robbery

proverb If items of equal value are exchanged, it is a fair trade or deal. Come on, a fair exchange is no robbery. You're gonna have to up your side of the bargain to make this a fair trade.

A situation in which one is charged an exorbitant price. I need to find another mechanic because this bill is just daylight robbery! I can't believe how much he charged for a simple repair.

A situation in which one is charged an exorbitant price. I need to find another mechanic because this bill is just highway robbery! I can't believe how much he charged for a simple repair.

Fig. the practice of blatantly or grossly overcharging. It's daylight robbery to charge that amount of money for a hotel room! The cost of renting a car at that place is daylight robbery.

outrageous overpricing; a bill that is much higher than normally acceptable but must be paid. (As if one had been accosted and robbed on the open road or in broad daylight.) Four thousand dollars! That's highway robbery for one piece of furniture! I won't pay it! It's highway robbery!

Charging exorbitant prices, as in The amount you're asking for this couch is daylight robbery. [Mid-1900s] Also see highway robbery.

The exaction of an exorbitantly high price or fee. For example, You paid ten dollars for that meat? That's highway robbery. This term, used figuratively since the late 1800s, alludes to literal robbery of travelers on or near a public road.

You use highway robbery or daylight robbery to describe a situation in which you are charged far too much money for something. They're charging ten bucks for the comics, which sounds like highway robbery to us. You have to pay thousands of dollars for the service. It's daylight robbery!

So expensive that it is considered extortion. This expression simply transfers the literal meaning—armed robbery of travelers on an open road—to the more or less legitimate charging of exorbitant prices. As J. B. Priestley put it in It’s An Old Country (1967), “Nothing on the wine list under two-pound-ten. Highway robbery by candlelight.”

An outrageously high price. An appliance store advertises a refrigerators for $900, but you see ads for the same brand and model elsewhere for half that price. That store, you conclude, is committing daylight robbery, a “crime” so metaphorically blatant that it is being committed in broad daylight. That's not to be confused with “highway robbery.” “Daylight robbery” offers you the option of paying the money or not, but you don't have that choice in “highway robbery,” just as the victim of a stagecoach holdup had no choice. Your city raises property taxes. You receive the bill, take one look, and scream, “That's highway robbery!”