Justifying High Prices

[DrFaroohk]

I hate how people try to justify high prices. For example, a certain profession might charge extreme fees. The justification is that their licensing fees are outrageous, and they let it go at that, because its an easy excuse. Same with doctors. I understand they have lots of expenses, but when I look at my bill and there's a three dollar "medication fee" for a nurse to give me two tylenol, I feel like there's something wrong. That's like 300 dollars an hour, and your only job is to give out tylenol.


Even smaller business do it. The C-Store I used to work at always cried poverty because they "lost" so much money on wasted coffee cups and soda cups.

"But those cups cost us over a buck apiece!" they always cried in meetings. "It's so unfair, but that's why we have to charge a lot of money for the coffee. It's the cup. We pay so much for them and then people double cup or just change their minds and we lose allllll that money."

When the reality of the situation is that if you do the math, a 20 oz cup of coffee there cost the store about 14 cents (including the coffee, sugar and milk). The cups were like 6 cents a cup.

Then they "attach a value" to the cup of like a hundred dollars so they can write it off when there's a shortage or something like that. They can pretend they've lost all this money, but its just imaginary money.

I have a lot of well-to-do acquaintances who always bitch because poor people like me are sucking up all their hard earned money. But what they don't get is by outright lying about things like that (inventing expenses, inflating losses) they're doing the SAME THING. That's the G-man's money they're "taking" because of such things.

[jackfaire]

I have contemplated going back to school getting my Phd in psychology and becoming a therapist in my town.

I could undercut every other one by 30 dollars an hour and still make plenty of money to pay for my license and a good honest wage that would put me in middle class.

I would also get more clients because the "sliding scale" they use for low income clients is a joke. The lowest I saw was 60$. I understand they have to also rent the office space but give me a break they are making more money than they know what to do with.

[blas87]

I want to be in the medical field. Greedy bastards. My doctor gets $90 out of the $130 that the Depo shot costs, I'm not even sure who gets the extra $32 they are now charging for "medical handling fees" (there is one of those for EVERY thing that they do to you....one for my Pap, one for the shot, and TWO for my colposcopy because they took two samples).

Oh, and I want to be in pathology, too. The doc who tested my colposcopy samples got $400 for one sample and over $900 for the other.

I know doctors don't get "all" of that stuff or what's charged on your bills, but it still chaps my ass.

[the_std]

Specifically with doctors, there are a few factors, such as insurance. Do you know how much insurance doctors have to carry simply to practice? Specialists have to carry even more than the standard GP does. And those kinds of insurance make your car or house insurance look like a drop in the bucket. Yes, doctors make a lot of money, but there's also the schooling they took (thousands, often times hundreds of thousands of dollars in classes) and the time it took them to get to the point where they can actually be a practicing doctor.

[HYHYBT]

It's not just the insurance, though that's a large chunk of it. Everybody you see in the doctor's office has to be paid, even on days when there are few or no patients. Because of the multiplication of paperwork required mostly by the insurance companies, it takes more staff and also more of the doctor's time outside of seeing patients. (In the 80's, Dad could see ten or more patients more per day, and with a smaller staff, than now. The days aren't any shorter.) Then there are the people who won't pay, or the insurer won't allow the charge because the procedure was miscoded as having been done on the wrong day, etc. And that's just the office practice; the hospital side is worse. As for being charged $$ for Tylenol, I'm guessing that was in a hospital. Those are required by law to treat people whether they can pay or not, up to a point, which means the ones who *do* pay have to make up for the ones who can't or won't or the place will go out of business. It's not fair, but it would be a sight less fair not to have a hospital to go to, and yes, that's a possible alternative; the one here is *this* close to closing up. This goes for things like convenience stores and restaurants too: no, the cup doesn't really cost a dollar. But if you add up all that they sell, and all the expenses, you'll find the profit margin on the store as a whole isn't much. I remember a managers' class McDonald's sent us to where, among other things, it showed the breakdown of everything for the average store, and while I don't remember all the figures and would be uncomfortable sharing the ones I do recall, the actual profit was small and shrinking. Certainly it told me that, if I ever had enough money to buy my own franchise, I'd be better off doing something else with it.

[DrFaroohk]

Believe me I know all about the expenses places have to put up with. I guess what I'm getting at is that they don't NEED to cost this much. It's one of those things that'll never happen, but it doesn't mean I can't bitch about it.

I know that a doctors office costs a lot to run. I think it was on here someone posted a conservative estimate of like 250K a year to run one. That's fine. I understand that. I'm more than happy to pay for that. Except I'm not just paying for an office. I'm paying for a 250K office, PLUS the doctors 250K lifestyle as well. Don't come bitching to me about how expensive your life is when you own six mercedes and a three story house on the beach.

[jackfaire]

Specifically with doctors, there are a few factors, such as insurance.

I understand that but when my doctor is driving a car that my parents when we were upper middle class couldn't afford then I don't buy his, "oh but I have so much debt" argument.

Also mostly in my case referring to shrinks whose overhead consists of rent and utilities. It's even worse cuz most of them just use their own homes (the ones with sliding scales) meaning they don't have overhead beyond what we all have.

[Greenday]

Plus, along with med school, there's four years or so of undergrad. Med school is a lot more expensive than undergrad. Insurance. License. Pay for everyone in the office. Pay for supplies. Pay for transferring of supplies. Pay for disposal of hazardous wastes (when it's biomedical wastes, it costs TONS as I've learned in my biology labs).

It adds up to a lot.

[DrFaroohk]

I almost forgot about the "fees". I see this in almost any business.

"How much is this?"

"It's 100 dollars."

"Ok." (signs up)

Then you get a bill for two hundred dollars, because of all the "fees". There's a 25 dollar service fee, a 10 dollar processing fee, a 5 dollar administration fee, a 20 dollar application fee, etc...

That shit needs to become illegal immediately. They need to have a ban on all these extra fees so they can only charge one price.

[Rageaholic]

I almost forgot about the "fees". I see this in almost any business.

"How much is this?"

"It's 100 dollars."

"Ok." (signs up)

Then you get a bill for two hundred dollars, because of all the "fees". There's a 25 dollar service fee, a 10 dollar processing fee, a 5 dollar administration fee, a 20 dollar application fee, etc...

That shit needs to become illegal immediately. They need to have a ban on all these extra fees so they can only charge one price.

This is why I hate crap like paypal. I never used it mind you, but I know it's needed for online transactions and I know they charge all these stupid fees hidden in the small print. What the hell is a processing fee anyway?

This may be unpopular here, but I can see where some SCs get pissed about false advertising. Take the lottery for example. They advertise a million dollar jackpot, but then there's always small print that says it will be paid out in annual payments, or that the cash option is only half that. And that's not even taking taxes into consideration. It should be made simple, not complicated with all this small print.

[Cats]

Speaking of idiotic fees, a few months ago, I went to buy tickets for a concert. On the website for the venue we were going to, there was the ticket fee itself, then a fee for buying online, then a processing fee on top of that. And even better, you couldn't even pick up your tickets there, you either had them mailed, or print them out yourself, WHICH COSTS MONEY. Yes, they were charging ME to use my OWN ink and OWN paper to print out my damn tickets. Assuming I did all that, it would have cost me like $60 for 2 $18 tickets. (as a side, since it was a 2 hour drive back and forth, it was not worth not reserving tickets and chancing it at the gate, since there was a decent chance the show might sell out).

We bought them from a 3rd party seller, who only charged one single fee that was cheaper (which is still slightly annoying, but I sort of understand, since they need to make money too).

You know it's REALLY bad when buying direct has tons more fees than going elsewhere, especially when you're getting and printing tickets online, which cuts down on THEIR costs.

That "we're gonna charge you more for all the money we saved to fatten our wallets more" is utter bullshit and honestly, I think should be illegal.

[Rageaholic]

*sigh* shouldn't the costs of the ticket cover all the other crap? They advertise it at one price, but the fees make it over twice as much. I agree, this shit should be illegal. Either include the fees in the price, or don't have any fees.

[Anthony K. S.]

All of this talk about hidden fees reminded me of something I once saw on eBay.

Somebody had put three sets of Magic : The Gathering cards (which, at the time, typically sold for around $125 to $150 each) up for sale, for only $5 each.

. . . No, that's not a typo.

Card sets that generally fetched upwards of $150, this guy had put on sale for only $5.

When I saw that, my immediate reaction was :

"What is going on here? Is there a 'catch,' or is this guy just crazy?"

I read through the auction listings, and soon found out what the "catch" was . . . The seller had set the Shipping charges at $95 for each auction.

Nice.

I presume the idea was to sucker somebody into thinking, "Whoa! $5 for a whole set? I'll take it!" and immediately Buyout the auction (perhaps in a rush to beat anybody else who might jump at the offer), without checking the rest of the listing and finding out that the total price would actually be $100.

The real irony here was the guy didn't really need to scam a buyer like that. $100 was actually a pretty good price for one of those sets, and if he was willing to let them go for that much, then he could have just put them up for sale straight for $100 and probably would have found buyers for all of them.

As it was, I'm sure that I wasn't the only person who read the listings, saw what he'd done, and said, "It's actually a good deal he's offering, but NO WAY am I going to do business with a guy like that."

[Boozy]

or print them out yourself, WHICH COSTS MONEY. Yes, they were charging ME to use my OWN ink and OWN paper to print out my damn tickets.

I can't imagine how they'd even begin to justify that charge. I'd be furious about that one.

[Dreamstalker]

A lot of credit cards/utilities are starting to charge for check payments over the phone (if you give them an individual check # versus direct-debit or card).