No more so than every time you earn some money, you have to mail a check to the government for income tax.
If I remember correctly, several years ago, online retailers like Amazon didn’t charge sales tax, but when I did my state income taxes, I had to add on an amount for the stuff I’d bought online during the past year. (And I see now @Eyebrows_0f_Doom has just posted something along the same lines.)
The tax is on the transaction, the sale. And your receipt from the store or restaurant will almost always have a separate line showing clearly what the sales tax was.
Yeah, “The customer should push back against the merchant and not pay the tax!” is such a ludicrous idea. It’s really no different than thinking you shouldn’t have to pay income tax because you agreed to work for a certain amount and “why should my check be less than that?”
No, you pay the tax as an add-on at the till, which is how this discussion started. The merchant collects the tax on behalf of the government and makes regular remittances of the tax they’ve collected.
No, that’s not what happened. I specifically spoke of my own experiences. And that is that I prefer paper money to coins to save on weight. Yeah, it’s not much weight. But it is weight I’d still rather avoid. I made no comment about people in other countries or their experiences (save the (as far as I know) factual statement that bills stopped being produced in Canada about when coins were introduced for those denominations).
Showing the final tax-included price on an object pre-sale would seem to be impossible for internet stores based in the U.S.
The law decrees that the tax added is the tax at the place of the recipient (1). People do not always buy for themselves. This doesn’t usually raise an issue in brick-and-mortar stores but is critical online. People shop for items and then go to a checkout. Only as one of the last steps in the process is the address of the recipient known. Only then can a lookup in the database calculate whether a tax is required and if so how much.
International sellers, like eBay or ABEbooks or a million other sites, have even worse problems. No matter if your country has a single VAT or other tax, those will differ country by country, just as the U.S. has thousands of separate taxing jurisdictions.
With the percentage of commerce ever-growing on the internet, tax inclusion is no longer a matter of going to a neighborhood store. It’s a global nightmare. Americans are ahead on this curve.
(1) This is America. There are always exceptions. A few states are origin-based but the rest are destination-based in their taxes. Outsiders never quite understand how different the individual states can be because there is no single federal control over most things. They didn’t grow up with a lack of one country-wide measure. It’s analogous to Americans not understanding how 40 degrees can be broiling hot instead of cold, because they didn’t grow up with it and it’s not in their bones.
Not just states. The Washington state sales tax rate is 6.5%, and where I live city/county taxes add another 3.8%. But if I go to the next county over (in any direction) the rate will be different. And it can be worse: I understand that there are places where crossing the street will change the rate.
I am surprised this is not regulated … and it needs the opinion of someone…
how much is tax on gas there … and is it handled the same way??? (gas normally carries an obscene tax load)
I think North America is the only place where you do pay more than the price-tag in the isle shows you … in Europe (and most places in the world), that would be a big NoNo …
One could say that, but it would be wrong. The point wasn’t to introduce dollar coins for some nefarious reason and then “get” people to use them; the whole point of the exercise was to eliminate the expense of constantly having to reclaim worn-out paper money and then print and redistribute new bills. The low $1 and $2 denominations were the worst offenders. Whereas the coins last practically forever. At around the same time, the remaining “paper” denominations were replaced by a type of polymer plastic for the same reason – doesn’t have nearly the durability of coins but better than paper, and has better security.
Well, we have both one-dollar and two-dollar coins and I’ve never felt “weighted down” by them. The thing about cash is that you’re either a cash user or you’re not; if you are, then the dollar coins get quickly spent with your purchases long before “weight” is actually a concern. If you have enough of them you use that instead of a $5 bill or breaking a ten. OTOH if you’re not a cash user (I haven’t been for many years) then any coins you have can just be dumped into a little plastic bin until such time as you may need them. Or if you have a lot of them, take them to the bank, just as you would do if you had a big wad of low-denomination paper money. I haven’t actually had coins in my pocket in years. But coinage is an essential part of the cash system and $1 and $2 coins just make sense from the standpoint of eliminating needless cost and waste. So did the elimination of the copper penny.
At least in the USA prices are always assumed to be quoted without (IOW before) tax.
The very few retailers who do bundle tax in with their prices will have prominent signs saying so. Often these places price things in round units of 25 cents or even a dollar so they have no need of dealing with small (or any) coins. That may be becoming less common now as so much of even small retail is paid for electronically, not with cash.
Gasoline is universally an exception, and is marked as such (“all taxes included”) on the dispenser. The one and only price you see is the with-tax all-up price.
Even then we can still make things complicated / confusing by charging (and disclosing) different prices for pay-with-cash, pay-with-branded-credit/debit card, or pay-with-other-credit card. Not to mention the effect of being a loyalty member, where the prices all shift once you’ve given the machine your loyalty ID.
One needs to distinguish between ordinary items which make up the vast majority of transactions, and “special cases”. For typical transactions the principle described by @Northern_Piper applies: there is a net price that you see on the label, and then there is a sales tax applied at checkout.
The thing about “special cases” is that they have a more complicated tax structure often involving multiple taxes and surcharges. Gasoline and diesel, for instance, is subject to a flat federal excise tax, provincial sales tax, provincial fuel tax, and federal and provincial carbon taxes. It’s all bundled into a single per-liter price as a matter of practicality.
What if I’m just browsing several online retailers to see who has the best price on violas and I don’t want to have to give out all my personal information before I get to see anything?
Or what if the viola is being shipped internationally – say, from US to Canada? (Something that happens a few million times a day, though not always involving violas.) Does the merchant have an obligation to collect and remit sales tax? (Answer: sometimes.) Will there, in fact, be any sales tax payable at all? (Answer: not always.) In many cases the only feasible option is to charge the customer the net price, record that price on the customs paperwork, and let customs figure it out at the border. Yet another reason why a “net price” is important.
You’re probably in a better position to judge the big picture than just about anyone else here. I will say, though, that you’re absolutely right about the US being way behind the rest of the world in the related areas of (a) chipped “smart” credit and debit cards, (b) RFID/contactless.“tap” capability on cards, and (c) the mobile gizmo providing for at-table payment. We’ve had all of those for probably two decades or more.
Trivia about the “tap” payment system. It was initially intended to allow you to use a credit card for trivially small purchases like a cup of coffee. But the upper limits and consequent uses have been steadily rising. Today at the liquor store I paid for my entire hoard with a single tap. I was surprised it worked, but the cashier said she thought the tap limit (before having to insert the card and enter a PIN) was $250. As for the magnetic strip, it hasn’t been used for payments in decades AFAIK. Some older software on POS machines, if it has trouble reading the chip, tells you to use the mag stripe instead. That never, ever works, presumably for security reasons. What usually does work is re-inserting the card, or wiping the chip contacts on my shirt and then re-inserting the card.
With the addition of some of the other points raised, the proposal was shown to be, at the very least, so ridiculously impractical that it could never be implemented. Which in the real world of business – the context in which the assertion was made – is a pretty good working definition of “impossible”.
