This is most likely a bug rather than malicious intent or predatory pricing. This type of pricing makes zero sense from a conversions point of view. Don't get me wrong, every telco in North America is an oligopolistic, stagnant, rent-seeking, anti-consumer pile of crap, but I doubt this is intentional.
This is most likely a bug rather than malicious intent or predatory pricing
Color me skeptical.
I built web sites for a mid-sized B2B and B2C company, and had to build all kinds of games into the pricing.
Refreshed the page more than three times? That's a price change.
Returned to the same page 24 hours later? 36 hours later? 72 hours later? Price change. Price change. Price change.
Using a tablet? Price change.
Connecting from an IP address believed to be in a particular geographic region? Price change, and inventory change.
An unintended side effect of all of this was that it gave the illusion that pricing was dynamic based on supply and demand. It wasn't. There was no link between inventory and pricing. It was all games based on the user.
Yeah, it would not surprise me to find out that this is an innocent bug, but it would also not surprise me to find out it's a bug in some other bullshit behavior that's just going off the rails in this case.
Would be interesting to scrape large swaths of the web and calculate the average differences in price based on user agent string (it's well established that Apple users occasionally see higher prices, but I don't know about Windows vs Linux for example), other fingerprinting, ISP / IP geo, and so forth. Does this exist?
Taking it a step further: a browser extension that tries several scenarios (like Honey, but just for re-fingerprinting and stuff... can an extension make a request that suppresses/manipulates cookies only temporarily?) as you're shopping.
Agreed, though I wonder what the original intent was. My guess is there was still a variable pricing scheme, but probably only varying by $10, with the display code not expecting its value to get saved locally.
I have a habit of asking what the exact price of my bill will be after taxes and fees. It is _rarely_ what the sales person quotes. I have cancelled service because of the difference in quoted price vs bill price.
But at least once in the last 5 years it was exact to the penny. So there's that.
At least with comcast, if you get just internet and buy your modem, the actual price is the same. If you bundle TV, all hell breaks lose because with TV, there can be any number of fees (broadcast, license, content, HD, technology, anything imaginable under the sun). If they threw in a nuclear fusion fee, people wouldn't even notice.
I used to work at att, I had 0 ability to tell you what your actual bill would be, more like a +-10$ estimate. Often times people's bills would slightly change every month by a buck or two up and down, no idea why.
I left directv because of this some years ago. Every month the bill was just slightly different. The person who called me begging me to come back insisted that wasn't true. lol
Literally nothing in any of our documentation mentioned it all, and it wasn't everyone. Always just makes as generic things like fees. They were lying or new
>> This is most likely a bug rather than malicious intent or predatory pricing.
Hahahaha. It takes more code to add $10 to a price. It takes a cookie or something to remember how much they quoted you last time. This explicitly programmed behavior can NOT be a bug, it's a feature that someone took time to implement. The "feature" might be buggy in the sense that's its too obvious and perhaps was only supposed to increase the price once or something, but the overall implementation is almost certainly not a bug.
>> I have, on multiple occasions, introduced bugs that are orders of magnitude wackier than this.
Those would make a nice blog post. I've done some stupid things and seen some unexpected results, but I've never encountered the likes of this "accidentally" incrementing price thing. ;-)
It could be an index error or a misuse of references, where product B is supposes to be product A + 10.
It could be that some local taxes or fees comes out to $10, and the client code does `price += taxes` on page load.
There could be code to round up to a $10 increment, and then subtract 2 cents so the prices are all $X9.98, but the rounding logic is incorrect. Since this is JS, they will be using floating point prices. That is a minefield in itself.
I'm not saying it's definitely a bug. But it trivially could be.
>> It could be an index error or a misuse of references, where product B is supposes to be product A + 10.
But why would ANY price be determined in part by the users browser. It gets it right the first time, so why would page reload do anything different? This makes no sense.
Okay slowly turning the 800 pound steel beam 1 degree per minute, and now it's trying to toss it across the room...
Boss we need a new $1,000 dollar motor!, and maybe a new wall.
It could be as simple as pulling locally cached price data, saying this one is $10 more than the one below it, and then caching that. It would raise the price of itself if they used the wrong array index - something every programmer has done.
No idea if GP is correct, but that would not even be close to the weirdest thing I've seen in production code in companies. Very plausible to me that an engineer for a large company could write code like that. Short answer, corporate codebases are messy and weird, and because they are already messy and weird they are therefore breeding ground for even more baffling decisions based on time constraints and partial understandings of already weird systems.
Especially in legacy systems, questionable, weird design choices keep producing other questionable, weird design choices until explaining why AJAX requests are getting parsed through hidden input fields or why all of the localstorage fields are Base64 encoded suddenly requires a multi-part, 5-10 minute story about the history of the codebase -- and that's if you're lucky enough to have anyone around who knows the story in the first place.
Related to the above, if you're in charge of an engineering team at a company please build more time into your team's schedule for refactoring and code cleanup.
----
To jump off of OP's (at the top of the thread) point, it could also be a bug with malicious pricing. A programmer might have tried to build a dynamic pricing system based on geographic area or whatever and just accidentally read the base price from the same cache they're writing to.
And if your followup question is "but why would you read the base price from localstorage instead of from the server, or why would you even have that logic clientside in the first place?" -- then see the first point above.
But none of the explanations here would be surprising to me at all. It's not really a debate about whether AT&T alters prices based on stuff like area and customer data, I'd be surprised if someone tried to claim they don't. But like OP said, this doesn't make much sense from a conversions point of view; and it's way more likely to be a bug than it is to be an executive mistakenly believing that raising the price by $10 on every refresh makes people more likely to buy Internet.
That executive already has better methods to increase prices: adding hidden fees and service charges, and raising prices behind the backs of long-term customers who aren't checking their bills regularly enough or who are unlikely to go to the trouble and inconvenience of switching or fighting the bill.
>> No idea if GP is correct, but that would not even be close to the weirdest thing I've seen in production code in companies. Very plausible to me that an engineer for a large company could write code like that. Short answer, corporate codebases are messy and weird, and because they are already messy and weird they are therefore breeding ground for even more baffling decisions based on time constraints and partial understandings of already weird systems.
This is the first time reading HN has made me scared to live on this planet!
I'm not sure if it should make you scared or not, but it is good for people to internalize that many if not most systems in our world are (sometimes literally) held together by duck tape and often function purely because either:
A) like 2 or 3 people total care about them way more than they're obligated to and keep them from falling over,
B) it turns out that in many instances people just don't exploit or crash stuff, and broken systems can take a while to fail.
----
That could be a longer conversation and it's not necessarily all pessimistic; the reality of how software (and systems in general) get built is one of the reasons I don't have a lot of patience for people who say there aren't any ways they can contribute to or improve anything and that the world is too connected or competitive now for people to make a difference. There's a ton of stuff to do and improve in most systems regardless of your talent level and there is no shortage of small but really impactful things that people can do around infrastructure, even if it's as simple as documenting how systems work.
But I'm dead serious about this: internalize that real world systems are messy and that everyone involved in them is doing car maintenance on a still-moving vehicle. Internalize that systems decay over time and that as things become messy, they get messier at a faster rate. Internalize that this is not an exception, but the rule. All systems and codebases that are seeing regular development by nature decay and become unmaintainable unless you expend extra energy to keep reinforcing them, pruning them, and refactoring them. And it's not as simple as hiring good programmers, messy systems actually have momentum towards messiness, and regardless of who you hire they'll spend the majority of their time just keeping the system from falling over.
That is an incredibly important principle about the world for people to understand -- both because it helps make sense of a lot of the world and because internalizing it will make you a better manager if you're ever in that position.
It also helps with evaluating security, because it's one thing to say that extra data storage and processing might increase security risk by multiplying attack vectors, and it's entirely another thing to actually have a sense for how much extra risk of bugs/mishandling/exploits each extra layer of software and corporate handling adds to data. At the same time, it also helps with understanding threat models and managing expectations, because you realize that very few things in the world are actually secure, but that for some reason (absent coordinated effort or a lot of attention) they very often don't get exploited or destroyed, and that there are ways to mitigate that kind of inescapable ambient risk.
Makes sense to cache an API call for prices, then if you don't realise you're mutating the cached object you could do this on every page load.
Not in the web space but I've seen similar with using pythons lrucache as using that on a function modifies the programs behaviour (if you mutate the returned value, you're in trouble).
For it to persist across refreshes you would need to do more than just mutate the object, you would need to actually write it back to a persisted location like localstorage or a cookie.
> This explicitly programmed behavior can NOT be a bug
Um, I know you said you work in software, and the rules say not to doubt you. So I'll press Y and move on.
There are so many levels of bugs that almost nothing would surprise me, and this falls very easily within the range of bugs I've witnessed personally. Let's try this:
Hahahaha. It takes a single off-by-one errors to accidentally increment prices. It would take a lot of effort to deliberate design a feature that deliberately adds to quoted prices on every refresh, for the purpose of... um... well, that part is unclear. This bug can NOT be explicitly programmed behavior, it's too obvious incorrect behavior to be something someone took time to implement.
I haven’t, but I’ve coded trading systems. Typo a dividend or convert and your dumb little bot starts incrementing its offer every millisecond. (The fun is when another bot gets thrown into a complementary loop and the exchange yells at you.)
Have a system that e.g. codes a local tax or maintenance allowance run on lookup, or have these data in two systems that try to sync but do it wrong, and you get something like this. (This is not a legitimate pricing strategy. Nobody gets FOMO buying an AT&T plan.)
I think OP was saying that the price being relative to each user/session is not a bug, but a feature. The bug part is probably that it keeps raising the price on every refresh, rather than just once.
over 40 years if you count my kid years and closing in on 30 on the clock. IMHO anyone that thinks "the price magically increments 10 dollars every page refresh" is somehow a typical bug (that made production yet!) should probably quit the field.
So I've been coding a few more years than you have, but not many. As a backend dev, this bug makes no sense at all. Having spent a few years with companies using things like Angular and React, I've seen bugs of this type / in this category more than once.
Count yourself fortunate that you've missed such things, but this is the norm more often than not.
>> Count yourself fortunate that you've missed such things...
Will do.
... but this is the norm more often than not.
I can't tell you how frightening I find that ;-) I did appreciate your comment:
>> As a backend dev, this bug makes no sense at all.
That affirms my idea that such things should never happen - at least in some contexts. But it leave me wondering what on earth kind of tools are people using for this to be unsurprising?
The space where things should never happen is fertile ground for bugs, because by definition programmers pay less attention / do less testing when they think failure is impossible :)
I retract my assertion then. However, there were several possible scenarios proffered in the comments whereby this is an easy bug to create. Mainly an increment setup where it increments itself instead of increments off of a base.
It makes a lot of sense. People returning to your pricing page are more likely to have decided to buy from you, so they're likely less price sensitive. I've seen it myself.
Not in $10 increments every refresh though, that's most likely badly coded.
I see this argument but wonder how true it is. If I'm shopping around, I'm already being fickle, comparing prices, features, etc. $10 would probably often be a breaking point. And me finding out you did this definitely would.
If anything, it seems one should slightly -lower- prices when suspecting a customer is shopping around.
Very common bug actually. I've noticed it on most of the airline and traveling agency websites. Must be those sloppy programmers. I know I'm always extra careless when I have to program something where real money is moving.
If they are calculating the price in JS then maybe it is worth me spending a few minutes with the console open on their website to try and bring down my monthly bill. Yes, I would like to switch to the new $10 plan!
Everyone on this thread debating legality of "it's running on my computer already" needs to remember the infinite stupidity field flux density emitted from certain offices. It doesn't matter if it's legal if your legal defense bankrupts you.
There's a story of a guy in Russia who received a contract from a credit card company. He altered it to provide himself a 0% interest rate and then some stipulation that if he keeps a zero balance the company actually owes him money. The company reps signed the agreement without reading. Eventually they canceled his card and he sued for breach of this contract. It went back and forth in the courts and they eventually settled.
Is doing so illegal? No. Can you demand the company accept Plan W? Also no.
You are basically just giving a counter offer, the company can choose to accept or reject that offer. There have been cases (cba to google them right now, just going off my memory) where customers have done what you have suggested, the company have blindly accepted the "counter offer" and have had to honour the amended contract they agreed to.
EDIT: The problems happen when trying to enforce such amended contracts, trying to prove the company agreed to such changes. For me when I'm negotiating my annual broadband contract I record the phone call (granted I'm in the UK, recording calls as an indivial is legal) just to make sure I have a record of what was agreed. But my current provider has always followed up with a updated contract after the phone call with the new terms, so it would be easy for me to prove that my provider agreed to those terms. My current provider agreed to a price which is £1 per month cheaper than the cheapest like fore like competitor I could find at the time and also agreed to waive any cancelation charges if I choice to cancel before the end of the 12 month contract.
However a) been pretty happy with their service todate so unless the shit hits the fan I have no plans to leaving them unless b) my local area finally gets FTTP but if that does happen I will prob use my current provider as my FTTP provider. So they really don't have any risk of myu cancelling during the current contract.
>Can you demand the company accept Plan W? Also no.
Maybe I'm misremembering but I vaguely recall a story of a man who altered a contract, signed it, and mailed it back to a telecom company. They signed it without reviewing and when it went to court it was upheld because both parties signed the altered contract.
But I understand that's different than "demanding" they accept it so it doesn't negate your point.
What I meant by "demand the company accept Plan W", was that you can not force the company to accept your "Plan W" counter offer, but if they do accept "Plan W" you should be able to enforce "Plan W" as long as you can prove that they accepted "Plan W".
In the example I gave in my edit with my own ISP recently, the inital offer they gave me when my contract was coming up to expire was to keep my existing price and level of service, however over the previous year prices for new customers had dropped below what I was paying and a competitor was even lower than my own ISP's new customer pricing (For the same level of service - the pricing diffence wasn't much but it was still there).
So when my contract was due for renewal I called them up (easier to negotiate with a human than a computer) pointed out that a) I was happy with the service they had provided but I was not happy that the price they initially offered to renew was higher than if I was a new customer. b) Because they hadn't offered the price that they gave new customers it incentived me to compare prices elsewhere which lead me their competitor and I was inclided to switch, but suggested that if they sweetened the deal I would stay.
The rep offered a lower price and I said I would agree aslong as they wavied any cancellation charges during the contract. I did say to the rep that I had no plans to cancel unless my street finally gets fibred. It took a bit of wording in the contract, tech speaking the early termination charge is still there however the discount I have cancels out that charge so it would end up being a zero owed balance which I was happy with (Chances are that my street won't get fibred during the remainer of my contract and even if it did I would prob use my existing provider as my fibre provider as they do offer it where its available, so it was a safe bet for the provider and just gave me a bit of reassurance).
My ISP had every right to tell me to go pound sand, my choices would have then been to take the best deal my ISP offered and stay or switch ISPs (which here in the UK has been fine-tuned to a point there is very little downtime, basically for most people its a case of swapping out the ISP issued router, for me it would be configuring my own modem to the new ISP's auth come switch over). Customer retaintion reps usually have a bit of leeway to keep non probmatic customers happy, and tbh I would have been happy if they had just price matched the price they offer new customers, but hey if you don't ask, you don't get :-)
Honestly, given the way the CFAA has been (ab)used in the past, it might just come down to whether they "use a computer" to scan the page and see what's checked...
The same way that if a company puts pages you can access at `www.example.com/1` and you then access `www.example.com/2`, which you should not access, you're violating the CFAA.
I haven't read the CFAA in a while but it is extremely broad. It boiled down to "if you access a system in a way you should not, illegal".
Or how accessing the same page a billion times per second, a page you have every right to access a few times, is illegal.
Or if you dial into a nuclear arms facility with your phone.
So if I access it with a non-compliant browser that, say, doesn't run validation javascript when I submit a form, it's abuse? I think even the most tech illiterate judge would agree that, if I fill out a paper form and give it to someone at a company, it's on them to validate the information in it before executing a contract with the information inside it.
If someone is doing these kinds of calculations client side, then they are pretty much begging someone to take advantage of them like this. After all, it is code running on my computer that you've given me control of by doing critical decisions client side. I've just decided to make that critical decision myself using the same code that has been provided to me.
Don't ever do critical calculations like this client side. It's just dumber than dumb.
So is exceeding the speed limit. However, catching speeders is much easier to do than proving someone intentionally manipulated the data client side and that it wasn't a bug somewhere else in the shittily designed system.
If the Javascript code is running on your own computer then you by definition have authorized access.
By the same token, AT&Ts malicious pricing malware running in your browser could be construed of "unauthorized access" of your own computer, thus AT&T would be violating CFAA.
Once you send that over the wire to their system, you've committed a crime. Whether that's simple theft of services or something worse is up to the prosecution. Considering you altered a company's website to have it send malformed data for the express purposes of getting an unauthorized discount, computer/wire fraud might be on the table.
But don't sit there and pretend that you can say, "well, they let me do it because some of the code ran client side." No, that's not how it works. Changing the price of a $100 service to $10 on a website, is like taking a bar code from a $10 product and slapping it on $100 product. The biggest difference is, since it involves computers, there are even more crimes committed.
Obviously IANAL, but it is an interesting thought exercise. Would changing price (and having it accepted) be a financial crime (wire fraud, etc), or a negotiation? It isn’t like you are going into the ATT database and changing your bill. Would it be more like saying, I’m willing to pay X for plan Z? And if they accept, is this the result of digital haggling? Because, this is possible when you are physically talking to a rep (in person or on the phone).
I doubt a “reasonable” person would think of it like the latter case, but for people who think about software agents, it’s interesting to think about.
I think the critical difference is that their backend API is not meant for public use. The situation is akin to forging an internal email to your customer service rep, tricking them into changing your bill.
It responds to calls from their frontend code, by necessity. It is not meant for public use. Just because you are technically capable to interact with it yourself does not mean you legally can.
Just because you can physically enter a strangers house does not shield you from trespassing charges.
Society / the legal system is not code. There is all sorts of nuance and morals and subjectivity involved beyond the "bits on the wire", so to speak. You can go to prison for accessing a website you know you shouldn't, even if the HTTP response code is 200.
It would probably be a crime if you manipulated their computers to accept the $10 price. But if you submit you want a plan for $10 and their servers just accept it then what crime could I have committed?
You've still committed a crime even if the other party doesn't actively prevent you from doing so. You can walk into a store, and walk out the front door with a television and probably nobody will stop you. Additionally, you can walk into a bank and demand that they give you money, and they will give it to you.
In none of these cases are the companies condoning or supporting your actions. You can try the argument that the bank teller gave you the money and that it's bank policy to do so. But it probably won't work.
It's strange to see people bending over backwards to deny that this is a crime. Surely if someone manipulated your bank's computers to wire transfer your entire balance to another account, you wouldn't be asking, "what crime could [they] have committed?" You'd feel like somebody stole from you.
I think the reason people are denying this is a crime is because it's happening on their machine, not a remote server. And the remote server is presumable accepting the request.
Using your store analogy it would be like bringing a television to the cashier and telling them you will pay $10 and they accept.
You could argue that you have access to their JS. But as soon as you modify that JS to do something they don't want to their backend servers, that's most likely unlawful.
When I was in college my friend figured out a major fast food chain had a flaw in its API with the way it validated coupon codes.
The server validated that the coupon code was legitimate, but the actual discount value of the coupon code was validated client side in JS for some reason.
So he could turn any 10% off coupon into a 100% off coupon by modifying the API requests during the checkout flow. I'm sure this was illegal but he ate a lot of free fast food before they ever fixed it.
Let's run with this thought experiment even further: what if I use a very obscure browser that happens to interpret their JS in a very specific (and beneficial to me) way?
Anytime I've had to interact with any AT&T website, it's not uncommon for a clicked link to result in a dozen or so redirects in the browser. I suspect their tech is just layers upon layers of legacy goo.
It also happens when trying to verify your account through the various streaming apps. I'd say it's also 50/50 if you can successfully authenticate your account to get access to the streaming app.
Now imagine how bad their internal sites are. I worked for a subsidiary and we used their internal site for network circuit ticketing...it was an absolutely maddening experience.
Their other services might be hell, but I'm now three years in on AT&T fiber internet. It has been a great experience. They charge a round dollar amount with all fees included and have only changed the price once ($10 more) after the first year deal.
Google threatened to bring fiber to my home years ago. Well, they still haven't, but doing so apparently motivated AT&T to do so. I've now had reliable 1 Gbps service for $70/month since Jan 2017, no price increases. They even started giving me free access to HBO awhile back. I keep thinking they've just somehow forgotten about my account. I assume I'll lose free HBO once the Warner sell-off is complete.
Aside, but I was recently helping my mother-in-law get Internet. She's in a place serviced by Sonic, but only over AT&T copper. Their pricing was not great. I ended up discovering Xfininty (Comcast) pre-paid. $45/month for 10'ish/50'ish Mbps service which is plenty for her, no data cap, no dealing with Comcast customer retention when she wants to cancel. This is not a well advertised service and I came across it only by accident.
I think "Google threatened to bring Fiber but never did and everyone else lowered their prices" is best case for everyone. People get reasonably priced high speed Internet, and nobody has to suffer being a Google product.
As a contrasting experience - AT&T owns the rights to supply internet via overhead lines where I live (it's rural here), with a contractual agreement to provide high speed access. Because they're a multi-billion dollar corporation and we're a township of around 500 people (and our town council are fucking morons) it's a forever agreement, and high speed is defined as dial-up.
Meanwhile, the local co-op ISP just finished running underground fiber to the township. Full gig connection for $250 set-up fee (with a 1000yd drop to your house if necessary) and $80/month forever.
In a township that small and moronic council members, have you ever been tempted to run for council position yourself? I'd have concerns that I'd become a moron in that sense as usually there are such deep rooted moronic decisions that non-morons can't do anything. So now the non-moron comes across as moronic as well.
But that's just my own personal fear.
The problem in small towns is that the idiots in charge, generally, haven't ever left the small towns. Therefore, they are blissfully unaware of their ignorance. They don't even know what they don't know.
They apply lessons their fathers and mothers learned in the 50's and 60's about how business is done with a handshake and a friendly disposition to today's world.
And if you don't have the right last name or the willingness to defer to their ignorant authority, you can't get anything done.
It's frustrating to see the same people from the same families making the same stupid mistakes for literally generations. It's more frustrating to be excluded from that process that you know you can help fix just because you dared to leave the community for any period of time regardless of whether it was for fun or for advanced university studies or your last name is tainted because your grandpa was a complete shithead, regardless of how you turned out.
A bit of a rant. But. I have been tempted to run, and I have been elected to the council. And I couldn't get anything done, because I was purposefully excluded as an outsider with too much education, regardless of what I tried. It was frustrating.
I hate to agree with this, but ATT fiber has been good for me as well. I'm going to change soon to a different, local provider, but for other reasons than "ATT fiber sucks."
Way back in the day, when DSL was The New Thing, I had a good experience with it as well. Damn you, ATT! I try to hate, but you keep meeting my expectations!
That said, a friend is getting royally jacked up by ATT incompetence and complete disinterest in slightly rural service.
Agreed. AT&T fiber has been rock solid for close to 4 years that I've been using. They've even let me keep the discount price after the promotional period (I just asked).
My only complaint is their subpar gateway. WiFi signals keep dropping when there's any kind of interference and the automatic channel finding is awful. But a one-time investment in a router and you're good.
This is pretty much my exact experience as well. I'm just too damn lazy to find a different WiFi to switch it out. It does seem to have gotten worse in the last 6months or so. I love the gigabit outbound for being able to connect to my OwnCloud server while away from home at high enough speeds I don't use Dropbox/iCloud/etc.
I use it too. Theres only one place in the house where I can plug in the required modem which makes it annoying. Also not possible to replace it with ur own equipment interestingly enough. Not sure why
My local monopoly simply increased prices across the board for everyone. Who else could we turn to for new service? Starlink is at capacity here and DSL has a nice "up to 3Mbps" disclaimer.
It's hilarious how most people in that thread are jumping on the hate train and taking the post at face value, despite not a single person confirming they can reproduce it. Surely there's somebody with an at&t account that's reading this thread that could take 60 seconds to check themselves?
Exactly this. There are people in that Reddit thread claiming that using a Mac will make companies charge you more too, with absolutely zero proof of any of these claims.
People will go to endless lengths to justify their spending habits.
Yes. The person produced the video should share his AT&T account or even his desktop account and open for remote, so that everyone can login to try it out.
Again, you're missing the point. The problem isn't with the OP, it's that everybody else didn't bother to reproduce it, and is uncritically believing it despite the lack of replication.
I did. I went to the url in the post but got a login page. I'm not an at&t customer so that's basically the end of my attempts. That said, based on the upvote/comment count, and how big of a market share at&t has, there must be at least hundreds of users that can reproduce it.
My question is if these prices are algorithmically generated, and borderline pseudo-random, will they actually honor the quoted price? What if I tried to sign up but injected some javascript that created my own imaginary price. Would I be able to convince the system to accept this number, and what proof would AT&T have that their frontend didn't actually show it to me at some point?
Cynically, I suspect that the fabricated number will be disregarded when it comes time to signing a contract, and you will always be presented with one of the same small number of rate buckets. That may be higher or lower than what you saw on the website. If you complain a service rep will be able to drop you into a lower bucket, but they predict that most people will either not care or not notice the price. Not until you get your first bill.
Used to be checkouts for things like hotel wifi passed the price as an unvalidated URL param. All you had to do was change `&price=9.99` to `&price=0.01` and you got cheap wifi.
It's even more expensive. There are all sorts of service fees and equipment rental fees on top of these prices. It's a scumbag way of increasing the costs while still advertising artificially "low" prices.
You don't get many 'cable cutters' in the UK because it's just £120 total a year, and like many people I pay it even though I almost never watch TV, but you can see why do you in the US.
FWIW, in metro areas there's free over-the-air TV, there's no license fees for that. In my metro area there's easily 80 or so OTA channels I can pick up for free. So one could argue TV in the US is actually £120 less than in the UK, from that perspective. Here you can own and watch TV without paying anything other than the upfront cost of the TV and a wire (the most basic form of antenna).
This would be more like paying for Sky TV subscription.
I really don't watch much TV either way, as I agree advertising is atrocious these days.
Still, in US there's no TV license you have to pay like in the UK. So if you don't want to pay for TV service in the US, you don't have to. In UK, if you own a TV you pay for TV service, it's the law.
It's awesome in the US if you only have one internet provider. Not only is the internet badly overpriced[1], they bundle cable and internet together, so that you basically pay for cable whether or not you want it. We wanted to drop cable to save money, but they said "Oh that means we remove the bundle discount. Your bill only goes down $3 a month."
[1] This is not an opinion. AT&T just put in fiber and I got 6x faster download, 20x faster upload at a fraction of what I was paying before. My existing provider countered (after I cancelled) with a much faster internet plan plus cable at 40% of their previous price.
In these monopoly provider situations, can you not get a "dry line" data only package? A lot of people are unfamiliar with that option as the ISP doesn't like to advertise it as they want you to subscribe to their bundles.
However, I have found that by using my cable subscription to gain access to the various streaming apps, it is cheaper than buying all of the apps a la carte.
That's the shocking thing. I've heard of cases where dropping cable would increase the bill. I suspect that's because it's easier to defend leveraging your monopoly power if you can show customers are "buying" other services like cable.
My mobile bill with unlimited (7.5g before being throttled) data is $25/mo.
I could have gone with $15/mo if I didn't use so much data.
You can spend more but you're basically just paying for the privilege of having a provider that more readily offers flagship phones subsidized via contract.
And you have to regularly shop around. Do you want more data or voice? Do you want international roaming? International calling? Spotify? Netflix? Hulu?
I, for example have a T-Mobile Magenta Plus. It also includes, Netflix, Apple TV+, Paramount+ (the Star Trek Channel), and Spotify. Those services are $40 separately.
I live in Michigan too. Have you tried Visible, Verizon’s discount carrier? It works great for me in Greater Detroit region, the thumb, and up north. I pay $25/mo for unlimited everything.
I used to use a tier 2 carrier. Then we had the freeze / grid anomaly in Texas and it resulted in a lot of cell phone traffic. My wife who was on a direct plan with ATT was able to use her phone most of the time with little issue. Meanwhile I was on a tier 2 carrier and had nothing the entire time. Work's great until it doesn't.
I have a friend on the police/emergency responder ATT network (FirstNet) and he said he's NEVER had it slow down since those EIMIs get priority routing. I'm sure someone in telco network operations could explain this even better than I can.
Not only that, but in many areas the same company who owns the TV network also has a monopoly on the local Internet prices. It's a right mess. Part of the reason I'm excited for starlink to be a thing is that it, along with mobile networks, basically forces that monopoly on internet service to finally be broken up in rural areas.
I’ve had a great experience with Visible, Verizon’s discount carrier. I only pay $25/mo for unlimited data, phone, and text. You join a party and each member of a party gets their own bill.
It’s funny, this is exactly what weev went to jail for doing to AT&T. Apparently it’s okay if you increment a number in every HTTP response, but not if you do it in the request!
I seem to recall that there was a proposal in Europe where such pricing practices were to be - if not outlawed - then made more transparent by having websites explain that they were offering different prices for the same service/product, and why the price might differ (currency, referring site etc).
I don’t know how it compares to Windows and Android, but in South East Asia I get “mobile prices” on my iPhone and they’re actually lower than on the desktop.
That's what they advertise, but multiple times when checking the price is absolutely the same on desktop (from a different account). They've already been caught in false advertising so i don't see why they continue to do it
Prices are so flexible I usually find a hotel and then Google it to find a better price, even if I end up on the same site. The worst thing is when they advertise a price without taxes, which unfortunately is not illegal in most of the world. I think in Europe you’re required to show the final price.
Avianca -- a Colombian airline -- does this too. It's really irritating. They also jack up the prices if you're viewing it in COP vs USD, to the point where the price can vary by >50%.
Lots of places do price discrimination, but there's an honest way and a dishonest way to do it.
Honest way: "Here's a base price for the product; here are some extras (even if Veblen) that you can also get by giving us more money". Lots of video games do this (buy the presale premium edition, get some merch); streaming sites also do this (see Netflix's pricing tiers).
Dishonest way: "Here's your price." (Unsaid: it's different than Chad's price, but there is no way to know what factors make that distinction).
There's price discrimination, and there's airlines.
Airlines will tell you "An economy seat on this flight costs $100. There is 1 ticket left at this price." ; you'll think "Great!" and proceed to click into it, with the intent to buy at that price. You'll get to the part where you need to choose your (specific, not simply class of) seat on the plane, and the diagram will show no seats available: your only option will be to "upgrade" to a costlier seat. So, in reality, there weren't any seats at that price, and the whole "There is n seats at this price" thing was simple bait & switch meant to just wear you down into purchasing the more expensive seat.
I'm sure some of this is just scumminess, but there's also the possibility of concurrent access, and someone else booked while you were thinking. There's also the more likely issue where airlines often outsource inventory management[1] and they have to pay a fee per search for realtime inventory (and those searches are slow), so they cache a lot of things and only get realtime inventory when you're very close to booking; then they often do a very poor job of cache invalidation (because it's hard)
There's a lot of ways you could organize the data so it's less terrible, but all of those involve a lot more IT involvement than airlines want to invest it.
> but there's also the possibility of concurrent access, and someone else booked while you were thinking
You can restart the flow from scratch, and you'll still get "n seats available at this price", which rules out that it was booked while I was looking.
> so they cache a lot of things and only get realtime inventory when you're very close to booking; then they often do a very poor job of cache invalidation (because it's hard)
Yet the end result is the same: the consumer gets a bait and switch.
You're not wrong here, but what you point to is the problem: companies using "blame computers" as a way to abdicate responsibility for the problem.
> There's a lot of ways you could organize the data so it's less terrible, but all of those involve a lot more IT involvement than airlines want to invest it.
Precisely. One can look at it too as there is no penalty these days for screwing consumers over, so there's no economic impetus to do anything about it when it happens.
Appropriate that this is posted in /r/AssholeDesign, as AT&T is a company that seems to have embraced AssholeDesign as a mission and organizational philosophy.
There's no way this persists through the whole payflow, likely a bug on the client/view layer.
Pricing is subject to multivariate testing all the time on e-commerce sites, this is likely supposed to show x for Segment A and x+10 for Segment B. I'd be shocked if OP could check out with the inflated price. Otherwise I'm opening up web inspector and getting myself a $0.00 AT&T monthly plan...
I just ordered AT&T Internet a week ago. Because the building I'm living now has a deal with them and I get a cheap package. They demanded my SSN for a credit check, and they spent almost every call trying to upsell me. It felt very trashy and unprofessional. They also hijack DNS and point all unresolved domains to their own search page. Very scummy. I wouldn't use them again if I had a choice.
Additional fun on AT&T’s website. The phone number to call and complete the order changes on every session. So you can often get a new phone number by refreshing as well.
Wait a little longer and then refresh!! The price might go down!! I once was trying to use Lyft because I missed a bus.. I searched again for the ride and the price went up like crazy, tried again and it stayed high.. Then I decided to just wait for the bus. After some 15 minutes I searched Lyft again and the price was back to normal if not lower!!
I JUST NOW experienced the opposite of this with an airport parking website.
I double-checked my reservation dates (maybe hit the back button in doing so) before pulling the trigger on the order button and it applied my $19 'free day' discount twice.
And, yes, my credit card was charged the post-double discount value!
as an AT&T customer, I can confirm that their websites are some of the jankiest I have ever seen. The number of redirects and different loading gifs you get when logging in to your account is comical. I need to capture this sometime.
They raised the price of their products $10 recently (I cancelled). So they might have done something like price = price + 10 but this had the unintended effect of incrementing the price every time rather than just once
ok so the price goes up on page refresh, ok lets just assume thats now a given, and wonder just how high can the price go?
Can we for instance jack the price up to thousands, perhaps millions of dollars?
most importantly when contacting ATT to purchase at such price, will sales think that is reasonable, or will they have a different price in front of them?
