GOTCHA!

Once again I spent a few days of the Christmas season with my parents on Jekyll Island. This thoroughly delightful family tradition happens at the Jekyll Island Days Inn and Suites. This is my father’s idea of an honest value. The motel is simple, clean, and has a really good free breakfast. Truthfully, like this patron, the property showing some signs of age but it is still in pretty good shape. For $45 a night, the off season rate, a customer gets a room with a view of the woods across the road, free parking, free in room coffee, breakfast, a newspaper, free Wi-Fi, and for those of us without a laptop a courtesy computer in the lobby. What you see is what you get, no tricks, no traps, no gotcha.

In the course of my employment, I have stayed in a number of so called luxury hotels. These traps for the unwary are generally located in major metropolitan areas. Nothing is what it seems. The lobbies of these operations, particularly the atrium lobbies popular in the 1980s are spectacular, but in some cases the room is even smaller than the Jekyll Island Days Inn. Nothing is free. A Coke from the mini-bar might cost $4.00. Wi-Fi might cost $15.00 a night. Don’t even think about going to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. Who in their right mind would pay $12.00 for scrambled eggs. Many of these places don’t even provide a little in room coffee machine for those of us who tend to wake up before 6:00. However, after 6:00 coffee can be obtained from a cute little cart in the lobby for $3.50. The Casino Hotels of Las Vegas have raised the gotcha to an art form. In some of these establishments, some of the items for sale in the room are placed on electronic sensors. If you pick the thing up to look at it, you bought it.

Car dealers delight in the gotcha. They intentional make the deal as complex and interwoven as possible, making it impossible for the customer to determine how much he is really getting in trade in, the cost of financing, or the price of the new vehicle itself. Car dealers also delight in finding add on gotchas like rust proofing or extended warranties. Really, if I thought the car was going to breakdown often enough to justify the cost of an extended warranty, I would not buy it in the first place.

Look at things like the legal disclaimers attached to credit card applications or prescription drug descriptions. They are not there for your protection. They are made extremely complex in order to confuse the unwary or protect the company from legal action. Watch out for the gotchas wherever they are hiding. Try to get to the bottom line out of pocket costs for the actual way you use a hotel, or when you buy a car, or when you vote. Any time you are hearing too many words of finding too many hidden fees or excessive charges, don’t bite the hook.

Matthew 5: 37 (NIV)

Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.

Proverbs 10:19

When words are many, sin is not absent, but he who holds his tongue is wise.

A tip of the hat to the oftwominds financial blog for inspiring this one.