No you don’t. You only have to pay if you want to choose your seat ahead of time. You can skip that part and you will be assigned a random seat when you check in (although it will almost certainly be a middle seat). Although it wouldn’t surprise me if Spirit’s website obfuscates the fact that that fee isn’t actually mandatory. I wouldn’t know; I’ve never flown Spirit before.
But back to the OP, a few years ago California started requiring restaurants to offer health insurance to their employees. In response to this requirement, a few restaurants started adding a “California benefits fee” to customer’s bills rather than simply rolling the cost into the prices. IMO they’re trying to make a political statement through that fee.
Nitpick: That was the city of San Francisco that implemented the health insurance requirement. Not the whole state of California. So it’s really only restaurants in SF that have the benefits fee added to the tab. Usually listed as something like “San Francisco health ordinance”.
Yeah, like giving their employees health insurance is some terrible horrible thing.
However, the value in having healthy employees- those that arent taking off sick, or spreading disease among other workers or customers, far outweighs the cost- not to mention the social value.
Based on published estimates of its price elasticity of demand and of tax wedges, as well as the method of revealed preference, I estimate that the annual social value of ESI is about $1.5 trillion beyond what policyholders, their employers, and taxpayers pay for it. The private component of that value, which in some respects is the other side of “job lock,” derives in part from group plans, with the group determined by many characteristics other than the demand for healthcare. With voluntary groups formed this way, adverse risk selection is reduced, the groups can be effective at obtaining substantial discounts and rebates for their members, and division of labor employed in shopping for health providers. ESI is also a mechanism for employers to act on their incentives for a healthy and productive workforce. External effects include tax externalities (in both directions), encouraging work, and easing government expenditure obligations by helping to prevent people from going without health insurance.
I could get behind making retailers in WA post the shelf label price of, say, a handle of store-brand vodka including the distilled spirits tax. I drove to Vancouver once after work to pick up some liquor at a Fred Meyer. I was delighted to see the price label showing $9.99 for 1.75L of vodka, and horrified that they added the nation’s highest alcohol tax at the register.
When I was in California, I saw lovely notes on my checks at Norm’s, Pizza Hut, and Claim Jumper informing me that they were adding what amounted to a (piddling little) doing-business-in-California fee to everyone’s bill to defray the “extra costs” of doing business in California. My response was to stop patronizing those establishments.