[dhosek]

Yes, but not quite: This is actually about the California x%. When you pay sales tax, there is a state/county/municipal tax that gets paid to the state, the county and the municipality where the customer is located. Municipal or county taxes may be zero or even, in rare occasions negative.¹

Then, the state portion has a fraction that gets allocated to a municipality (thanks to Prop 13, a lot of local funding has been shifted to getting granted from the state), which is generally going to be the municipality where the business is located.

These distinctions generally only come up for online transactions and some high-cost durable goods like automobiles (which is why there’s no benefit to buying your car in a different county—you’ll still pay the same tax).

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1. Thanks to a prop 13 lawsuit, for a time in the 90s, the county tax (or was it city? I don’t remember now) for San Diego was actually -0.5% because it was judged that the county (city?) had illegally raised taxes and this was the method by which the judge determined that the taxes would be rebated.