[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.

[olliej]

there are in the region of 100 different in the SF Bay Area alone. I drive through at least 10 in my daily commute.

Localized advertising as you put it, with included tax info, cannot work for: TV, radio, billboards, internet advertising, and is not useful to consumers for seat advertising, bus stops, etc.

Circulars only work because they can be printed in large numbers and delivered cheaply because they are delivered to every house in a region. Except delivery regions are by zip code, not by city or municipality - my zip code has three cities in it. As I have said elsewhere I am around 10 houses from a different city, so postal delivery for circulars that includes the prices is out unless you include multiple prices, but that's still kind of busted because if I get a circular I might stop at the store in a different city along my commute.

So now if I see a "full price" from X different ads, which "full price" is correct for where I would be shopping? Hence what matters in this environment is that all advertisers are providing a complete price where the only difference is the tax.

[heimidal]

“Local” advertising is not practical. There are 13,000 sales tax jurisdictions in the US.

[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).