[Doctor_Fegg]

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]

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]

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]

> 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]

>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?

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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]

You don't need the address, you just need to know in which city they live, AT MOST.

Taxes don't change every street.

[ffgjgf1]

What would the ID change?

It only really matters where the goods are delivered.

[heimidal]

Tax depends on the location the item is shipped to.

[guappa]

So if you buy groceries and then live in a different tax area, you have a customs office to pay the extra tax?

[noahtallen]

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]

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.

[bloppe]

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.

[olliej]

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]

>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.

[heimidal]

> 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.

[snovv_crash]

False advertising is beneficial to the consumer how exactly?

[heimidal]

Given the only practical alternative I can imagine would mean to never show a price... yes, the current state of things is more beneficial to the consumer. Again, seeing an pre-tax MSRP price in an ad is better than not having any MSRP in an ad at all.

If you have a practical alternative that could somehow allow for advertising with prices that include tax, I'd love to hear it. (Just to make sure we're on the same page ahead of time: amending the Constitution to strike the Tenth Amendment so that the Federal Government can prevent states from levying their own taxes is not "practical".)

[snovv_crash]

Localized advertising is the obvious answer.

[ffgjgf1]

> 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?

[olliej]

> They really shouldn't be advertising false claims in the first place.

They aren't false advertising, they say "$X + tax and fees", this law is about removing the "and fees" bs where the seller is actually charging more than the advertised price but pretending it's a nebulous fee they didn't set.

I also think you may not be understand the degree of BS. My partner and I were recently buying a new car, and not one car dealership was advertising a true price for their cars. Multiple dealers had something that they literally stated was a "market price adjustment fee", that was not given until you were in the process of purchasing the car. These "fees" were 5-10 thousand dollars on a 30k car.

> That one has an easy solution: just ask for the destination.

So you would be ok if the first step in shopping online is giving the site your street address? you're saying that you could not price compare online without first providing your address to every company you were looking at.

I'm assuming you aren't in the US, so you aren't familiar with how its governance works. Every state, county, and incorporated city can have its own sales and service taxes. It doesn't matter if you think that's a questionable setup - the US constitution guarantees that right at at least the state level, and most states have similar laws guaranteeing some amount of that power to county and city governments, so it is literally impossible to remove this structure. So this issue is how do you make this law work, given the constraints of how the US government is constructed. "Solutions" that require any kind of unification of governance are almost certainly unconstitutional (again this separation of governance is a part of the US bill of rights).

[heimidal]

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.

[tjbiddle]

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]

"Taxes can change quickly"

Like, how quickly?

<1 day? otherwise it shouldnt be a problem

[pbhjpbhj]

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]

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]

Yes, books have RRP (recommended retail price). That price includes all taxes.

[heimidal]

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.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Not really, that's just a manufacturer-recommended price for the seller to charge, the seller can put whatever they want on the actual price tag.