Vets, hairdressers, and other bastards who only tell you the price when it’s too late

COMPETITION watchdogs are to make vets publish price lists, because they along with these bastards have been getting away with it for far too long: 

Hairdressers

Barbers have a price list on the wall. Your upscale hairdresser offering you a matcha tea and a sympathetic chat? Who’s more of a friend stroke therapist than a hairdresser? Who caresses your troublesome curls so caringly? She doesn’t display a price. She just says ‘That’s £135’ then waits for her tip.

Vets

The assumption is that you love your pet so much that when you rush in, finally making the link between missing Warhammer figures and why he’s off his food and has a lumpy, sharp stomach, price is no object. It’s your assumption too, until you get a bill for £4,855 and realise that your love has clear financial limits which you cannot here-and-now admit to.

Bars

Technically even a working men’s club in Swansea is coy about the price, but it’s the high-end ones that truly horrify. First they apply the pressure to seem like a sophisticated, urbane couple for whom figures are a mere trifle, then they charge you £40 for two double vodka cokes. You hand over your card with a smile that cannot seem in any way genuine.

Mechanics 

Sure, there’s a price for MOTs listed on their website. That will be the price, if everything passes. If it doesn’t? Then look forward to an itemised and entirely improvised bill of wild creativity, charging £25 for a replaced windscreen wiper blade and a full £145 for carburettor encyclement (hydration) and for you to pay it blindly, only swearing when you’re accelerating away.

Oasis

Not just them, obviously. Every twat in the live music business who can fill so much as a room has a little surprise saved up for you at checkout. ‘I’m afraid there are only Platinum Party Packages left,’ your laptop murmurs, ‘but if you’re a real fan then you’ll be delighted with our exclusive merch offer. Besides, you did promise your son..?’

Funeral directors

It’s terrible, to lose someone. So terrible there’s an entire industry calculating you’ve been left a bit of cash and won’t make a fuss at them charging £120 to plug the USB holding the Powerpoint of photos you’ve created into their own laptop, and then there’s the hearse, and would you like us to provide flowers? Do you dare make a scene, ma’am? No?