Sten Gazette

“Hurry! Today only– Widgets for just 99 cents!“ So you hurry on down to the Widget store only to be told “Sorry, we’re out of the 99 cent Widgets, but we have plenty of $5 widgets and that’s still a real good price.”

You’re a victim of a “bait and switch” fraud; they’ve baited you into the store with a great offer, but once you’re there they switch you to something else. It oughta be illegal. Well, it isillegal, according to state, local, and federal law. Unless you are an airline.

You’ve seen the ads in every paper in the country: “Limited Time Air Fare Sale.” A “sampling” of really great fares is printed, typically occupying half of the ad space. Most of the rest of the ad is literally “fine print” that explains why the airline doesn’t have to sell you a ticket at that price.

The airline baited you into calling them up or visiting their web site (the modern equivalents of the used car dealer’s “come on down!”) When you get there you will find that, one way or another, the advertised fare is not available but they are happy to switch you to a ticket at a higher price.

The switch started when you read beyond the headlines. The first thing you notice (there’s little attempt to conceal it) is that the listed fares are “one way based on round-trip purchase.” How do they get away with that? It’s a one way fare that doesn’t exist! There is no difference between that and saying “Milk, only 99 cents” with an asterisk and a fine-print footnote saying “price shown is per half-gallon based on purchase of a whole gallon.” To extend the analogy one little step further, you can buy milk in half gallons, and you can buy one-way airfares. Just not at the advertizsd prices. Where the analogy breaks down is that any grocer foolish enough to advertise milk that way would end up in jail and/or out of business. The airlines get away with it every day.

There seems to be a feeling that it is perfectly ok to bait a customer as long as you have adequate “disclaimers” in the fine print. And what constitutes adequate? Usually there are more words in the fine print than there are in the rest of the ad, whether it is a print ad in a newspaper or magazine, or visible for 3 seconds in a TV ad, or read at 400 words per minute by a specially trained “speed-talker” at the end of a radio ad.

The TV commercials are a favorite example– if you go to the trouble of taping an ad and freezing the frame with the fine print, you will find you still can’t read it due to inadequate screen resolution. Or if you can read it, it ends with the expression “other restrictions may apply.”

In the case of airline fare sales, United let one little kitty out of the bag today. They had a calendar showing which days the “special holdiay fares” are available, and according to the calendar the special fares are available on seven specific days over the next three months.

And then of course you need to read the fine print, which lists the usual restrictions and conditions which add up to the virtual impossibility of getting that fare.

The net result of all the fine print is that you could reduce an ad for just about anything to two words– CHEAP!* and…

*Expensive.

–SG

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 16th, 2004 at 11:58 am and is filed under Favorites, Great Scams. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.