[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.