[jlglover]

It was a real shock when I moved to the U.S. and the posted price on items didn't match with what I actually had to pay. In Australia, the posted price is the price, and must "include any tax, duty, fee, levy or other additional charges"

[ars]

That's mostly because local sales tax makes it very hard to advertise a price - each small locality might have a different tax level, and a different final price.

So if you are trying to send a mailer or run a tv ad, what price do you do?

That's different from fees that don't vary by location, like in this article.

[michaelpb]

I mean it's just a tax the business has to pay to the government, calculated based on products sold. Any business could conceivably do something similar with any tax if they wanted, e.g. add a "XYZ fee" that's added at the register to compensate for XYZ tax. (And in fact many businesses in the US do exactly this, listing each tax as an excuse to tack on arbitrary extra hidden fees at check-out!)

I think this also doubles as a political statement. Basically a subtle way to shift "blame" and make consumers feel upset about a tax, and more likely to put pressure on governments to reduce said taxes. Ultimately it's all anti-consumer.

[weberer]

Its not shifting the blame. Its placing the blame squarely on where it belongs. If you're in New Hampshire and buy something listed as $1, then you only have to pay $1. Why? Because New Hampshire does not charge any sales tax. But if you were to cross the border into Massachusetts, then suddenly everything has an extra 6.25% tacked on at checkout solely because the Massachusetts state government decided to tax each transaction at 6.25%.

>I mean it's just a tax the business has to pay to the government, calculated based on products sold

No, its explicitly a tax on each transaction to be paid by the buyer. You're probably thinking of corporate tax, which the company also has to pay, but is completely separate from sales tax.

From their site:

>The buyer pays the sales tax, as an addition to the purchase price, to the vendor at the time of purchase. The vendor then sends the tax to Massachusetts. For motor vehicle and trailer sales, however, the buyer pays the sales tax directly to Massachusetts.

https://www.mass.gov/guides/sales-and-use-tax

>Ultimately it's all anti-consumer.

Yeah. Fortunately, New Hampshire is a lovely place to live.

[M2Ys4U]

I'm not in the US, but I assume that the shop calculates the correct taxes at the till, right?

So what's stopping them putting tax-inclusive prices on shelves or on stickers on the items themselves?

[jldugger]

It's not the stickers on the shelves, though it would be mildly annoying to retag the entire store, it's the ads in the newspaper. Low margin businesses like groceries can't advertise an all-in price for their stores in the metro area when every tiny municipality in a metro has a slightly different tax rate.

Growing up in suburban Kansas City, we had both city, county and state sales taxes which could vary based on a short drive. And then there's certain entities which are allowed tax exemptions, like teachers making qualified purchases for some things.

[sellyme]

> Low margin businesses like groceries can't advertise an all-in price for their stores in the metro area when every tiny municipality in a metro has a slightly different tax rate.

Yes they can. Just have a constant price in that advertising region for the premium items you're advertising, eat the cost in locations with high sales tax rates (or rent, or wages, or shipping costs, or any other of the ten thousand other factors that they already deal with without issue), and make up for it in the areas where costs are lower than average.

Almost every single large business in the United States already does this, and it would be incredibly trivial for them to do it for sales tax as well.

[jldugger]

Pretty sure this is a factor in how we ended up with food deserts: municipalities that couldn't rely on property taxes to cover their budget raised sales taxes, and chains closed their underperformers. Which of course means the municipality loses more tax base as their citizens shop in another city.

Almost every large grocery store business does this, and a brief google street view tour of North St Louis will show multiple places where grocery stores have vanished and been replaced, if at all, by dollar stores.

[jareklupinski]

now i'm curious; has anyone been to a store that doesn't have a computer at the till / register, and the person ringing up your goods had to calculate the subtotal + sales tax = total by hand?

the few times i remember handing over a specific sum of cash at thrift/vintage stores, indie shops, etc smaller stores here or there, they would always seem to include the tax in the displayed price if there was no computer to calculate the final tax, and the receipt (if any) was whole numbers throughout

[cafard]

No, not since I was a teenage employee at McDonalds, and doing the arithmetic with a pencil. The next summer I saw my first computerized cash registers. But then I was a stockboy and had nothing to do with the point of sale. (Summers of 1972 and 1973.)

[rrauenza]

I can’t recall where, but I’ve been to small shops in the US where they’ve whipped out a small table to calculate the tax.

[ncallaway]

If their POS system can charge you the correct amount at the cash register, it could also print the price label that goes on the shelf.

If this were the law all retail businesses would be able to comply and it wouldn't even be a significant burden.

[davchana]

Not to criticize anything, but India too have similar structure like US, Federal Tax is Central Tax, State Tax is State Tax, City tax is known as Octrai Tax. Even then, anything & everything has MRP sticker or print, Maximum Retail Price, which includes everything. Shops at places with lower tax sells at lower rate, or not, but everything which gets uts price advertised is advertised at MRP.

[exporectomy]

Maybe for TV advertising but definitely not the reason for price labels on shelves to omit tax. Retail chains are perfectly capable of printing custom price labels for each branch. Supermarkets in my country have individual pricing per branch.

[kevin_thibedeau]

I worked in a grocery store in a state that taxes food. Sometimes bottlers would have a giveaways with prizes revealed under the cap. A free soda being the most common. These were redeemed as a 100% off coupon but we still had to collect a penny in tax.