words have meaning (SCA)

[cellio]

About a year ago the SCA corporation started imposing a $3/person/event fee for people who are not members of the corporation. (Events are produced by local groups at their own expense and are generally designed to roughly break even.) The corporation calls this $3 fee a "non-member surcharge", and some people have argued that that's not sufficiently positive and want to call it a "member discount" instead. I sent the following to the kingdom mailing list, but I wanted to record it here too. The argument comes around frequently; I think I'll probably need these words again in the future. :-)

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The $3 fee is not a discount. Technically, it's not really a surcharge either. Discounts and surcharges are price adjustments offered by the entity setting the price. Most events offer discounts for children, and some set surcharges for late reservations. The salient point, though, is that the person or group whose bottom line is affected sets these adjustments and deals with the consequences. (To those who would say "but AAA gives me discounts at hotels!", I say: no, those hotels agreed to grant those discounts to people associated with AAA. AAA does not have the ability to impose a discount on an unwilling hotel.)

A fee assessed by an outside entity is a tax. Taxes are usually set by governments, of course, but in this case it is set by the corporation. Either way, the taxing authority has no direct involvement in the activity being taxed. It's a fee paid in exchange for permission to do business.

This is not just a point of pedantry. Words have meaning, and if you use an inappropriate word you change people's perceptions of the thing being described. It is misleading to call this fee a "discount", in my opinion, and the corporation was right to avoid that usage. It's unfortunate, but not too surprising, that they didn't acknowledge it as a tax.

Comments

The whole membership system is screwy

[zachkessin.livejournal.com]

We are having a problem in our group of getting 5 paid members so that we can be a group. The thing is that membership is expensive $35 (155 Shekels) and we get almost no value out of it. A number of people have sugested doing a fundraiser to raise the money for memberships (we have 3 in group so far) but to be honest I can think of so many better things for our group to do with a spare 300 Shekels if we had them. (Make a shire banner, loaner garb, books etc). But I need to find those two other members for my shire or we will never be a shire.

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

I'm not convinced that the AAA parallel is that far out of line - a sufficiently unwilling local branch could go independant and thereby avoid the charge. That involves considerable (mostly non-monetary) costs for the local branch, which is why most conclude that the benefits of remaining with the Corporation outweigh the drawbacks. But even that hasn't stopped some groups from at least setting the groundwork.

A closer parallel would be discounts offered by a chain restaurant like McDonalds, where the local shops have fairly wide latitude on pricing but sometimes have "sales" imposed as part of a chain-wide promotion. You can always open your own burger shop, but the franschise provides enough benefit to (most) store owners that they go along.

(Of course, McDonalds Inc. charges a franschise fee to the local branch, in order cover chain-wide expenses, rather than charging each McDonalds customer a membership fee. I think if the SCA is going to continue to have a central corp - and there are reasonable arguments for that - a model where the local branches buy "franschises" of SCA Inc. makes more sense and would be more efficient to administer. And has the benefit of being a meme people can wrap their heads around to replace "membership". But anyhow.)

Note that this isn't perfect even in business. Witness the Subways around Pittsburgh that can't agree on whether they honor official Subways Frequent Sandwich punchcard promotions. Or the recent flap where one of the big CD labels is trying to drive its stores into a nation-wide sale for certain titles, and is getting pushback from retailers who still have inventory to move from before the wholesale discounts kicked in or aren't large enough to meet the requirements for the wholesale discount. But independent - or semi-independent - local operations have umbrella groups impose discounts or surcharges on them all the time as a condition of the operating relationship. And the locals can always avoid that by ending that operating relationship - that's often a pyrrhic victory, but always an option. Calling these taxes, while it taps into a lot of convenient anti-tax social constructs, muddies the waters because taxes have the power of the State behind them, and I submit that we need to be careful about being informal about exactly what sort of stick the latter is.