tomndebb, those are all obstacles (I’d claim they’re fairly minor) to having prices printed on the items (or packaging), but I’m not sure if that’s really necessary, or even that common.
Thinking about the things that I buy commonly at retail (food, both groceries and prepared, various sundries, clothing), almost none of them have prices printed on them at the factory. They generally have a barcode printed on them, and the price is printed on a label stuck on the wall or shelf. This is to the advantage of the stores, since it makes it simple and easy to change prices. All I’m saying is to change the label on the shelf to conform to the actual price paid at the till.
Books and clothing are common (but not universal) exceptions, but buying either one on sale (or even marked up) is a pretty common occurrence.
I’m not sure what sort of computer power is required besides a barcode scanner and a relational database, both of which have been standard in retail outlets for decades.
There seems to be a lot of people claiming that displaying and advertising the actual price of things is difficult and tricky, but somehow it’s easy for people to just do the mental arithmetic. That doesn’t make sense to me. It’s way harder for me to on-the-fly calculate 9.25% of some subset of my grocery bill, for example, than it is to just add up the prices listed on the shelves. And that’s even assuming that I know the current tax rates, which products are taxed (at which rates?), and that I’m in a familiar geographical area.
A specific response to one part of your post
You mean, as an itemized surcharge? Of course not. No more than I’d pay an extra fee for lighting of the store, or for restocking of the merchandise. Properly labeling the actual cost of items for sale ought to be considered a basic cost of doing business. Personally, I think that truth in advertising laws should come into play.
Mexico is almost always with VAT included in the prices. In very, very rate occasions, I’ve gone to a restaurant where VAT was included, which memorable because most restaurants also include the service charge in the price (and clearly state on the menu when they don’t). However I deal with a lot of commercial accounts in Mexico, and in my experience VAT is never included commercially (but it’s not tax-free, VAT is still due).
And as mentioned up-thread, that’s how the sales tax is computed anyway — not individually for each item (then summed), but as a percentage of the total sale amount.
Some businesses in the US will have “no tax sales”, but it’s just where the price is reduced enough so that, when the sales tax is added, the price at the register is the normal non-sale pre-tax price.
Some states have sales tax holidays on clothing and school supplies before the school year begins.
There is a proposal to make downtown Buffalo a sales tax-free zone, to draw high-end retailers and Canadian shoppers to the area.
Sorry, but as others explained, the sales tax and retail landscape in the United States is just too confusing to make post-tax pricing viable. Blame the powers given to the states by the United States Constitution, and the powers given by many states to its counties and municipalities. That doesn’t mean the US is “backwards”; just different. I bet if it were the other way around, with a uniform GST throughout the USA and a fractured sales tax system across the pond, we’ve be begging to have pre-tax prices on the shelves “like the more sophisticated Europeans”, because “it makes more sense” and “we can see where our money is going.” Likewise with receiving party-pays cell phone plans, checks, and so on. :rolleyes:
Or, at least, the percentage of the sale amount of taxable items. Tax isn’t added to tax-exempt items, which vary from state to state as others have noted.
You claim to have retail experience, but a statement that these obstacles are “minor” does not support that claim. Are you really claiming that maintaining separate shelf tags for tens of thousands of items in each store in each taxing authority is a “minor” obstacle? The chain at which I work is a local outfit with stores in “only” five taxing authorities. Now consider multiplying that by the number of outlets in multiple taxing authorities for a Wal-Mart or a Target or a K-Mart/Sears. (And remember that local authorities change taxes at their whim–not constantly, but hardly never.) Every time a taxing authority makes a change, each affected store would have to re-print and reset thousands, (or tens of thousands), of shelf tags simply to avoid showing prices in the same way that Americans have been used to seeing them for decades. The cost of changing shelf tags for simple price modifications is already not negligible; adding random events in which every price in the store changes does not make it less negligible.
Again, it would be possible, but hardly “fairly minor.”
Well, besides the printers and the hundreds of man hours of label changing shelf tags, of course.
I have made no claim that it is easy on the customer. I simply note that the expense to the retailer is hardly negligible.
You wish to add cost to the price of doing business. I just think that the people who want the retailers to incur more (unnecessary) costs should pay for it.
Just because you dismiss it as not being material doesn’t make it so. Retailers like Wal-Mart are known for haggling with suppliers over a fraction of a cent in the unit price of their products. UPS designs its routes to eliminate left turns, to save in infinitestimal amount of time and gas for each delivery.
Around here, car dealers don’t collect sales tax. You pay it when you register your car and the state rebates to the city you live in based on the city’s tax rate. On a $25,000 vehicle sale, the difference between my 8.491% sales tax and my neighbor’s 8.425% sales tax is $16.50. Frankly, I don’t see my neighbor in the next town agreeing to pay an extra $8.25 for his car while I save $8.25, just so our car dealer can average out the difference because I live in city A, my neighbor is in city B and the car dealer is in city C.
Hehe… yeah, 15% in NZ, and no-one is driving to another jurisdiction. Well… you could drive to Sydney over the harbour bridge… but it’s a really long way.
A few places here do advertise ex-GST – computer resellers are one. Not the “Best Buy” equivalents, they advertise inc-GST, but little places where quite a few of their customers are businesses (who get to claim the GST back and are more concerned about the ex-GST price).
If the car dealer doesn’t collect sales tax, then I don’t think it’s a relevant transaction. If the dealership isn’t taking the tax, they don’t have to display it as part of the price. And, besides, don’t you bargain for cars like they do everywhere else? You pay whatever price you can agree on.
No they do not: for retail, the tax is added beforehand, but itemized in the receipt.
Spain doesn’t exactly have “one VAT for the whole country”: different items have different VAT %, but which items get which of the three possible VAT %s (“full”, “half” and “exempt”) and which are the possible %s is set countrywide.
What I’m wondering is: in Spain (and AFAIK throughout Europe, by which I mean the continent and not just the EU) you can only be subject to one taxation authority for each kind of tax (you may have to pay income at the regional level or at the national level, but not at both); in the US, you can pay tax for the same concept to several different authorities (income tax at the city, state and federal level is possible). Which other countries have taxation structures similar to the US?
Although in my state local sales taxes are prohibited, we have conditions much worse than you describe with shelf tags. Our state still has a stupid individual item labeling law whereby every item on the shelf must be equipped with a price tag! Our new governor has proposed eliminating this regulation, and no one is able to cite any consumer horror stories against doing so, but there are only complaints that a lot of minimum wage people (and some unionized people, I suppose) will suddenly lose their jobs. Statewide, this would save millions of dollars per year. It’s not a small thing.
I don’t know of any municipal sales taxes or income taxes in Canada.
We have municipal property taxes.
We have provincial sales taxes (or lack thereof in Saskatchewan).
We have federal sales tax (GST).
There are separate income taxes for the provinces and the feds.
Not not mention ridiculous (hidden) taxes on things like cigarettes, booze and gasoline, which also have separate provincial and federal rates.
You may also be billed separately for water usage and garbage pick-up. (Which is really a tax.)
Sometimes, as in the case with gasoline, you are taxed on the taxes. Meaning that a certain tax is already levied per litre, and then additional percentage taxes are added on top of that, such that you are paying taxes upon taxes.
We pay disposal fees when buying things like tires, oil, and electronics: which are also taxes.
