I suspect that with the proliferation of electronic money, there will be even less impetus to change the U.S. system, because fewer and fewer people will have to worry about keeping the cost within the exact amount of cash in their pockets.
just to add, I don’t think this is done much, if at all, in Europe - all the countires I’ve visited (not all by a long shot, granted), did have tax included in the sticker price. Seeing as most countries are members of the European Union, and those who are not generally follow many of the same regulations, I’d be surprised if it’s done differently.
Also, all online stores operated inside a particular country, generally adds the same VAT as the brick and mortars. However, buying from a different country they generally don’t add sales tax, and you don’t have to worry about it. So, it is often cheaper to buy from a different country.
And, we generally have a much higher level of VAT. 25% in Norway, for instance.
I’ve known vendors here who quoted prices without tax - I’ve got a price list here from the 1950s with prices ‘exclusive of purchase tax’ - but it’s very unusual, and rather old-fashioned. If it happens today. it’s usually a business that sells to a lot of VAT-registered customers who can claim the tax back again, and want to know the ex-VAT price.
That could very well be. I’m remembering from my time working at a General Cinema in the early '90’s. Those of us who worked concessions with any regularity would quickly memorize the tax-included totals of commonly-ordered combinations, and they tended not to be round numbers. For example - and I can’t believe I still remember this - $4.44 for a medium drink and a medium popcorn. (Hey, it was twenty years ago. Evening adult tickets were only $6…)
I recently saw a movie at an Edwards theater, and even bought a soda at the concession stand, but don’t recall whether the posted price for the drink was pre- or post-tax.
That’s not true. There might have to be a rounding somewhere along the line, but there doesn’t have to be, and there certainly doesn’t have to be one in each transaction.
If I buy something that costs $3.23, tax included, there’s no rounding when I pay for it. I pay exactly $3.23. It doesn’t matter what the tax rate is to me.
When the store adds up their totals and has to remit tax to the government, they add up all the stuff they sold, calculate the portion of that that was tax, then send that in. It’s likely that there will be a rounding required at this point. But it’s not for sure.
Sure, if I get my receipt and it says: Item: $2.99, Tax: $0.24, then the printing of the receipt has rounded things off for the convenience of displaying an estimate on a small piece of paper. But the underlying system does not require that rounding to occur at the transaction level (unless the laws are written stupidly, which they might be, but that’s beside the point).
Your system might work if taxes matched up exactly with units of currency, but then we couldn’t have assessments like this:
The sales tax in my local community is 8.491%. The sales tax in the city next door is 8.425%. Both towns have stores of the same national pharmacy chain. Under your system, an item marked at $2 in my town would bring the retailer $1.83018 in actual revenue, while in the town next door, it would bring the retailer $1.8315. So either my town’s pharmacy raises its prices by .066% or the national chain will only locate its stores in areas where it can take advantage of rounding.
This is silly. The company will pick a price that averages out pretty reasonably, and whatever very minor inefficiency is introduced by this will just be a wash. If there are large tax differences, then the company will just have different prices in different areas. They already do this at the register. The only difference is that they’ll have to print labels and signs with different prices.
If one of the company’s employees lives 30 feet further away, I bet they don’t pay him $0.0003 more per hour to account for his extra gas costs.
If one store’s ceilings are 1 foot higher than another’s, I bet they don’t account for 0.000002% higher operating costs because it takes more Windex to clean the front windows.
It’s not like every product in the same store results in the same profit, even. Yet companies persist in stocking all those products that they only make a 12.2% profit margin when they could reduce store space and sell just a different brand that makes 12.3%. They even stock products in cylindrical packages when square packages could improve their packing efficiency by x%, and packages with a height that’s not an integral divisor of the shelf height, and any of thousands of other things that don’t actually matter in the big picture.
Just because you can think of a difference doesn’t mean it’s a material one.
I think that you’re making two big assumptions here:
(1) That the same tax rate is applied to everything that a store sells; and
(2) That purchasers don’t need to identify what tax they are paying on each item.
In the sales-tax type of system that’s common in the U.S., I don’t think the first ever happens. Even if you don’t have a situation where some items are free of sales tax (e.g., food in Ohio), some purchasers (e.g., non-profits) can get an exemption from sales tax.
On the other hand, if you have a value-added tax system, then purchasers who are using the goods that they buy as inputs into their firms need to know what VAT they pay on those inputs, so it needs to be shown on their receipts, and inevitably it will be rounded (at any realistic rate of VAT, and even at a round figure of 10%, unless prices of goods are limited to very round figures). That’s because they deduct the VAT they pay for those inputs from the VAT that they get from their customers, and only send the difference to the tax office. (That’s why it’s called a value-added tax.)
I don’t think it’s beside the point at all.
I do sales tax returns as part of my accounting services. My clients tell me all the time that I must be doing it wrong because it is too complicated for them to understand and doesn’t make any sense. I try to explain that the more your know about Washington state sales tax, the less it makes sense.
Let me provide an example of stupidity: In one of your examples, you felt that 0.24 of tax could be rounded out later in the company’s system. In fact, if a receipt says 0.24 of tax, then the state (Washington, at least) expects that you remit 0.24. Often, companies remit “overcollected sales tax” because their cash register rounded up. Furthermore, the laws do not permit you to net out rounding up against rounding down. So if you round up 25 receipts and round down 25 receipts by 0.01, you still pay 0.25 in overcollected tax.
Now… do most people report it this way? No. Do most auditors care? No. But it’s there on the books in black and white.
You’re forgetting (or not mentioning) one other issue: advertising.
If a retailer (or, for that matter, a restaurant) has multiple locations, and runs any advertising featuring prices, having different at-shelf prices for different locations will be a nightmare. If a consumer sees that item X is on sale for $1.79, that’s what they expect to see at the store shelf.
That’s a very good point, and it does mean that rounding needs to be done at the transaction level, at least from the customer’s point of view, so they can properly account for taxes.
When I said it was beside the point, I was imagining that changes to the law would required to get this sort of price posting established, so any portions of the current law that don’t make sense would also have to be changed. While I recognize that there’s some friction involved in changing the law, I’m arguing that a system in which the price posted is the price paid would work just fine in principle.
Not at all forgetting it! The whole point of this change is making advertising more correct and transparent. I find it hard to believe that a customer cares more about the price listed in regional advertising matching the label on the shelf than they do about it matching the amount of money they actually have to pay for said item.
There are a variety of solutions to this. You can let large regional advertisements still list only the before tax price, list a range of prices, or some other compromise. But there’s no reason the label in the store can’t be correct.
Have you ever worked retail? There are, indeed, people (frequently senior citizens) who come into stores clutching the weekly ad from the newspaper, going up and down the aisles, specifically selecting what’s on sale, and then carefully checking the prices as they’re rung up, to make sure that they’re getting exactly the price promised – and, if there’s a discrepancy, they raise a conniption fit.
Said consumers certainly understand that they pay sales tax on top of that retail price, but they seem to be more concerned that the retailer isn’t getting one penny more out of them than promised. (Sales tax, of course, isn’t going to the retailer.)
Wow, this thread has grown quickly!
So on a typical US supermarket till receipt, is the tax (or several different taxes) itemised for each item? Here in the UK, typically the receipt just marks the items that attract VAT with an asterisk or something, and then at the bottom it has a VAT summary showing the net price of the VAT rated items and the amount of tax charged (which together of course add up to the total price shown on the receipt).
(VAT is not applied to food except for “luxury items”. In the case of my lunchtime till receipt, the sandwich and biscuits had no tax applied, but the potato crisps did.)
I have worked in retail. I’m pretty sure we had some kind of “get $5 off if we get it wrong” deal, which meant the conniption fit was short-lived. They’d point out the discrepancy, I’d apologize and have someone check, then they’d get a discount. Disaster averted!
I’m not sure how to respond to this. I think (see below) you could put the before-tax price and the after-tax price on the label. They can then compare both, which should make them happy that neither you nor the government is getting anything extra.
Even if you don’t, I think the value of actually knowing how much something will cost when you’re in the store outweighs this problem. If I go into the store with five bucks in my pocket looking for a snack, I have to go through this process:
A sandwich would be nice, let’s see, $3.99 from the deli plus tax is…uh, about 35 cents… and a soda is $0.65, plus tax is hmm, pretty close to $5. Oh, crap, plus 5c for the can deposit. That might put me over. Hmm, maybe I’ll get a carton of milk. That’s 70c, but I think it’s not taxed, because it’s dairy. Oh, man chocolate milk, that takes me back. Hmm. I wonder if chocolate milk is considered a snack food by the state. Uhm…
Obviously, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but the problem is real. You can’t actually tell how much something costs until you take it to the register.
This is even worse with things like online vendors (cough, Ticketmaster, cough) and telecommunications services, which seem to tack on bullshit fees and taxes like no other.
Several people have mentioned that this is by design, so that you’ll know how much the government is taking. That’s fair, and putting both the before and after tax price on the sign is a good idea for that purpose. But as far as I’m concerned, when I’m in the store shopping, the amount that I care about is the amount leaving my wallet for destinations unknown. If I know that, I can make an informed decision about what to buy. I don’t care nearly as much where it’s going.
The difference is the countries with sensible (VAT-in-price) taxes are just that - countries. I don’t know about Australia, but IIRC New Zealand, Britain, France, Italy etc. there is one tax rate for the whole country. Nobody is going to drive to the next jurisdiction from New zealand or Britain to get a cheaper VAT; you just pay the 18% or 22% or whatever it is, embedded in the price.
The only other place like the USA that is equally backward that I’m aware is Canada, where the provinces have widely different PST rates which are added to the country wide GST rate and also have the difference in rates - what is taxable for PST is not taxable for GST or vice versa. The HST (“Harmonized Sales Tax”) was supposed to get around this. Several provinces have adopted this… but again, some items have the GST rate, some have the HST, some have neither. Still, to the best of my knowledge, no Canadian city has an additional sales tax. The law says the price cannot include the GST, but it doesn’t matter; nobody advertises a price 5% or 13% above the competition.
the bit I really liked about theose other countries was the sensible pricing. An item was usually 12 dollars or 6 Euros even, and you didn’t end up with weird little coins in your pocket very often.
Typically, no, the taxes are not itemized separately for each item on the bill. The taxes are listed together at the bottom just before the grand total. Sometimes nontaxable items will be marked in some way, however.
In Australia the GST is a Commonwealth tax, so it is uniform across all states and territories.
iamthewalrus(:3=, clearly the U.S. could, (theoretically),find a way to make your system work. However, in the real world, there is simply no way.
I live in a county where the combined state/county tax comes to .065. The next county to the West has a combined tax of .0775. The county to the South has a sales tax of .0675. There is a shopping center in the very Southeast corner of our county with a Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Kohl’s and several other outlets. When the retailers order the pre-priced items, (and there are many such products–jeans, sweaters, hammers, boxes of screws, cookware, etc.), from the manufacturers, what price do they tell them to place on them? If you answer that they should simply rate them for .065, what do you then tell the retailer when the company needs to re-direct product to a store in one of the nearby counties with a different tax? Are you going to offer to pay the retailer for the manual cost of repricing all the items that were automatically priced during packaging in China? What happens if the clothing has to be re-directed toward a store in Pennsylania where the clothing has no tax?
Alternatively, if the items are assigned a price based on some averaged value based on all the potential taxes that might appear, you are still stuck with either manually re-pricing anything that is shipped interstore to Pennsylvania or simply gouging the people in Pennsylvania for the taxes you are not going to collect. And if you do the latter, I will guarantee that one of your competitors will simply revert to not putting the tax on the price tag and undercut all your sales.
For that matter, all those prices that are printed in China can currently arrive with a single price for the entire U.S. (Or all the items manufactured and priced in the U.S. can go out the door with a single price.) Under your scheme, every item has to be priced according to destination, meaning mass manufacturing cannot be done efficiently as there is not really a good way to know which items will need to be produced in what quantity to arrive at each individual store. (Think of all the Christmas items that are manufactured through the Summer and Fall to be warehoused until shipmentin October or November–often to secondary warehouses operated by the retailers. Now every one of those items has to be tracked at the case level, based on the destination retail outlet.
Is it physically possible to do this with increased computer power? Possibly. Is it worth it at this stage? Not really.
I’m an american who despises the pretax price listings and go out of my way and spend more to shop at the few stores that for one reason or another list post tax prices. I don’t particularly care why the us is so goddamn special that it has to be like this. I just want to not have to do anything more difficult than simple addition if I only have 6 bucks.
Has the law changed recently or have some stores been smacked down? I ask because I have most definitely seen “Pay No GST” sales a few times (I’m in Alberta, so at least we have no PST to contend with) although not for the past little while. Since the store still has to submit 5% GST to the Feds regardless of what the sign says, “Pay No GST” is equivalent to saying that the price includes the GST.