Is there something a little more general/accessible that you guys have as a demo? It looks super cool but I'm not a rocket scientist so I can't tell how good it is... (am def into agentic AI and am mildly involved in this in the ecom space).
We have our agent on our docs page! (Hi I also worked on this with Jay) https://docs.contextual.ai/ - if you type a question into "ask AI", it's powered by agent composer just like the rocket demo. And we actually have a blog about an ecom agent coming out soon, it was one of our test cases due to a large, public dataset available in this space.
I feel this is def solvable these days -- but the 7 years thing is gonna be tough to overcome at this point.
What I've done on some of these "need to escalate to a human" issues is to buy a ticket to Amazon Accelerate (in Seattle every September), book a Seller Cafe appointment to talk to a leadership team person (I think recently got moved to the captive escalations department), and get someone to talk to face to face.
I know it sounds dumb but I've solved issues that were costing my company 7fig/year sales like this.
FWIW they got a lot better on this past few years, clearly someone high up finally got the memo.
We had a similar issue in 2018 or so, 1 writer wrote a problematic listing copy on a set of SKUs -> one of the Amazon bots auto-banned the entire account (8-figs/year, great performance metrics otherwise), took us 3 days to restore and we have an insider who was able to see internally what was up + let us know how to escalate within the performance/safety orgs.
Nowadays they make sure they give you a warning first + I wanna say a week of time for people to respond before suddenly disappearing your account if you have a good Account Health Score? I think the main issue these days is people don't pay attention to the Account Health tab...
Most executive seller (8+ fig) have a kindasorta dedicated account manager... I think they're part of SASCore (Seller Account Support) that is kinda okay for internal escalations, but it is highly variable in quality based on whether you get a person that's good or downright terrible.
Supposedly anyone can get them these days by paying $1-2k/month? We've got ours since 2018 and when we balked on the price they just waived the fees -- to be fair I basically talk to him 1-2x a year only for important things and do some panel stuff for Amazon to kinda pay my dues.
>We've got ours since 2018 and when we balked on the price they just waived the fees
You must be in the seven figures revenuewise or higher. I am not, and can't imagine getting the fee waved.
That said, what I've heard about having an Amazon account manager: It's just another layer of the same of the usual awful seller support. Since the "manager" can't actually do anything, having one is worse than not having one.
Yeah, low 8s on Amazon. They already take ~50% of our revenue for all expenses, the SASCore person is a drop in the bucket for them.
We also do B&M and website sales which have way less hassle or much lower expenses, but get nowhere near the traffic of Amazon, so that's why we deal with 'em...
>They already take 50%+ of our revenue for all expenses
As mentioned my revenue is far smaller, so I need larger margins. My total marketplace fees plus shipping spend in 2025 was 26% of revenue. My net margin was 28%, but the metric I focus on is margin on COGS; that was 60% in 2025 and 54% lifetime.
Hearing your account and that of another seller with close to seven figures revenue makes me think I should aim for smaller margins. Not as small as yours, but maybe 10% smaller.
>We also do B&M and website sales which have way less hassle or much lower expenses, but get nowhere near the traffic of Amazon, so that's why we deal with 'em...
My Walmart revenue equaled Amazon's in 2025.
I've thought about opening my own website. On the one hand my multichannel software already supports such, so it would be from that perspective just another marketplace. On the other hand, besides the additional cost and hassle, I keep coming back to how difficult it is to match the Amazons and Walmarts of the world in terms of customer reach.
My fees are high but my COGS are low -- they're typically <30%, but our typical unit pricing is <$30 so the FBA fees and base fees/unit sold hit hard.
We make ~30% before labor and net 10-20% after everything so it works OK. Most bigger sellers I know live in the 10-30% net range.
Our Walmart store is pretty sad, cross product lines we sell between 1-10% of our rev on Amazon :( ... but that's also because our products (home and kitchen) have lower cost competitors on Walmart itself. We're the mid-premium product, which is a much better position on Amazon and the right marketplace fit.
> My fees are high but my COGS are low -- they're typically <30%
45% for me in 2025.
>but our typical unit pricing is <$30
$59 ASP in 2025 ($63 average revenue per sale).
>Most bigger sellers I know live in the 10-30% net range.
Yes, that's the impression I've gotten of the marketplace megasellers, of 10% margins being the norm. Not quite the old dotcom joke of losing money on every sale but making it up on volume, but you know what I mean.
>but that's also because our products (home and kitchen) have lower cost competitors on Walmart itself. We're the mid-premium product, which is a much better position on Amazon and the right marketplace fit
That's interesting; I would have thought that Amazon would have more sellers across price points. Walmart has more Chinese sellers with gibberish brand names than before thanks to a noticeable loosening of application criteria, but still fewer than Amazon. Are competitors at your price point not present on Amazon but are present on Walmart? Or they are present on both, but for whatever reason (advertising, FBA/FBM differential) your listings get relatively more visibility on Amazon?
For my product niche, Amazon has (many) more buyers at my pricepoint and value prop (moderately well-designed kitchen gadgets at a price point between your run-on-the-mill gadget and OXO).
Maybe I also know how to SEO better on Amazon vs Walmart, but not sure! ¯\(°_o)/¯
> The sad part is that I sell a book, Computer Engineering for Babies
Oh no way, I bought your book (I think via kickstarter?). :)
First off -- Amazon's super bureaucratic so all of their processes require a certain language and esclation path. I'll have to ask my team's support specialist on what she thinks, but my gut is telling me your language needs to be "compatible with Samsung" or "Samsung compatible" instead of "for... Samsung TV remote".
I've been doing Amazon for 13 years and have a team + a few brands I own in the ecosystem -- just some basic tips:
1. Get brand registry (or find a maker buddy and put it under their brand) for listing control. Generic is not the way to go for listing control -- you need brand registry. Then you can edit away under your own brand.
2. You shouldn't be losing any money doing this. If you're doing 3D printer stuff you should expect your cost to be like 5-10%, Amazon takes 40-50% between all fees, ads around 10%, and the rest is labor/margin... and if your numbers aren't there you need to figure out what's wrong.
I have lots more thoughts but I realize this can become an essay haha. Feel free to ping me if you need some help, loved your books. :)
===
Edit: I don't think you're at risk of getting banned, but you might need an escalation to a higher level support (a captive or escalations specialist within Amazon).
Edit 2: I had some extra downtime to look at it, my approach to resolving the issue would be:
a. You should first try to clearly indicate you're a product accessory and not a Samsung-branded product; review sellercentral best practices for SKU naming but it's gonna be something along the lines of "compatible with Samsung TV remotes"
b. If you get stuck here for too long, I would first remove all reference to Samsung for now from the listing and make it a more generic accessory, acknowledge the brand confusion, reinstate your store, then create a case to add Samsung back into your listing (and be sure to have this case handy if you get future problems so you can reference back and show you're doing this the right way).
c. Phone support works a lot better in recent days than email/chat support. But since you're deactivated I'm not sure if you get access to this.
My personal email is rot13’ed when you click on my username :)
This is my company (not selling anything, just wanna help out the creator of a product that brought my family some joy and showing I'm not some rando :) ): http://www.buyawesome.com
I remember a time when I'd pick up every single call received... now it's the opposite, I only have it ring on recognized phone numbers + I skim voicemails, filter out the ones that leave the 3-4s of silence or autoplay text, and call back those who actually have business purpose with me.
If there exist AI robocalls that start spoofing my friends and loved ones... ugh, I can just imagine the hassle of doing due diligence for every voicemail going forward. (This does kinda remind me of the scams where someone pretends to be a kidnapped distant family member, cries in the background of the call, and asks for ransom money....)
Android has a call screening feature that's amazing. I turn it on for any unknown number. I haven't missed any calls I wanted to receive, and everything else fails the screen.
That's not realistic for many people. I don't have every doctor's office that I might come in contact with in my contact database. Nor every emergency service that may contact me because of an elderly relative or someone else. And presumably you don't have a landline either so you're simply choosing to make yourself not contactable.
Which isn't a reasonable option for a lot of people assuming there are alternatives.
That's fair. I don't have any elderly relatives I'm responsible for, but if/when that situation arrises I'd probably try to set up contact records for their caregivers and providers. It's a shame that scammers and spammers have ruined our telecommunications system and that the telecom companies haven't done anything about it.
> I'd probably try to set up contact records for their caregivers and providers
Won't work. I have both elderly relatives and young children, and it's possible to get calls about them from just about anyone in their respective facilities. It's not possible to try to find and list the phone of everyone who ever watches over them. Including substitutes and temps and so on.
It is frustrating, though, that they require you to provide an exhaustive list of people who can contact them but they are under no such obligation to do the same for you.
I find it easier to set up voicemail. Unknown callers that care will leave a message. That message is speech to text processed and I can decide if to play it or call back. Anything important enough gets through even from unknown numbers. Never have to answer a spam call.
You probably should have at least an option to go to voicemail.
I do get messages from offices I don't have in my contacts database that I generally want to receive. Ignoring total junk is mostly fairly painless at least for me.
I'm ... strongly antagonistic to voicemail myself. But even if you don't check/listen to messages, simply noting who's left a message is a pretty good screening method. For most medical comms, you're unlikely to have a meaningful message left other than "call back" in any regard, so enabling but not listening too hard is viable.
Many medical systems now have some sort of electronic patient record which includes medical staff (MD, RN, PA, etc.) messages, though that's no silver bulet either.
When a phone is receiving dozens of calls per day, answering each and every simply isn't viable, not matter how critical a given call might be.
Unfortunately, it's often older people with a greater dependence on healthcare providers who are also targeted by robocallers, fraudsters, and telemarketers, often to devastating effect.
I've been mulling over an idea for some time: set up an answering machine on freepbx with an IVR that requires the caller to push a button before it's forwarded to a (ringing) phone, otherwise sayonara.
That should cut off most robocallers, shouldn't it?
Doctors have no business calling, medicine isn't done through phone. Contact is possible: when I don't answer spam calls from banks, they send me sms stating their business.
Meanwhile, in the world where I live, doctor's offices call me on a not-frequent but not-rare occasion to reschedule appointments and the like. SMS is increasingly used for a lot of routine stuff like reminders but there's still a fair number of phone calls.
Per another comment, my suburban hospital system has merged with one of the two big city systems and as a patient the electronic health records system saves quite a few phone calls and faxes being sent around. But there are still some calls.
I would treat it analogous to asking ChatGPT to code for you (but for food) - some times it works great, other times you gotta nudge it a bit.
The tool is currently best used by people who already know how to code/cook and don't want to spend too much cognitive bandwidth, but have the skills to mofidy as needed.
That's pretty much exactly how I see it, too. Offload a good chunk of the scut work, but I'm sanity checking the results. Still a strong net positive, at least in my experience.
Can't comment on the macroeconomic trends, but personally as a consumer, hotels are more attractive than AirBNBs for <1-week stays due to cleaning fee and chore lists ($250 cleaning fee per stay, still have to clean up the house and pack the garbage out). Most of my travel is solo for work for 2-3 days so this nudges me towards hotels.
For 1+ week stays AirBNBs make more sense (family vacay, larger house with children), though it seems like the house owner lists the same house on VRBO and for whatever reason prices it slightly cheaper there, so I just book it at the cheaper place.
Hotels win for some intersection of short-duration-of-stay and low guest count (with the break-even point varying somewhat as both those figures vary)
AirBnB wins for longer stays with more guests, or if you want to stay somewhere without hotels (but with houses) and also don't want to camp.
Stopping one night on a leg of a long drive, not really doing anything in the room except sleeping for a few hours: hotel/motel tends to win by a long shot. Staying somewhere for several nights with a family of 4+ or a group of friends or something: AirBnB (and similar services) tends to win.
> Stopping one night on a leg of a long drive, not really doing anything in the room except sleeping for a few hours: hotel/motel tends to win by a long shot.
Unless your co-traveller (spouse or not) snores like a motorcycle and having a room to stuff them in (or escape to) has a ton of value.
Oh hello my mother-in-law, didn’t expect to see you here… uhhh…
You have to complete a “chore list” for Airbnb stays now? I thought this was a meme or joke.
Why do people put up with this shit, especially on vacation? Why go on vacation to do chores afterwards? May as well stay home and not have to pay for the experience.
For single travelers IMO there isn't a good reason to pick Airbnb over a hotel. But there are types of properties that aren't really available widely in hotel-form: the vacation house.
Want to gather with your family in a big house for some holiday? There isn't really anything else other than Airbnb (or Vrbo, which has many of the same issues). Some very heavily vacation-oriented places have hotels that rent out properties of that sort, but in most places this isn't an available product category.
Buuuut even with this said, I'm very hesitant to stay in Airbnbs nowadays.
I just had a terrible experience a month ago - rented a vacation house that had great reviews and looked great. Arrived after a red-eye flight and a long drive... and the lockbox code is wrong. The house is also in the woods so there was no cell reception, so drove a half hour to the nearest area with reception, contacted the host (hosts are never available on Airbnb, naturally), sorted that out, and got into the house... and it was filthy. Top to bottom filthy with air fresheners in every room to cover the smell.
Immediately left and booked a room at the local Hampton Inn, which was overall a far superior experience. Airbnb in all of their grace only gave me ~70% back despite y'know, a totally unusable product. I'm still out over ~$1,000 over the whole thing, and Airbnb seems entirely ok with... what feels a lot like fraud?
The reliability of the Airbnb experience is so poor that I'm at this point completely unwilling to hinge a family vacation on it. It's like rolling a 1d6 and needing to score 3 or above. Just way too risky.
Seems like the Hampton inn suites are the hotel alternative for family vacations. The ones I’m thinking of are basically complete with a fridge, cooking range, and apparently on premise laundry. Being able to get a separate room for kids with a door open between the two is a thing at many places too.
And of course you’re just dealing with a corporation. It’s not someone’s personal home. The management might be weird at a hotel or something but that weirdness would still be spread across many more units-and it has other mechanisms and people in play to normalize the whole experience. AirBnB seems much more ripe for abuse.
This seems to be a very common experience. I suggested booking an AirBNB for a team off-site a few months ago and heard half a dozen variations on it from a ten person team: code wrong and no host overnight, blatantly misrepresented properties, toilets overflowing upon entry, no power, etc. I haven't travelled much in a good number of years so I was very surprised how much the situation had changed.
I've never experienced the bad ones that want you to clean the place top-to-bottom. I believe they exist, but I've not seen it, and have been averaging probably 4ish AirBnB stays per year for several years (I'm posting from one now!). It's usually like "please load & start the dishwasher and take the trash out before leaving". Reasonable stuff, not, like, hours of work. Most onerous I've seen is stripping the beds and starting the first load of that laundry, which takes maybe ten minutes with several beds and only one person doing it. We tend to do more because we have young kids who make messes, so we clean up after them just so it doesn't turn into a truly unreasonable mess and/or outright damage (and because living in filth isn't pleasant) but that's not because of the chore list.
> Why do people put up with this shit, especially on vacation? Why go on vacation to do chores afterwards? May as well stay home and not have to pay for the experience.
Shrug. The way we use it, it's more like temporarily owning a vacation home than being in a hotel. With the good and the bad of that. Lots of space and beds for way less money than that'd cost in a hotel. Easy access to a washer and dryer, full kitchen, full-size fridge with freezer, and often in locations without any options for normal hotels. Far nicer to hang out in/around than hotel rooms, short of luxury suites and such. But you also can't be quite as messy as some people are comfortable being in a hotel—if we e.g. get crumbs all over the carpet or track a little dirt in, we vacuum it up like we would at home, rather than just grinding it into the fibers and leaving it to the cleaners. We'd do that in hotels, too, if they had a vacuum in the room. It's really not a big deal.
I guess I'm not following how people avoid the most time-consuming ones while traveling simply by picking a hotel over an AirBnB. Gotta do laundry (or pay to have it done). Gotta shop for food, cook it, and clean up after (or pay someone else to do that for you). Those aren't an AirBnB vs hotel thing.
The ones we do avoid by staying in hotels or AirBnBs—either—are things like dusting, whole-house floor cleaning, laundering bedding (entirely, in all but one case, and in that exception we only had to do like 5% of the work, it took less time than stopping to refuel the car on a long drive, or many airport security lines), cleaning bathrooms, weeding landscaping beds, mowing the lawn, stuff like that. We get that benefit in both. Basically the same thing you'd get having a once- or twice-a-week cleaning service and a lawn service.
I get that maybe some AirBnBs really do have absurd "chore lists", but nearly all the ones I've stayed at, we're talking like 15 minutes of effort for a whole week, maybe, that might have been avoided by staying in a hotel. Basically, take out the trash and don't leave dirty dishes scattered around the whole house. It's super not a big deal.
I'm more than willing to empty my own trash and wash my own dishes if it means I'm staying in a multi-bedroom house/condo with ample space and amenities.
Staying for more than a few days in a hotel is depressing and claustrophobic.
If you pick the correct one, you are afforded more privacy, and a cleaner stay, with the con of needing to throw your bedding in the wash and take your takeout trash to the dumpster on the way out.
I don't see the logic in singling out the cleaning fee. I guess it's because AirBnB gives us the opportunity by calling it out as a seperate fee. I always look at the total, including fees. That's the only number I care about and that's what I compare to hotels. I think AirBnB would do themselves a favor by incorporating the cleaning fee into the base price and not calling it out separately.
As for the chore list, I may recall a couple annoying ones from years past, but usually it's a non-issue. Though unfortunately I don't think this is something you know until after you book.
The cleaning fees on AirBnB are dishonest (hidden by default), ridiculously high, and redundant with giant list of chores that make me do all the cleaning anyway. They're predatory and greedy and deserve all the calling out they get.
AirBnB cleaning fees are the same garbage as eBay sales for $1.99, $50 shipping, and should be banned by policy.
A fee is something additional, tacked on for something special, something that I can avoid.
Like a car rental 'return with have a tank of gas'-fee. I can avoid that.
But I am sick of these websites that show price X, but then tack on 5 fees that I cannot avoid.
Hotels with resort fee. I can't avoid it, ergo it should be part of the base price.
Restaurants with extra fees to pay their people extra. Can't avoid it, should be part of the base price.
It's becoming harder and harder to compare things. Nothing is stopping people from wanting X per night, but advertising X-Y and adding fees to make up for Y. And that is deceptive advertising.
These are a result of some jurisdictions, such as certain municipalities, having it within their bylaws/legislation that these fees must be applied and that they must appear as separate line items (like taxes). The result is the effect you see, where the displayed price does not include those fees due to the nature of the rest of the markets not having such fees and coding in those edge cases is like dealing with taxes... A near impossible task to keep up with.
The outcome is that the systems are built to allow such additional fees and by default (or exclusively) they are not included in the base price (which is generally the same across markets).
And thus we have what we have... And some abuse this to add even more fees of course.
I'm sure a billion dollar company with 5,000 employees can't find the time to include a computed "total price" column in their database for total price. Sorry, not buying it.
Something being a separate line item does not mean it can't appear in the total price. You have to intentionally build a system to be that deceptive.
Most non-American jurisdictions include tax in the listed price. Even AirBNB does for German customers: https://i.imgur.com/j7ot5xz.png
Look at my screenshot. For german users, the map display price is $131. That's the $81 base price plus taxes plus fees. All shown in the initial UI where it's easily understood by the user, nothing hidden.
This is really the kicker. Not only is the phenomenon really shitty, but Airbnb's refusal to police the practice shows that their interests are firmly aligned against actual guests and instead aligned with hosts.
A lot of the platform's problems come down to this alignment problem. As Airbnb has matured as a service I've found that hosts have gotten lazier and lazier - the chore lists are a relatively recent phenomenon of the last few years. The platform is rife with "hosts" who have no interest in actually running a hospitality business, and are only interested in passive income, and Airbnb itself refuses to uphold any consistent bar and forcing poor hosts off.
This has been wildly destructive to the trustworthiness of the business.
I would be more willing to attribute this stuff to growing pains if I didn't feel like these issues are only symptoms of a significant misalignment between guests and Airbnb corporate.
> eBay sales for $1.99, $50 shipping, and should be banned by policy.
eBay deprioritizes listings like those, and is generally up-front with fixed&calculated shipping costs.
In an effort to compete with Amazon, eBay really wants sellers to offer free shipping but sellers hate it because it’s often not a fixed cost (especially here in Canada).
eBay used to exclude shipping costs from their commissions. So sellers, like me, used to list things for $0.01 and $X shipping (literally in the title) until eBay caught on.
But nobody was stopping you from paying more for the same item with realistic/free shipping.
Plus you get a bad rating if you miss something on a long list. They should tell me ahead of time that I should schedule an hour to complete all the tasks before I’ve come up with my itinerary with an early morning flight.
The fees vary wildly, from reasonable to outrageous. Some cleaning fees I've seen are as much as $500. At the time I was looking, these were not shown by Airbnb until checkout. It was an awful experience.
The reasoning for showing cleaning separately is so that the daily rate isn't inflated. If I was wondering how many nights to stay, and saw the cost for one night as say $300, then I'd guess five nights would be $1500; in fact though the cleaning cost (usually paid direct to the cleaners) might be $150, and $150 for the accommodation, so five nights total cost would be a more affordable $900.
Edit to add: we have one Airbnb apartment, and zero chores for guests to do; our cleaners get our cleaning fee and we have laundry costs on top of that. Not all Airbnbs are a ripoff.
Right, so including the cleaning fee in the base price would incentivize owners to keep the fees low, as well as creating a much better experience for renters trying to find places in their budget.
VRBO is just as bad as AirBNB if not worse. We had a miserable host who showed up with her dog and stayed in the house until we all left, it was absolutely weird. VRBO removed all of our reviews about it.
Also, lots of hotels have rooms with kitchens in them.
Serious question: if I am on vacation, why do I need a full sized kitchen and fridge? If you are just cooking at the short term rental, and not experiencing the area. Then what’s the point of taking a vacation in the first place?
At most, all you really need is a mini fridge to store take out and alcohol.
The only use case I can think of for having a full kitchen, fridge, and other amenities is for temporary workers. Maybe a company has their consultants stay at an AirBnB with the aforementioned amenities and in an attempt to reel in the costs, will only approve business meals with clients and personal meal expenses if cooked at the STR (ie, grocery store line items).
Because not everyone has the same needs and preferences as you:
- Some people like to cook. I ran into a guy on a recent vacation to Lyon (one of the best cities for restaurants in the world) who was in a rental house because he wanted to cook himself at least every other dinner.
- Some people can't afford to eat out every meal and can save a lot by cooking many of their meals
- As others have mentioned: people with families
- Sometimes you're in an area without good eating-out options. If you're in a rural area, your options might be "drive 30m into town" or "wait 1 hour for the exactly one pizza delivery place."
- Sometimes you're in a place for a specific reason, and that reason's not food. For example, I've visited the Tahoe area in California to ski. I'm not there to experience Tahoe cuisine - I'm happy to make simple dinners every night and spend the rest of my time doing what I'm there to do.
There are a ton of reasons to want a full kitchen, depending on your needs + style of travel.
In most of the world, takeout food isn’t the greatest for health, and possibly dangerous if your immunity doesn’t match the local’s. If you’re on the road often, as GP is, prepping your own food may again be favourable (and doubly so if you have any kind of stringent diet restrictions).
Edit: would add, in some places, your takeout/dining choices vapourize on some days of the week or holidays.
cooking with your friends and family can be fun, relaxing and cheaper than eating out ... imagine an afternoon on a sunny day in a nice backyard, grilling some food, drinking beer/whatever and enjoying the company of your friends and family.
Right, longer stays with kids, AirBnBs are almost always more attractive because there can be a kitchen & more spaces. It's hard to dine out all the time with kids.
when traveling for work why does the cleaning fee factor in, or is it just the chores does your work not book your travel? or do they give you a flat fee and tell you to find your own accommodations and any money extra/left over is your own deal?
I travel 300+ days a year for work.
I book my own place to stay using my company credit card.
Never really tested the upper bound of what I’m allowed to pay per night, but I do live comfortably. The megacorp I work for has a booking system we’re supposed to use, but I’ve never used it. I figured if I bend the rules to everyone’s advantage, no one will complain.
Generally I use booking.com(for those sweet sweet miles & more points) or call the establishment directly to get the best possible price.
I've stayed in 30+ airbnb's around the world and I've never encountered the cleaning fee on top of a chore list that is so reviled on reddit and twitter. The only time I had to clean, the host just informed me that there wasn't a cleaning fee so I'd have to do it myself. Still sucked (went out and bought cleaning supplies and took a whole day) but seemed fair.
Interesting. I travel mainly in the US and of the approximately 10 visits I can’t remember an instance where I didn’t pay a cleaning fee while also dealing with a chore list.
It’s pretty sharp in my mind because it always frustrates me so much.
Yeah most of mine were in San Jose, CA, but this was 4 years ago and they were single rooms (not an entire apartment), so I wonder if the practice has grown since then. I still don't like airbnb for other reasons: broken stuff (even in well reviewed places), worsens the housing crisis, poor quality but nice looking furniture. The furniture is "bony."
It is very much a US thing. I've stayed in AirBNBs in India and the US, and a majority of the AirBNBs I've stayed in the US have a cleaning fee, while none of the ones I stayed in India did.
Are you a social dancer? :D Salsa dancer for over a decade and event (Congress/social) organizer for a few... I know exactly what you're talking about!
PS - the issue is that many social dancers want to dance over being social, and alcohol detracts from it. People have jobs and want to pay to contribute. We ended up settling on a cover charge that comes with food credit so people can booze up if desired, and buy water/snacks if not. Win-win.
