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This is another week with a quick hitter. Listen, a couple weeks ago the FTC forced Ticketmaster to show the full price up front. They complied, which in Ticketmaster means the mugging now comes with an itemized receipt. This is junk fee strip pricing. The advertised price is just the bait price. Here's how it works. Michelle Madrigal, California, 2024, she bought three concert tickets on Ticketmaster. Displayed price was $290 per ticket, $870 total. She picks her seats, enters her credit card, and then guess what? $164 in mandatory service fees plus $78 in taxes. Final cost is now $1,112. 28% above the price she clicked on. The fee waited until her credit card was emotionally involved. And here's the kicker. Four researchers ran a field experiment on StubHub. Blake, Mosherry, Sweeney, and Tatalus. Same platform, real buyers. Marketing Science 2021. Drip pricing made 21% more money. So hidden fees aren't a bug. They're a business model with footnotes. Every hidden fee exists because hiding it literally pays better than showing it. Now, same architecture applied to your rent. You see a listing, $1,500 a month, sounds reasonable. You apply, well, there's a $60 application fee. Despite that, you sign. Then comes the pet fee for a cat that lives somewhere else and the facility fee for the gym that sucks and has one treadmill and a lawsuit pending. And then here's my favorite. Ballet trash. Ballet trash. That means a mandatory charge for someone to walk your garbage 10 yards from your door to the dumpster. You can't opt out. The FTC just settled with Graystar, largest multifamily landlord in the country. $24 million for concealing mandatory fees. Approved two to nothing by Republican commissioners under Chair Andrew Ferguson, who said it would inform new rulemaking on rental housing. Same story with invitation homes. Largest single family landlord in the country. $48 million. Hidden fees totaling more than $1,700 per renter per year. 444,000 people just got refund checks. Well, guess what? They average 106 bucks. That's the trick. The fee is monthly, the refund is apology sized. And here's the moment. 2019. Internal email, CEO of Invitation Homes to a senior BP. Not a public statement. The boss said, quote, juice this hog by making the smart home fee mandatory. Juice this hog. That's not a bill in line. That's a quarterly objective. It's not just rent though. It's everywhere. Airlines pulled in $8.3 billion in bag fees in 2023. Yeah, you heard that number right. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations went and looked, and you know what they found? Airlines don't even track what it actually costs them to handle the fucking bags. So it's not a price for service, it's a profit cost playing as a logistic model. Banks made $9.1 billion in overdraft fees. The CFPB math? A typical $26 overdraft paid back in three days at the standard $35 fee equals an effective APR of $16,000. $16,000. At that point, don't call it overdraft protection. Call it what it is, a payday loan wearing a bank polo. Your bank charges more in three days for $26 than some credit cards charge you in a year for $26,000. Sometimes the same bank. The left hand offers the points, the right hand takes hostages. Now I'll be straight with you. The industry has one real argument. Unbundling can lower the sticker price for people hunting the cheapest fare. Airlines for America says it, Cato says it, all in pricing could raise advertised prices. Fine. That argument gets a chair at the table, it doesn't get the whole fucking house. Because the Senate asks a simple question, what does it actually cost you to handle a single bag? The airlines didn't track it. Ticketmaster's own help docs say these may not reflect the actual cost. The defense works right up until someone says, Oh yeah, cool, bro. What did the bag actually cost you? Then suddenly we got to take a break and everybody has to have a meeting. Typical Washington, the only junk fee role that survived was the bipartisan one. FTC tickets and lodging, signed under Republican chair Andrew Ferguson in December of 2024, is in force. The single party ones got fed into the wood chipper. Airline roll, gone. Overdraft role, gone, credit card late fee cap, gone. Both parties take the money. The American Hotel and Lodging Association alone employs 38 lobbyists. And guess what? 18 of them are former government officials. Yeah, the revolving door has a resort fee. So here's what you can do. Right now, any transaction before you click, sort by total cost, not by sticker price. Don't put your card in until the total stops moving. When the Stub Hub experiment showed people the all-in price up front, they bought less, and they bought lower priced options. 28% of the revenue gap came from people just choosing differently when they could see what things actually cost. You can't kill the architecture, but you can refuse to be the data point that makes it profitable. And if you think this is bad, wait until I tell you what happens when they turn the computers loose on it. That's not a tip, that's the move. Now subscribe. There is no service fee yet.