The Australian government announced plans to ban a range of consumer-harming pricing practices known as 'dodgy pricing', including drip pricing, dynamic pricing, and confusing subscription cancellation processes.
On Tuesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced their plan to ban surcharges on debit cards, and just one day later, they added a bonus announcement, promising to crack down on dodgy pricing practices .Grouped within the catch-all term of “dodgy pricing” are practices like drip pricing , dynamic pricing , fake warnings of limited stock , being forced to set up an account to make a purchase, and confusing subscription cancellation processes.
That’s a big old money win if ever I saw one. But, to save this money, it’s essential that cancelling subscriptions is actually easy to do.
Take, for example, this year’s Australian Open, where under dynamic pricing, single tickets to the men’s final sold for almost $6000 a pop because of demand.Credit:Britain’s competition watchdog has announced an urgent review into the practice after Ticketmaster, using dynamic pricing for Oasis tickets, bumped up an expected price of about $285 to almost $700.
In Britain, it’s estimated that drip pricing alone costs consumers more than $4.2 billion. In Canada, where the government took a cinema chain to task over a fixed booking fee it applied to movie tickets being booked online, those couple of extra dollars amounted to over $42 million in extra money in their account.“Most businesses do the right thing by Australians and they’ve got nothing to worry about.” But as consumers, it’s less about worry and more about what we have to look forward to.
Most of us remember a time when this wasn’t the norm, when it wasn’t this hard, when it didn’t feel like we were being lied to every time we pulled out our credit card.
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