Drip Pricing
In the dock: Every ticketing checkout, somehow, at once
The crime
The price you saw was $40. Between there and the pay button it grew a service fee, a facility fee, and a convenience fee. It is now $67.
The fix
All-in pricing shown up front. The first number is the final number, or you're quoting a price that doesn't exist.
The law it breaks
Sneaking — costs revealed only after you're committed. It weaponises the sunk-cost fallacy: the further in you are, the less likely you'll walk.
The word “convenience” doing that much work should be a crime on its own. You pick a $40 ticket, and on the way to paying it quietly accretes fees with names written by someone who’s never felt shame: a service fee (the service is selling you the ticket), a facility fee, a processing fee, a convenience fee for the convenience of being charged fees.
It works because of where it’s placed. Reveal the real price on the listing and half of people never start. Reveal it at the end, after they’ve entered a name, a date, a seat they can already picture sitting in — and sunk cost carries them over the line. That timing is the whole trick.
The fix is the least surprising sentence in this index: show the all-in price first. The number on the listing is the number you pay. Regulators are catching up to this one — but you shouldn’t need a regulator to not lie about a price.