re: Are “service fees” and “restocking fees” the biggest “in your face” scam today?

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Does it really cost the store 5.99 per item for an employee they ALREADY pay to stock items they stock anyway at 4:30am in the morning.

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You're paying for the warehouse to pull and pack that original item, then receive it back, check and restock the return, then discard and replace the shipping box.

$5.99 is a lot less than what fulfillment facilities usually allocate for those costs.

I think a bigger scam is auto-renewed services with insane price increases.

Example:

Sirius XM for the SO's vehicle just auto-renewed at $296.71 per year including tax.

We cancelled rather than negotiate again with those annoying Pakistani boiler room people.

She switched to Pandora Plus with offline music at $54.89 per year. Seems to like it better so far.

ETA:

I hate big businesses that use this tactic for services you can't easily get rid of.

Intuit might be the worst offender.

Few users want new QuickBooks features, so Intuit crippled account sync in their paid-up licenses to force you to buy higher-cost subscriptions.

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“restocking fees”

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I'm good with these. Too many people buy material they don't need then want to return it. I see no problem with charging them for "their convenience".

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“restocking fees”

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Are designed to disincentivize returns, and will always be skewed in favor of the seller. There are a ton of ways that returns can frick up a company’s margins. You’re incurring cost with no revenue every time you accept a return without a fee. And it’s not just the cost of physically restocking the item. It’s also the entire cost of selling the item in the first place. So that includes any transaction fees, sales support, warehouse costs, delivery costs, etc. when you bought the item, as well as the same costs again when you return it.

On top of that, they may have reordered - to fill their typical stock - and now they have the cost of excess inventory on the shelf (cash flow and warehouse space). Or worse, they may have missed out on a sale because they were out of the item.

Then you have the issue of items being returned that can’t be resold for whatever reason. Due to missing parts, open boxes, the customer using them and/or damaging them before returning, etc… the business should be verifying this stuff before accepting the return but some percentage will always slip through the cracks.

These things may be minor for a single order but they add up. So the company will charge a restocking fee that should guarantee they don’t take a loss (in aggregate) on returns.

Govt being peoples daddy is

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So I ask, what am I paying for?

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Just drive to the police station or clerk’s office and pay cash if the charge is too inconvenient. That’s what you are paying for. The amount of time it would take me to do that would be worth the convenience.

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bought tickets for a concert yesterday

$7 service fee for the $31 ticket

for the only way to actually buy the tickets is to use that service

so tilting

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Ticketmaster is the worst. NFL teams are colluding to show that Seatgeek is a viable alternative and thus TM isn't a monopoly? A couple of years ago I bought 4 college football tickets for $6/ticket. I ended up paying more than $50 once their fricking fees were on there...per ticket fee, order fee, convenience fee. They should just combine them all and call it the raping your arse fee.

Excessive Seller and Buyer fees are bullshite. But on top of it all they have the balls to report the amount the customer paid vs what I got paid as the seller to the IRS. Last year for 7 NFL games it was nearly a $1,000 difference.

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But my company lost a million dollars last year because they won't charge the 3% on credit cards.

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Did they lose a million or gain more business bc the customers might not have used their service at all bc they had no cash?

I don’t carry cash for businesses. It’s strictly for emergency.

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Same with “restocking fees”. Does it really cost the store 5.99 per item for an employee they ALREADY pay to stock items they stock anyway at 4:30am in the morning



This isn't the reason for it, at least not in the business I've done

It's to stop people from fricking around with your inventory and not buying or returning the item, while another customer would've bought it (people who have since moved on to buy somewhere else). Opportunity cost.

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This. It's to pay for tying up inventory that someone else could have bought and kept. The amount of people that buy shite to use once and return is absurd. Worse than stealing IMO.

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Paid for with taxes

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Why should my taxes subsidize your speeding ticket?