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Last week, a friend was halfway through a Hollywood wax when she complained to her beautician about stubborn hairs that were often missed. “That’ll be extra,” she was told. Apparently now the outcome of a Hollywood — famously meaning that your entire vagina is left completely bare — depends on what the beautician you have at the time can be bothered to do.
She paid the money. What’s worse is that she didn’t even recount this story to me with pure, incandescent rage. When she finished talking and saw me red-faced and flapping my arms about, she laughed calmly and said, “It happens all the time now.”
Tragically, this does happen all the time. Last week, I went to Rome and decided that I’d get my hair done for the trip. A treat, I know. Especially if you have hair below shoulder-length where you have to pay a surcharge of nearly double the standard price for the luxury of not looking like a persnickety librarian. You want a rinse? That’s extra. You don’t want to leave the shop with sopping wet hair in the middle of winter? Add on fifty bucks for a quick blow-dry because nothing — literally nothing — is included in the price anymore.
I’m not sure when surcharges started. I don’t want to know. But it does feel like they’ve crept up on us. They started with credit cards and I — we — accepted that. But how we got to “convenience charges” for purchasing a ticket on the internet, or an economy flight for $70 ending with $300 worth of extras smacked on, is quite frankly beyond me. I thought the bleakness of this phenomenon could be summed up by the fact that we now have to pay an extra few dollars for whipped cream and marshmallows on a hot chocolate. Alas, it gets worse.
Some aspects of life should surely see a flat rate with no hidden charges, right? Particularly death — the second most depressing inevitability after taxes. Well, it turns out that now you can’t even keel over and die without being stung. A quick look at my local funeral home’s website shows that alongside paying almost $1,000 for the pleasure of being incinerated, you’ll be smacked with a nearly $200 surcharge for being burnt on a bank holiday or weekend. I nearly keeled over myself when I read that there’s a $400 charge added as a “late fee” if God forbid you’re stuck in traffic on the way to the cremation ceremony. But they do give you a fifteen-minute grace period. How noble.
It’s gotten to the point where there’s hardly anything I can think of that doesn’t have these extras. A morning routine of grabbing a coffee and sandwich at Pret A Manger will drastically increase if you want to eat it inside to avoid the elements. A friend went to a restaurant in DC last year and noticed that on the bill they added 5 percent for a “cleaning surcharge.” You could argue that these things are luxuries and maybe you could just make a coffee or your own lunch or have dinner at home. But when these surcharges are seeping into every mundane corner of life it seems pointless to try and avoid them.
Joe Biden calls them junk fees. At his State of the Union address in February, he proposed a “Junk Fee Prevention Act” that would get rid of “excessive” fees on tickets for online concerts, sporting events and entertainment. He added that he’d put a stop to airline fees for family members to sit with young children; put a stop to early termination fees for TV, phone and internet service; and block surprise resort and destination fees that can see you charged hundreds of dollars a night for drinking bottled water and wearing a hotel robe. An easy win, surely.
Living in London and having my rent increased every few weeks by scavenger landlords means that I move a lot. And every time I move I have to fight my old landlord for my deposit while simultaneously trying to scrape together a new one. Recently, every new lease I’ve signed has an abundance of surcharges for signing fees or — God forbid — putting the heating on. One girl I saw online was charged a $200 upfront fee and a $15 monthly fee for keeping a pet goldfish. The last house I left resulted in a six-month battle with the landlord who tried charging me a $600 cleaning fee for leaving tea bags in the kitchen cupboard. He conveniently forgot that they were his, and were there when I moved in.
As the cost of living skyrockets, paying more for the same product is something we’re all getting used to. There are things I’ve always bought that I now refuse to buy on principle more than price. But what makes me seethe, what I think should have us rioting in the streets, is asking for some guac on an already extortionately priced burrito and hearing the words “That’ll be extra!”
