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Taxes are set at a multiple levels (federal, state, district, and city) so it's pretty much impossible to show the post tax price on the label. Hidden fees are

• Doctor_Fegg 3y ago
  I never understand this argument at all. Your shops have computers with label printers, right? At the Co-op supermarket in our little UK town (population 3000) they’ve even just replaced the shelf price tickets with tiny colour displays.
  • bcrosby95 3y ago
    It's not really a problem in brick and mortar stores. It's a problem in online stores because you can't necessarily give someone the right price with taxes until you have their address. And this problem is harder than some might think. I knew someone who lived on a street that was a "dividing line" for this stuff: same zip code, same city, but one side had a 9% sales tax, the other side had around 7%. We tested a lot of online stores and none of them got it right. Including Amazon.
    • guappa 3y ago
      How do they know how much tax to charge you when you buy? In that same way they know what price to show you.
      • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > How do they know how much tax to charge you when you buy? Did you miss the part about it being calculated in the cart? That’s after you’ve made the decision to purchase, a decision which presumably included the price. I would refuse to give every vendor my address just to see a price.
        • pbhjpbhj 3y ago
          >I would absolutely refuse to give every vendor my address just to see a price. How does it work now? If you don't give your address, but the price depends on your address, how does the store know how much to charge you? If you don't have to give your ID then surely you just say you're from the lowest tax location?
          • ffgjgf1 3y ago
            What would the ID change? It only really matters where the goods are delivered.
          • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
            > If you don't give your address, but the price depends on your address, how does the store know how much to charge you? I don’t want to give my address to see the price. After I’ve decided to buy the thing, I’m okay disclosing who I am. But simply to see the price? Also, if I’m a retailer and people are giving me their address before I price them, on what planet am I not going to use that to help me price discriminate?
            • guappa 3y ago
              You don't need the address, you just need to know in which city they live, AT MOST. Taxes don't change every street.
              • JumpCrisscross 3y ago
                > Taxes don't change every street Ha. Oh boy. I remember when an engineer at a POS system start-up said something similar. It's like when someone decides they're going to roll their own time zone calculation. In case you're curious, yes, two people in the same city can be in different counties, different school districts, different water boards, et cetera. Each of those typically has taxing authority. And this is before we get into crap like urban enterprise zones [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:New_Jersey_Urban_Enterprise_Zones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:New_Jersey_Urban_Ente...
      • deleted 3y ago
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    • bloppe 3y ago
      It's also just not as concerning from a competition or perspective, since taxes apply to all competitors, and none of them have the freedom to set those rates.
    • noahtallen 3y ago
      Most online stores immediately ask for your location (or know a good estimate via IP or ad tracking) anyways. Or ask you to "search for the nearest location." So there is already a lot of data they could use.
      • tiltowait 3y ago
        I've never seen an online store ask for my address before I'm in the checkout process. The only exception is when I check to see if an item is in-stock at my local store or if one-day shipping is available. The location detectors are notoriously bad. I'm either placed in some town in Washington (multiple states from me) or somewhere else that does have different local tax than my part of my state.
  • olliej 3y ago
    Yeah, so in the US that doesn't work. Most obviously for display, tv, or radio ads you cannot ensure correct taxes in the advertisement (this was a big eye opener when I first moved to the US). It also doesn't work for online sales, where the final price can depend on the final destination of the goods or service. e.g. the taxes cannot be displayed until you've been given a street level address. For me for example even my zip code spans 3 different cities with different tax codes, my street is literally one block from a different city in one direction, and about 5 blocks to another. \o/
    • thfuran 3y ago
      >Most obviously for display, tv, or radio ads you cannot ensure correct taxes in the advertisement. They really shouldn't be advertising false claims in the first place. >It also doesn't work for online sales, where the final price can depend on the final destination of the goods or service. e.g. the taxes cannot be displayed until you've been given a street level address. That one has an easy solution: Just ask for the destination.
      • ffgjgf1 3y ago
        > They really shouldn't be advertising false claims in the first place. So basically what you’re suggesting is banning any ads (besides billboards etc.) from advertising any prices? How does that benefit consumers at all?
      • heimidal 3y ago
        > They really shouldn't be advertising false claims in the first place. Just to be clear, you're suggesting that all pricing be removed from all advertising nationwide. This would clearly be to the detriment of the consumer. > That one has an easy solution: Just ask for the destination. Again, this is to the customer's detriment. They have to provide their personal information just to see the price of any item on any website they visit? And that's somehow worse than having to mentally add a percentage to any price they see until checkout? You must be kidding.
        • 3y ago
  • tjbiddle 3y ago
    1. Taxes can change quickly, and it's a pain in the ass to keep up with. If you're now needing to deal with changing the printed price on tens, hundreds, thousands of items - I can't even imagine. 2. Online sales you won't even be able to calculate it until the customer puts in their shipping information. And no, they can't figure that out beforehand as there are a myriad of reasons why where their IP is does not mean where it's being shipped to, which is where the taxes need to be calculated.
    • tester756 3y ago
      "Taxes can change quickly" Like, how quickly? <1 day? otherwise it shouldnt be a problem
    • pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      Shops change their prices sometimes multiple times a day (UK), sales taxes change on the order of decades here. Stores can cope. It sounds like your legislature spend all their time setting taxes?
      • heimidal 3y ago
        I'm curious, do books have prices printed on them in the UK? Here in the US, the suggested retail price (pre-tax, obviously) is generally printed by the manufacturer on the back or inside the dust cover of every book.
        • pbhjpbhj 3y ago
          Yes, books have RRP (recommended retail price). That price includes all taxes.
          • heimidal 3y ago
            Gotcha. In the US, if you tried to keep that system, you’d need a different printed MSRP per tax nexus and books in warehouses would no longer be fungible.
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  • heimidal 3y ago
    AFAIK (I'm American), the UK has a VAT rate for any good a consumer might find in a shop: 20%, 5%, and 0%, depending on product type. Because this rate is country-wide, the manufacturer can include VAT in their RRP. For example, if I go to the Sony website, a PS5 is £479.99 incl. VAT. If I go to the Amazon UK site, it's £466, or 3% off, incl. VAT. If we locate the same product on the Amazon US site, it's $499.99 before tax. Amazon has two choices: show their price before tax or require shipping information from the user to see a price at all. (An estimated geolocation is not precise enough to determine a price.) For most consumers, I suspect seeing a pre-tax price upfront is better than having to provide personal information to see a price at all. That explains online sales, but let's address brick and mortar retail. Imagine you go to Best Buy to comparison shop against Amazon and the price says $550 including tax. Is tax on this item in this location 10%? Or is it 5% but Best Buy's base price is higher than MSRP? It's up to me to find out the local tax rate and do the math. Let's say they agree to price-match Amazon; the clerk will need a function on the register to input a pre-tax price to facilitate this. So, given this complexity and disparity, US manufacturers list MSRP without tax. Retailers display pre-tax prices for marketing and competitive reasons, generally never exceeding MSRP. Customers have come to expect this nationwide, so changing now would be challenging. (There are other good reasons to stick with pre-tax, too. In grocery stores, for example, pre-tax prices are very useful for SNAP beneficiaries.) Do I think it would be useful to display tax calculations on signage in-store? Absolutely, and for some goods in some states, they do. But without laws or customer demand, retailers have no incentive to put themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
• mrktf 3y ago
  That argument about multiple level taxes is always beyond me. Taxes are not stock market which changes in unknown direction constantly, they are always known at the worst weeks before implementation. In my eastern European country even biggest supermarkets can change all labels overnight (I even bet they can can do at least twice daily - albeit with here and there confusions when there multiple labels for same good)
  • Ekaros 3y ago
    And western European one have e-ink price tags. And one time there was wrong item on a tag. So I asked the person filling the shelf for help. He read the tag and item and behold in 5 minutes it updated itself to correct item and price... It is not like these shops hop hourly between taxes...
• megablast 3y ago
  Sure, yet every other country in the world does it. So impossible.
  • ffgjgf1 3y ago
    I don’t think that many other countries can have different sales tax/VAT rates in every town.
• snehk 3y ago
  The good thing is that prices (in stores) are set in the store. The labels are most likely little e-ink displays. There's absolutely no reason to not show the final price there aside from wanting the advertised price to be lower than it actually is. The same chocolate might have a different price depending on the store I go to as well and that doesn't seem to be a problem at all.
  • kelnos 3y ago
    > The labels are most likely little e-ink displays. I have literally never seen e-ink price labels in a store in the US. I'm sure they exist, but I would bet are present in fewer than 1% of stores here.
    • kwhitefoot 3y ago
      They are ubiquitous in northern Europe.
• shortcake27 3y ago
  Almost every other country in the world has solved this problem. It’s always fascinating when Americans have problems other countries don’t have, and just throw their hands in air saying “welp nothing we can do about it”
  • autoexec 3y ago
    One group always pushes the "nothing can be done" narrative because they've been making money hand over fist because of the way things are now and they don't want the status quo to change. Another group who jumps straight to "nothing can be done" have been conned by the first group into thinking that any deviation from the status quo is a trick by the devil to somehow take their freedom/property. Add in an unhealthy dose of American Exceptionalism and irrational fears of other countries and it means that there will always be somebody unwilling to consider adopting a good example set by people with a different flag or a funny accent. The rest of us are more frustrated than fascinated by the whole thing.
  • olliej 3y ago
    That's because other countries aren't as aggressive about pushing governance down to a local level. For example: in most countries you include sales tax in your advertisement, because why wouldn't you? In the US there is no countrywide sales tax, there are some states with literally no sales tax, and then there are states with high sales tax to compensate for zero income tax (which is excitingly regressive taxation). Then inside the states each county can have its own array of sales and service taxes, which can also vary according to the goods and services involved, and finally individual cities in those counties can also have their own. Core to this is that the US constitution explicitly enshrines federalism in the tenth amendment (the last part of the "bill of rights"), that explicitly limits the power of the federal government.
    • heimidal 3y ago
      > Core to this is that the US constitution explicitly enshrines federalism in the tenth amendment (the last part of the "bill of rights"), that explicitly limits the power of the federal government. I think this is the part that non-Americans fail to understand; we have no central tax authority and that principle is enshrined in our Constitution. Like it or not, so long as the US exists in its current form, so too does our wildly disparate tax code.
• kelnos 3y ago
  That only makes sense for an online store that's going to ship you something, in which case asking for the destination ZIP code up front solves that problem. For brick-and-mortar stores, the store can quite easily calculate the final price of an item on its own. Sales taxes do change on occasion, but likely less often than the pricing of the items themselves do, so there's no added burden in having to update them due to tax changes.
  • heimidal 3y ago
    FYI, ZIP code is not enough to calculate tax rate. You need city and county. 9,000 ZIP codes cross county borders. Currently, consumers can generally tell if they are getting a reasonable price by comparing the MSRP they see in an ad against the price they see in store. For example, if the nationally advertised price of an Xbox is $500 and Best Buy has it for $500, I know I'm not being swindled. But if the in-store price is $550? I guess I have to haul out my calculator and ask for the store's tax rate so I can determine whether or not Best Buy is ripping me off and I should take my business elsewhere. Ideally, they'd show pre-tax price, tax rate, and calculated total price on every tag. Maybe, one day, we'll see action on this in a state or two, but I don't suspect it is high on the lists of any lawmakers.
  • tzs 3y ago
    > That only makes sense for an online store that's going to ship you something, in which case asking for the destination ZIP code up front solves that problem Tax boundaries do not follow zip code boundaries. To actually find the right tax rate you need the full address, including suite or apartment number because there are cases where a tax boundary runs between different suites at the same street address. Also this is not just for online stores that ship something. It also applies if you are selling a downloadable good like a game or music, or selling memberships to your site.
    • astrange 3y ago
      > Tax boundaries do not follow zip code boundaries. Zip codes represent mail routes, so they're not actually polygons but a set of points (mailboxes), so they don't really even have boundaries. The Census Bureau has polygons made from those points, but they're not official.
• vincnetas 3y ago
  What do you mean "impossible" If waiter or cashier calculates final price when you pay, it must be possible to calculate it upfront. Im not aware of situations where final price would depend on the purchaser. That would be discrimination.
• bialpio 3y ago
  And yet the register magically knows how much tax to add for each and every item you buy. I could maybe agree with your argument if taxes changed often, but they don't, and it's very much possible to calculate them beforehand and display full price.
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