The countdown starts the moment you click. You have eight minutes to complete your purchase of two concert tickets, $74 each — a number you have already made peace with — and then, somewhere around the billing page, the total quietly grows legs. A service fee of $18.90 per ticket. A facility charge of $6, payable to a facility you have not yet entered. An order-processing fee of $4.50 per ticket, which appears to be a charge for the labor of charging you the other charges. The tickets now cost $103.40 each. The timer keeps counting. You pay. So does everyone behind you in the queue.
This is drip pricing, and after roughly two decades of treating it as an unpleasant fact of digital life, like pop-up ads or terms-of-service novellas, governments have started to move. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Rule on Unfair or Deceptive Fees took effect in May 2025, requiring businesses to show the total price — every mandatory fee included — up front and more prominently than any other number, with only taxes, shipping, and genuinely optional extras allowed to arrive later. The catch is scope: the rule covers live-event tickets and short-term lodging, and nothing else. Airlines, restaurants, and delivery apps remain free to improvise. California went broader with SB 478, operative since July 2024, which makes it illegal to advertise a price that excludes mandatory fees at all; the state attorney general’s guidance is blunt that disclosing the fees later does not cure the violation. Britain went furthest: under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, drip pricing is unlawful per se — no need to prove anyone was misled — and any “invitation to purchase,” a category stretching from shelf tags to Instagram ads, must carry the total price, on pain of fines up to 10 percent of turnover.
What’s worth noticing is what these rules are actually defending. Not cheapness — California’s guidance explicitly says the law doesn’t cap what anyone charges, and a $40 “resort fee” is perfectly legal as long as it’s in the headline number. What’s being defended is comparability. A posted price is not just information; it is a promise that the number describes the thing, and that the same number is visible to everyone, so that two numbers can be placed side by side and a choice made. That small act of comparison is the entire mechanism by which competition is supposed to discipline sellers. Drip pricing doesn’t merely irritate — it launders. You compared $74 against $78, but the real contest, $103.40 against $91, happened after you had already emotionally checked out, timer running, card in hand.
The radical invention of the price tag
The fixed, posted price is younger than money, younger than shops, younger than the word “retail.” For most of human commerce, a price was the output of a negotiation — a fact about the customer’s shrewdness as much as the goods. The one-price tag is generally credited to John Wanamaker’s Philadelphia department store in the 1870s, where it was sold as a kind of moral innovation: everyone pays the same number, no haggling, no favorites. It turned price into a property of the object rather than a property of the person holding it, and in doing so it made markets legible to amateurs. You no longer needed to be a good negotiator to be treated fairly. You just needed to be able to read.
Which is why the next development matters more than any resort fee. Every one of the new rules assumes the number is the same for everyone — and nothing in them requires that. The FTC’s own FAQ for its fee rule states that “nothing in the Rule prohibits dynamic pricing,” and here it is worth being precise, because the industry works hard not to be. Dynamic pricing means one price for everyone at a given moment, moving over time: the Uber surge, the airline seat that costs more on Friday. It is legible. You can see it, wait it out, complain about it at parties. Personalised pricing means different prices for different people at the same moment, tuned to an inference about what each person will tolerate — and it is a different species wearing the same name. “Dynamic” sounds like weather. Personalised is surveillance with a receipt.
The number that knows you
No major retailer has been documented charging individuals different simultaneous prices, and it would be wrong to claim otherwise. What is documented is the capability and the interest: vendors openly market pricing software that ingests behavioral data, and in 2024 the FTC issued study orders to eight companies over what it pointedly calls “surveillance pricing,” with staff findings in early 2025 describing tools that can draw on data as granular as location and browsing behavior. The unsettling property of personalised pricing is not that it is rampant. It is that it is undetectable from the buyer’s side of the screen. Two people on the same couch can both see “the price” and have no way of knowing whether they saw the same one. Comparison doesn’t die loudly, the way it does at the ticket checkout. It dies silently, because you cannot comparison-shop against a mirror.
The fee crackdowns are genuinely good, and the honest number they restore deserves defending. But they police only half of Wanamaker’s promise — that the price describes the product. The other half, that everyone in the queue is looking at the same number, is still just an assumption baked into rules written for a world of printed tags. Assumptions are exactly what software eats.