the bond is for.
Renter insurance should be optional.
Actually I’m surprised that landlord insurance is not already occurring, imagine a building with 100 apartments, I’m sure the bank would ask the landlord to have a single cover over 100’s of little crappy policies.
If renter insurance is required by regulations, this is likley another good target for policy change.
The answer to every question like this in the US is "because the wrong people would benefit".
In the past (and still today but less so), that literally meant black people. Now it mostly means poor people of all races.
It's been shown over and over that it's practically an American cultural value to accept lower benefits to yourself in trade for denying benefits to what you see as an undeserving group.
I’m pretty sure EVERYONE is covered under the public system, a levy is added in the car rego fee that is the funding mechanism. You don’t need to be a driver to be covered.
Same here. This has only been a thing recently when landlords figured out they could make money selling the insurance. When I was a renter, insurance was never required from me.
It was required in all my boilerplate leases going back to the late 90s. Just rarely if ever enforced or even asked about.
You’d just end up with some giant uncollectable judgement against you if you ended up burning down the apartment complex via negligence. Landlords insurance company would potentially come after you, but probably not since it would not be worth their time for most tenants.
The liability limits on most renters insurance policies are low $100Ks, because most renters don't have many assets they need to protect. This would be pretty inconsequential in the scenario of "burning down the apartment complex."
Landlords/owners have their own fire and liability insurance (ultimately paid for by the tenants as part of their rent); it's unnecessary to demand that the tenants provide their own. Renter's insurance is for the tenant's protection, not the landlord's.
My leases always point out that the landlord's insurance does not cover the tenant's personal property or liability, and recommend renter's insurance. But it's not required.
Plenty of places have required renters insurance going back the last two decades I've been an adult. My parents were landlords in the hood when I was a kid and they required it (as a lease provision, never enforced).
Then they should include it in the rent. My landlord wants a Porsche too, he doesn't get to add a separate Porsche Fee or mandate me to pay a Porsche payment, he has to take some of the money coming out of the rent and put it towards his Porsche.
If you’d rather pay $500 for the landlords insurance rather than $200 from your own policy, that sounds like a great plan. You’re paying for the Porsche either way.
That’s a legal requirement though. If I rent a car and the rental company requires me to also insure it or they won’t give me the keys, surely that should be included, even if the insurance money isn’t going to the rental company.
Renters insurance protects the landlord from liability claims. They don't care if you insure your own property, but I don't know of an insurance company that decouples liability and property.
Also, renters insurance is cheap, I haven't rented in more than a decade but when I rented I was only paying less than $100/year for it.
I just looked it up and currently the average premium for renters insurance is $15 to $22 a month.
The insurance requirement isn’t uncommon where I am (California). Though I would avoid whatever plan they are pushing. I got mine through my existing insurance provider and it worked out to ~$15 per month IIRC.
Wasn’t the argument for tips that tipped workers had a low minimum wage, but CA now has a minimum for tipped workers of $16.90 (actually the same minimum wage for non tipped workers too)?
> which is bullshit because the drip pricing that most people complain about is the X% "service charges" and "lifestyle fees" that restaurants have at the bottom of their menu in small print.
I don't think I go to the same restaurants as everyone else.
It's unfortunately somewhat common these days and personally I actively avoid any place which does this. At least it's only somewhat common rather than the standard so it's still possible. Couple of examples:
https://www.pacificcatch.com/menu/ "NorCal - A 3% surcharge (5% in San Francisco) will be added to all Guest checks to help offset the rising cost of wages and benefits. This is not gratuity."
Restaurant owners interviewed in the media here in SF are directly quoted saying they can’t do that because “customers would notice”, or think “oh that’s expensive, I can’t eat out twice a week”.
These are arguments for including the fees that make the customer __still pay the same higher price__, implying that the whole point is that they won’t notice. And reporters don’t seem to even register the absurdity of those remarks or question them in any way.
It’s the same thing with any “menu” vs actual price.
Airline baggage fees are probably the prototypical case for this. Airlines that did not display the lowest price during flight searches got outcompeted by those that did. This led the entire industry to change since it took an entire decade long marketing campaign centered around it (Southwest) to try to stay even.
Consumers make irrational choices all the time, and this is one of them. They absolutely notice the final bill and complain while continuing to patronize businesses that engage in such behavior.
Consumers would need to reward honest pricing if they wanted this to change. Or vote for regulation.
The restaurant fee isn’t a fee for something “extra”, it’s just a blanket extra charge on everything.
It’d be like the airline sold you a ticket for $500, but as you step off the plane at the destination they say “actually it was $550”, because it said so in the fine print.
More akin comparison would be charging for carryon vs condiments.
I just did trip with family where our allowance was 8 suitcases of 184 kg total weight. Buying same on a budget carrier we used on our leg would cost more than flights itself.
Yea, it's basically restaurant owners trying to get their customers involved in their political whining.
Notice how you never see things like "Business License Fee" or "Restaurant Electricity Bill Surcharge" listed out as separate line items on customers' bills. Those are things restaurant owners have to pay, too, so why don't they get their own charges to customers? Why does only "Living Wage" get a line item on the customer's bill?
"Fuel surcharge" on flights. Which should be illegal: the cost of hedging fuel cost risk should be included in any ticket price.
A friend said that Uber was charging a fuel surcharge here in New Zealand, but that it wasn't passed on to the driver (who pays for the fuel). If true I would find that interesting.
> A friend said that Uber was charging a fuel surcharge here in New Zealand, but that it wasn't passed on to the driver
I did a bit of a dive on this and I think it’s not correct.
I have a low threshold for hating them, after the reports of how females staffers were treated a few years back, but this new thing seems to be untrue.
Great link. Sounded suss to me. Could easily have been a bullshit taxi driver, or a social outrage story. I should have tried to validate before repeating, sorry.
Unfortunately you’ve spoken too soon on this one. I recently had an energy surcharge added due to the “Iran war” (as explained by the server) added to every check.
Hey now, let's not get carried away, these jackass restaurant owners want to make it clear, the "Living Wage" guilt trip is the tip part, and the fees THEY put on are to pay for "benefits like healthcare" and you're not allowed to consider it part of the tip.
Nevermind that California doesn't even have a lower "tipped" min wage like some states do, so by supporting tipping, we're just saying that servers simply "deserve" more money for some reason than people who stock shelves or pick orders at Amazon or Walmart.
> Nevermind that California doesn't even have a lower "tipped" min wage like some states do, so by supporting tipping, we're just saying that servers simply "deserve" more money for some reason than people who stock shelves or pick orders at Amazon or Walmart.
Isn't this the thing the government is saying in California? They passed a law requiring restaurants to pay the same minimum wage as jobs where workers don't get tips, on top of the tips, essentially making it the law that people in tipped occupations have to be paid more than what can be paid to people doing any other kind of work.
Unless the point is to get customers to stop tipping because a) the workers are now guaranteed the same minimum wage as anyone else even if they don't and b) they can't afford the tip on top of the prices that now have the higher minimum wage priced into them anyway.
I tried searching for what a "lifestyle fee" is and all I could find is references to "living wage fee" which is essentially a forced tip added to the bill.
A service charge for large groups though is understandable as they typically will require much more attention and work from waitstaff than the typical small dining party.
I'm somewhat skeptical that they actually require more attention per person. Does an 8-person group require more than 2x as much attention as a 4-person group?
They do need more attention per person. Doing anything with a group of eight is just more complicated, and you’re more likely to have a person in the group who slows things down for whatever reason plus people trying to help them which can slow things down more.
They’ll take longer per person to order because they’ll be coordinating appetizers and who’s sharing what, etc.
They’re more likely to be celebrating a special occasion which means people less familiar with the restaurant or even people who don’t eat out much at all.
And the group is big enough that people will be having side conversations while one side of the table talks to the server, which also slows things down.
The fact that Scott Wiener made that carve out for restaurants via emergency legislation (SB 1524) made my blood boil and I vowed to vote against him in any election is runs in.
I once wrote code that checks location before hiding/showing the cancel button. It’s really absurd that the nice experience exists on all subscription sites by now but you only get to see it if your state demands it.
Same with websites like Airbnb. Last I checked, their search results only showed the 'real' prices (eg including fees) for certain states and countries. In some states you have to click into the listing before learning that there's an extra $500 cleaning fee on top of the nightly rate :)
I have no context of who you are/your position here, but the responses you're getting seem absurd to me.
I just don't understand people placing the blame on you when it should be on your company. Most people in the world are just trying to keep their job - you did it. It wasn't something illegal, it was something that if you didn't do, you would have risked your job and then someone else would have done it anyway.
Saying no is always an option, and this seemed like the opportunity for this. Highly paid devs consistently choosing to do this and using the "following orders"/"food on the table" defense should be socially unacceptable. However, the parent seems to feel no guilt despite the many comments blaming him, so I think protecting his feelings is not necessary.
Obviously the difference of degree on the spectrum between the two in this case does vary greatly, but your comment reminded me of an interview with a journalist who had compiled a collection of interviews with midtier drug dealers in various cartels and one thing that stood out to him was that almost all of them, when asked why they did what they did, would respond by saying that if they didn't someone else would.
Seriously? No white lies or going along with anything that you didn't fully agree with, in your life, in all contexts? We're talking about kind and not degree here, per the comment I responded to.
Have you been fired from a job for standing on these ironclad principles?
Ok, well respect to you for whatever happened there, sincerely.
But all of us have compromised at some time or place, I have in some places and faced consequences for not doing so in other places. If you haven't compromised yet, then wait until you have a family to take care of.
I prefer being honest about the times I did compromise and took OPs comment in that vein. A true psycho would see nothing wrong and also not be reflective about it.
Maybe! But that’s certainly debatable. “I thought I was doing the right thing” is anyways a much better defense than “I was just following orders” anyways.
Exactly. Those low quality comments are an example of the sad erosion of quality of comments on HN that I and others have complained about in recent times.
It's perfectly valid in our increasingly enshittified world to be angry with all those responsible for it. As much as you're right to point the finger a the C-suites, ultimately ALL of these user-hostile features, every single one, only exists because devs keep putting fingers to keyboards in exchange for checks.
Tech workers had a time where unionization and getting a voice in our companies was very much on the table, and the biggest voices among us shouted down the others in the name of rockstar salaries and free beer at the office. The "top contributors" at huge companies were scared shitless that they might have to accept a wage too much like the REST of their software engineer coworkers. The horror.
This is a deeply ignorant comment. Do you understand how much money you have to have IN SAVINGS in order to be able to weather even a moderately short hospital stay in the United States when you’re uninsured?
Their boss hired GP over others for a reason. The person who is finally desperate enough to do it might be just a little worse at their job, a little more expensive, ... It will have a cost.
German has a related expression "vorrauseilender Gehorsam" (anticipatory obedience), where people will do evil long before they are forced to because of such strategic considerations. You must never rush to give up your morals, there will be plenty of time to do so later.
> We can’t legislate every aspect of a respectable society.
Well it's either capitalism and regulations with no end in sight to make sure that the rich don't exploit their power to exploit everyone else, or it's random executions of bosses for "moral wrongdoings", or it's something between communism and socialism.
I don’t like it either but blame goes to the top of the org chart. That’s not illegal or, by the standards of the field, flagrantly unethical so it’s a bit extreme to expect someone to resign over.
Are you willing to show us your work history and let hackers news judge every single feature you have implemented in your career in exchange for money?
Keep thinking about the parallel you’re drawing and you might hit the difference: that phrase gained notoriety in the Nuremberg trials for murder but somehow we do not give the same weight to, say, a pushy salesman or a debt collector or a government employee enforcing strict means testing laws. Is it possible that our moral sense can account for things being less severe than murder and draw a distinction between actual Nazis and people doing what they can to survive in an unforgiving country with few supports?
Is not showing a cancel button quickly better or worse than treating accessibility as a checkbox and producing things which many people struggle to use despite laws requiring you to support them? Shoving unwanted features into a bundle? Encouraging people to use Chrome by introducing dependencies on proprietary features or not testing other browsers? Designing apps with bloated JavaScript frameworks which are borderline unusable on non-flagship phones? Using ad networks which skimp on malware prevention or resell user activity data? Requiring lots of PII and storing it haphazardly? Designing products which depend on servers which are shutoff over the wishes of customers? Working for a company whose products support wars or mass surveillance?
I’m not saying it’s great but … the tech industry has a lot of problems and I can sympathize with someone who isn’t quick to resign when most of the alternatives aren’t clearly better. It’s a lot easier to say someone else should take a moral stance when you personally won’t have to pay their bills.
Well, some of those examples are instances of not being able to prioritize a good thing. That can be due to an unethical decision, but can also be due to needing to prioritize other things, possibly better things.
The unethical part of the example that I was referring to is, you have the good thing built, but you are refusing to give it to some people, for bad reasons.
GGP didn't break the law (in fact he conformed wtih it), he just didn't disobey his orders (risking his salary) in order to go the extra mile in order to make a negligible positive impact in the world. Seems rational.
Ever speed on the way to/from work? That's a worse offense than a strictly-compliant website - you're increasing danger for yourself and others and breaking a law, precisely for your own benefit.
Oh definitely not. Many of us work in tech. Many of us are the people that wrote the code that other people on this website complain about as anti-patterns, dark patterns, etc.
Be here long enough and you will find people bragging about their captcha solving services, or how they found a clever loophole in anti-gambling laws. Posts about certain unmentionable topics are flagged minutes after being posted, post titles are changed to protect in-groups, and human rights are sometimes up to debate.
The rule is that you have to be polite about it all.
I think you, as the reader, are expected to mentally append “in NYC” when a link comes from nyc.gov. It seems very silly for a given municipality to need to qualify every sentence on its own website.
Again: this is NYC’s official website. It might (as a stretch) be a “lie by omission” on a national newspaper’s website, but this is a website that is solely dedicated to NYC itself.
Now I'm being super pedantic, but every town can't have the same "landmark" law. What makes a law a "landmark" is that other municipalities look to it for direction.
In a world where the California law exists, and the New York Times has been used as an example of the success of that law for years already, claiming some sort of moral victory with the "landmark" qualifier is objectively wrong.
Does any of this matter? No, but I like arguing about it.
If you want to be pedantic, NYC is a different “land” to have a “landmark” for :-)
(I like arguing too. Nothing wrong with that. I think in this case it suffices that they’re regulations in different states with relatively different political histories, even if the political valence of the two is somewhat similar. I would agree if this was a “landmark” change for Irvine, CA.)
The ironic thing to me is that Mamdani is only the mayor of NYC. He is not the governor of NY state. So if you live in Buffalo, you will still have to suffer through shenanigans?
Edit: I see others with similar thoughts from further down the scroll
It's just local NYC news. Thinks are landmark to them that are often commonplace elsewhere which makes sense since millions call that place home that are not acquainted with other places. It is truly America's one megacity so that sort of puffery is expected.
The advent of dumpsters was similarly hailed there, though almost no other cities in the US throw their trash on the sidewalk.
Generally when a seller in state X in the US sells to a buyer in a different state Y the consumer protection laws of state Y apply.
Even if the seller in X does not have a presence in Y, and so you might think Y has no jurisdiction, purposefully conducting business within a state is sufficient to allow Y to assert jurisdiction in regards to that business.
No, you've found the person who (1) remembers Civil Procedure from the first year of law school [0], particularly the case of International Shoe Co. v. Washington, 326 U.S. 310 (1945) [1], (2) did some checking to make sure that between then and now nothing significant has changed (it hasn't--International Shoe is still the foundational case in this area), (3) remembers several large non-California companies California has successfully enforced its consumer protection and privacy laws against and several non-Illinois companies Illinois has enforced its similar laws against.
"Minimum contacts" is a good term to include in searches if you want to learn more on this.
[0] Note: I am not a lawyer. Near the end of law school I decided I'd rather be a programmer with a decent knowledge of law than a lawyer with a decent knowledge of programming.
I wonder if the bit about 'junk fees' will include undisclosed hotel fees. I just stayed there last week in a no-frills "hotel" which doesn't include daily room cleaning, has no staff at night, and has no amenities whatsoever, and they charged me a surprise-at-check-in $35 a night resort fee. This fee was not described in the booking.
That hotel may have broken an FTC rule that's been in effect for about a year now.
> Effective May 12, 2025, the FTC’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees, 16 C.F.R. Part 464, prohibits bait-and-switch pricing and other tactics used to obscure and misrepresent total prices and fees for live-event tickets and short-term lodging.
Every hotel I've stayed at in Hawaii charges one - usually to the tune of $50+/day - even if the hotel has no resort-like facilities. It's a bullshit fee.
I just got a notice from my credit card company that Evernote just charged my credit card after 2 'successful' cancellations of my subscription each of the last 2 years, and the complete deletion of my account several months ago.
Hopefully these will become more widespread - I'm not in NY or CA.
yes, that is happening to me real-time, the article in the Economist reminded me (https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/01/can-bending-sp...), right down to Evernote being the one they are attempting to gouge me on at best and charge illegally at worst. so i had a closer look at bank and PayPal GLs
i found similar issues with Paddle (attempted to quit), Proton (double charged), Splashtop (attempted to quit), and Bloomberg via Apple (attempted to quit) and the common thread is PayPal. never Stripe.
my PayPal account is ancient (2002) and knowing what i know about payments (perhaps a little) i believe there is something akin to a hole regarding legacy pre-auth tokens in a PayPal architecture which is old enough to run for the US House. at least Bending Spoons would be willfully exploiting such a hole, because after i refunded / cancelled, 9 days later they were able to charge again. PayPal also seems to have an open marriage with PCI-DSS / SOC2
There’s a reason they were used as a poster child of a bad actor when the FTC rule was made a few years ago, before the current administration shredded it.
I was so annoyed with how slimy Evernote had become and how the product regressed and they were clearly not spending money on it, I switched to Apple Notes and have been very happy.
This is what legitimate government looks like. Leaders actually advocating for the people who are being deceived by those in power instead of helping those in power.
While this may be a trivial issue, being able to cancel a gym or newspaper subscription, it sends a signal. Companies need to view customers as partners in a business transaction and not objects to be exploited.
I am sympathetic to a perspective that says this is not the responsibility of a mayor of a single city... But also; who else is going to do it?
Normal people have very little say over the politicians that govern them in larger electoral regions like states or provinces, and maybe this can signal to other levels of government that they should implement similar rules... If it works.
>I am sympathetic to a perspective that says this is not the responsibility of a mayor of a single city... But also; who else is going to do it?
With a population of 8.5 million if NYC was a state it would be the 13th largest so I'm quite all right with the city going beyond the normal purview of a city government.
Mamdani has been doing great in NYC so far. The hope is that he will inspire similar behavior in others. And drive similar approaches to politics in other constituencies.
I'm actually struggling to believe he's done all this stuff. Like it's crazy to see it was possible to fix everything the whole time and all it took was slightly increasing taxes on billionaires and not being corrupt.
It also shows that one election can make a big difference, so it's not hard to understand why R's are making it harder for Americans to vote. Remember that, not just this November, but when primaries roll around too.
I don't think it would be possible without a serious restructuring of the Democratic Party. It's far too beholden to capital and corporate interests and too afraid to be seen as "socialist" to allow someone like Mamdani anywhere near levers of national power.
Is there a website for New York City where people can petition for things like this?
If there's anybody from the mayor's office reading this, how about that all banks must provide their services at minimum on a browser through a web app and cannot mandate the use of a smartphone.
Government should represents and advocate for the best interests of the entire population. It should legislate for both people and companies to behave fairly towards each other.
Consider the gym membership. You join and sign a one year contract. The terms are that you can cancel after that period, but if the gym hides or dark-patterns the cancel procedure, are they really offering you the contractually agreed upon ability to cancel? They are not.
We all know what fair is. Just because companies (and sometimes individual people) have outsized power against their customers, it does not give them the moral right to abuse that power.
So, I believe in this case Mamdani is engaging in both good and well-functioning governance. And that to me is morally legitimate.
Some British media / reddit 'users' did the same over-the-top congratulatory puffery for some laws passed in the UK.
Like hello, Parliamentary supremacy and a whopping majority, the Lords who will at most suggest a few tweaks for anything that's been sold well, a Prime Minister who was a Barrister - passing laws is the easy part!
Call something the Renter's Rights Act for example and people lose their minds falling over congratulating the Government and Parliament before it even passes.
(In defence of some of our media, they did write one or two articles about all the people who got kicked out prior to the law coming into effect - just a couple of weeks before it coming into effect...)
We're software devs - we should know writing code (particularly now) is frequently the easy part. Tests, deployment, versioning, monitoring, logs, effect on revenue etc, bit trickier.
Is this something that cities can really enforce? Like I get that NYC is a bit of an exception but let's say a 5 person town in Wyoming decides that they want to make this practice illegal and they all vote to do so. It's not clear to me that would mean anything at all.
It ultimately depends on if there is overriding state or federal law. But yeah, it's something a city can enforce.
A small town in Wyoming could do the same and could sue (and probably win) against businesses that do business in that small town and break the law. What most likely happens in that case is that small Wyoming town ends up blacklisted by that business.
NYC has ~2% of the US population, and it’s a relatively wealthy slice compared to the mean. NYC has roughly 13x as many people as the entire state of Wyoming. I could see a company writing off Wyoming entirely (not likely, but possible) but not NYC.
States like CA, FL, NY, and TX can pass state laws that create defacto national regulations through sheer size, but smaller than that and you’ll have trouble.
Sure but say some company based in Lousiana has a website that violates NYC law.
What exactly will NYC do about it? Is there some mechanism to for them to block the website inside of NYC? The company would presumably have no property they could seize or employees they could imprison.
If it were a state passing the law then they could sue for enforcement in federal court but I don't think a city could?
I think, in practice, they'll only spend effort enforcing against service companies in the city, he announced the policy at a gym. As a bonus, a bunch of web companies happen to have NYC presence.
This is one way how "states rights" types of policies will favor large corporations at our expense. We need strong advocates for regular people at the highest level of law/enforcement. Having advocates at all levels is good, of course.
Nintendo (subscription I have for my switch to access some older a classic games btw) is very good reminding me I have a subscription and whether I want to cancel (or renew). I don't have the email at hand but what I remember is thinking they really desire you to reflect to cancel (rather than a push to renew) if not wanting continued service. Sentiment of politeness and I find a good example what to do.
Also, not a subscription but seeing some dark practices after COVID onset at any fast-food like business (including cafes, juices, cupcakes, etc) where a preselected tip is selected. Default should be no.
I really appreciate companies that are transparent with renewals. I’m sure it cuts down on customer support load a lot too. Kagi goes as far as not billing you if you don’t use their service in the prior month. I was pretty shocked the first time I got that email. Made me a customer for life.
It does feel like it’d be “better” if good behavior came from the company’s intrinsic behavior but laws like this help (re)establish norms that encourage those sorts of actions.
Likewise, it’d be better if kids say please and thank you because of a genuine sense of gratitude, rather than just to avoid parental nagging—-but that nagging helps develop appreciation for others’ actions.
> Subject: Information about Your Automatic Renewal
> This is an automatically generated email from Nintendo for customers who have a Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack individual 12‑month (365‑day) membership set to renew automatically.
> Dear [user],
> Your Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack individual 12‑month (365‑day) membership will automatically renew soon.
> ...
> Deadline to turn off automatic renewal: [1 month from now]
It also does this right when you first sign up for automatic renewal except the deadline is [1 year from now].
Even if that were true, Nintendo is better than most companies, which will use deceptive practices wherever they are allowed, even if they have to pay to maintain multiple systems and configurations.
> where a preselected tip is selected. Default should be no.
A lot of this push to higher and higher and preselected tip options comes from POS software providers (Square et al) and credit card companies. They make money on transaction volume. Higher transaction -> more fees
The restaurants get to set those values though. A coffee shop near me puts the default options as $1, $2, $3 for low order totals. So if I go in and get a coffee (which is $4.50), the lowest tip option is 22% and the highest is a whopping 66%.
I've seriously gotten tip fatigue and have been working to move back to a sane standard. I've noticed the places that have these crazy tips, also pay their staff well.
Recall that they're tax-deductible now -- so tips are the most efficient way to compensate employees. You're feeling the second-order effects of the inevitable business model change.
I suppose right now there is no federal preemption - but I fully expect gym & similar lobbying at the federal level to get a rule in place to allow preemption challenges.
For what it's worth, I just tried cancelling my NYTimes subscription to see if it was still as bad as I'd remembered, and aside from desperately begging me not to leave, it was quite simple. No need to contact support. I wasn't planning to go through with it, but I still got a nice discount for the next year, so.. thanks!
As someone who doesn’t live in the US, it was hilariously impossible: you had to call on the phone a number in New York, which never picked up, so you had to pay hours of internal call, or send a fax, something I hadn’t done in two decades…
Thankfully, I had a bank that used technology from this century, including a disposable credit card number. I stopped paying and that lead them to them calling me.
This is where getting it via Apple’s App Store is nice for consumers.
I (a non-American) had a NYT subscription through the iOS app some years back and cancelling it (like any other subscription through the App Store) was as as simple as:
- Open Settings
- Tap my account
- Tap Subscriptions
- Tap the New York Times option (or whatever it’s called)
- Tap Cancel
While the gate keeper aspect of Apple may not be good in many ways, at least we get this kind of benefit from it.
I ended up having to dispute credit card charges from Patreon because I couldn't solve captchas needed to log in or to talk to support. I won, but it was an annoying process, and now I use disposable/virtual cards.
Be careful of Paypal! Go info your subscriptions section and check it out - there's a decade of past ones, including companies in the grave. Some aren't, like Evernote, which renewed automatically for a year on an old email I don't have access to.
Doesn’t everybody want random db tokens that represent authorization to charge their credit card account stored on major platforms like PayPal and Netflix?
The irony with all this, is if a company makes it difficult to cancel their subscription, it's probably not a good product. Antidotically, I've found that making it easy for users to not only cancel, but refund, has given me eye opening things to fix in some products that made it so less people cancelled or refunded. So I try to always err on best user experience.
I doubt so, I think a large amount of serious companies do it as well because it's a very simple way to earn much more money (and strangely improve the service), many businesses (even "good") often rely solely on this, Gym businesses is the typical example of this and many gyms will just not be able to make money at all if people actually used their membership correctly, literally space-wise, it can't fit, many businesses are entirely based on "failure", however, we can acknowledge that some Gyms are exceptional in quality, but will still bank on the fact that the user will just stop going, ideally as soon as possible.
I'm not saying it's right, but the reality is that probably half the gyms would close immediately if this is enforced.
NYT made it difficult, and they are a pretty good product. If you didn't live in california and wanted to cancel your subscription, you were required to talk to a service rep who would try to get you stay by giving you some free period before normal subscription billing resumed
Any jurisdiction can pass a law unless there's a law against doing so.
For example, you couldn't do this in Massachusetts. A city would first have to petition the state for a new law allowing the city to pass such a local law.
> When the Biden administration introduced a junk fee rule in 2024, the US Chamber of Commerce argued it was “an attempt to micromanage businesses’ pricing structures”, and apartment fees were cut from that federal rule after lobbying by the real-estate industry.
This drives me nuts to read, because it’s usually the same pattern.
Rule -> lobbyists descend -> politicians cave -> carve out that takes away the whole point of the rule -> everyone declares victory
I don't expect that Mamdani will cave in to real estate lobbyists lol. What you're describing is exactly why Establishment Democrats are losing to Mamdani and his ilk (DSA)
The store is uniform across geography, in the sense that it doesn't move and a system within the store is capable of calculating the taxes. If there was a simple flat "10% sales tax" on every single item in a store, the store could simply print price tags with that included. Marketing materials posted in the store could have the advertised price slapped on a sticker by the store too.
The issue is really that taxes in most places are not uniform in application, not necessarily just because of geography, but also all of the specific carve outs and exceptions and so on that America tends to have, e.g., SNAP and WIC often don't pay sales tax. So its actually hard to know what someone is going to pay without communicating with them personally beforehand.
I have tried to cancel a newspaper subscription in the UK a few times, which is only possible by telephone, and they have a serious churn-reduction program in place where I end up getting a major discount on the subscription.
Maybe it should be required to review quality laws in other countries in general. One advantage is that you don't have to pretend or imagine what will happen if it's been tested in the wild.
This is really a banking / credit card thing. CC suppliers put a lot of effort into packaging recurring subscriptions for their businesses because … people forget to cancel. So the real leverage here is not go to each individual website to one click cancel, but just cancel the direct debit / subscription from in your banking or credit card app.
Another one that belongs on this list: AI-generated photos in housing listings. You can no longer tell what the property actually looks like, and the images conveniently erase the problem spots you'd only catch in person. False advertising is getting completely out of hand.
It's crazy that people think they should get away with these. I've seen some examples where basic things like the number of windows or where the garage and driveway are was totally misrepresented - surely they'd at least look at the results?
I agree, but how does one begin to enforce a ban like this? Bait-and-switch has always existed in real estate, which is all the more reason to do full due-diligence and inspect the property thoroughly and not just put in an offer sight unseen. If a seller is using AI to that extent, I'd be worried about what else they're hiding about the property.
>I agree, but how does one begin to enforce a ban like this?
Look to something that works to modify behavior: credit reports. Make it easy to report an actor for malfeasance, assume they are guilty until proven innocent, and force them to defend themselves to the agency. Since we invent these tools for evil, we may as well use them for good.
The "and" is very important here. Places like Seattle now mandate servers get a real wage. It inexplicably hasn't changed tip culture at all, so now they get regular wages and still complain when someone doesn't tip 20%+ for a takeout order.
Seattle and its surrounding cities have among the highest minimum wages in the entire world (~$22/hour). You're maybe not renting a studio apartment by yourself but it is far from destitution.
I hate tip culture too, but I don’t blame the employees for it. I never tip for takeout, counter service, retail, etc, and I’ve never actually had anyone complain or so much as make a face.
Is there something about serving people food that means you should get a tax break? Or is that just a holdover of cash tipping to kindly get servers to actually declare the full value if their tips as wages instead of just saying they magically weren't tipped all year
A big one I’ve been seeing a lot lately is advertising annual subscriptions as monthly rates. It isn’t $12/month subscription if I have to pay $120 in a lump sum up front. The actual monthly rate is often basically double what they’re advertising.
I don't understand because I'm not American but how does New York the city have such powers? At least where I am, cities aren't really "real" in that they are constructs the provincial government creates (and can uncreate). A city here could never make such a ban.
Cities are similarly not "real" in the US, but there's a strong tradition of local governance, so some states (including New York: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/MHR/10) issue blanket authorization for any city to pass any law that doesn't contradict the state's general laws.
Hasn’t Sadiq Khan been a similar story, from a Muslim immigrant family turned popular mayor of the nation’s largest city? Though from what I understand he’s from the more business-oriented center-left, in contrast with Mamdani.
Yeah, he's much more centre left, but also the London Mayor has very little actual power. It's the PM vacancy we need a Mamdani in but we're about to get a near clone of the bloke who just resigned.
Queenslander here and not a term I've noticed myself, bar one commercial on tv that used an animated meerkat, other than that not a big consumer of buying much or booking things online, though I'd understand if I saw it tagged to something where one time pricing event might sprawl ... subscription stuff, nah not happening.
Why should it be mentioned? The article doesn't call out any other specific company by name. Is the Times really that egregious of a offender compared to the other businesses? Does new york city have a history of selectively enforcing laws to favor local businesses?
New York Times is one of the worst and most famous offenders of making it hard to cancel your subscription. There are companies that make it as hard or spammy but few with the reach of the NYT
If anything, based on Louis Rossman’s experiences it’s quite the opposite - petty bureaucrats do their damndest to ensure it’s as difficult as possible to run a business in New York.
NYT is the biggest brand that I know of that pulls these "easy to subscribe, hard to unsubscribe" antics. Especially galling because if you live in california, you can cancel with just a click, so obviously it is possible, but if you live in 49 other states you are forced to listen to a sales pitch from a human before being allowed to unsubscribe
I'm building a SaaS right now and made the "non-deceptive" choices this law wants: cancellation is one click from settings, no retention maze, no surprise renewal, 30-day money-back. What surprised me is how much the tooling assumes you want the dark patterns. Billing platforms ship "cancellation flow" templates that are really retention funnels — discount offer, pause offer, survey, guilt screen, then maybe the button. The default path is the deceptive path; you have to actively rip stuff out to be straightforward.
Which I think explains why this needs regulation at all. Every individual dark pattern is locally rational — it demonstrably improves net retention, so any PM optimizing a dashboard will keep it. The cost (people who feel trapped and tell everyone) never shows up in the same spreadsheet. Markets are bad at pricing "customers who quietly hate you."
The one-click-cancel requirement is the part with real teeth. Junk-fee rules die by carve-out (see California's restaurant exemption), but "cancel must be as easy as signup" is binary enough to actually enforce.
From what I can tell online, NYC rules won't have this carveout, but I haven't eaten there recently so I can't confirm.
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
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