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A consumer class action lawsuit filed in federal court last month against the San Francisco Giants baseball team seeks to recoup alleged “junk fees” that were included in the price of hundreds of thousands of tickets to Giants’ games purchased online.
Junk fees is the term commonly applied to charges that are not disclosed when an online purchase is commenced, but appear at the final stage of the transaction, leaving the consumer with a bigger bill than advertised.
The complaint submitted Jan. 26 alleges that prior to July 2024, San Francisco Baseball Associates LLC – the ownership group of the Giants – sold online tickets to fans that included previously undisclosed charges labeled “service fees” or “convenience fees” or “order fees”.
The Giants declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The complaint illustrates the alleged practice by detailing the purchase of two Giants tickets by Los Angeles resident Juan Flores, the named plaintiff in the litigation.
According to the allegations, Flores bought two tickets to a game at Oracle Park on April 6, 2024, featuring the San Diego Padres playing the Giants.
Flores found the tickets online at an advertised price of $10 apiece. Flores says that he logged into his MLB.com account and was taken to a timed checkout screen where the price appeared as $20 for two tickets. He then was given a number of purchase related options – including parking, delivery method, payment details, and messaging preferences.
Only after making those choices did he get to the bottom of the page where the price was not $20 but $29 to account for convenience and order fees of $5.50 and $3.50, respectively.
The complaint says that if he had known the price was $29 upfront, Flores wouldn’t have bought the tickets, but by the time he discovered the total cost, he had “already invested substantial time and effort into selecting and purchasing tickets and (had) already psychologically committed to the tickets”.
The complaint points out that the junk fees Flores amounted to 45% of the advertised price.
The inclusion of junk fees in purchase transactions – sometimes also called “drip pricing” for the idea that the charges are dripped out to the consumer as the purchase proceeds – has been targeted at the state and federal levels in recent years.
California enacted Senate Bill 478, the “Honest Pricing Act”, that became effective July 1, 2024, and forbids advertising or displaying a price in most consumer goods or services transactions that doesn’t include all mandatory charges (other than taxes and shipping). The law applies to tickets and events.
The complaint says that the Giants discontinued the challenged practice in mid-2024 (presumably when the honest pricing law went into effect), so its focus is on transactions that occurred prior to that date. To make his claim, the plaintiff doesn’t rely on the Honest Pricing Act but on more general consumer protection laws – principally those relating to unfair competition and false advertising – that existed in California before the new law.
The plaintiff says that the class that he seeks to represent would include all California residents who bought an online ticket to see the Giants where the price they paid included a fee or fees that was not included in the initially displayed price.
The complaint does not identify the total number of such transactions, but it says that the class could include hundreds of thousands of purchasers.
The complaint asks for restitution of the junk fees to the members of the class, and it asks that the Giants pay the plaintiff’s legal fees in pursuing the litigation.
Wesley Griffith, attorney for the plaintiffs, said the lawsuit was important because “the price you see is the price you should pay and when companies deviate from that, it is bad for consumers and is bad for market economics.”
– Story by Joe Dworetzky, Bay City News Service
