In New York State most purchases for agricultural use are tax-exempt.
You have to have a tax-exempt form on file with the business you’re buying from. Any company that does a lot of business selling exempt items to farmers will be set up to use them. I might go into Tractor Supply (or place an order online) and get cat food (not exempt, taxable) and a shirt (not exempt even if I’m wearing it for farm work, taxable) and a garden hose (exempt if used to water farm crops) and some lynch pins for tractor hookups (exempt) and they’ll ask at checkout if I’m exempt, bring me up on their computer (by farm name or phone #) to check the form’s on file, and their computer will straighten it out. No tax charged to start with on the exempt items. No manager required, it’s routine for whoever’s running the cash register.
For tractor fuel, on the other hand, I have to pay the tax upfront and file for a rebate of some of the tax with my income tax forms. Not all the fuel tax is refundable – there’s actually several different taxes on a gallon of gas or diesel and only one of them is farm-exempt.
Something I’ve recently seen that probably only started this past year due to COVID is the server bringing you a check with a QR code on it that you scan then pay with your phone. No need to give your card to the server or to even touch a card reader.
There are two things I appreciated while I was living in Japan in the mid-1990’s that I thought would be nice in the USA – and realized would be impossible given USA’s culture:
Pedestrian tunnels: I lived in a relatively small town and my apartment building was on one of the main drags which actually had four lanes of traffic (two in either direction). Except at the edge of the downtown area** where my school was located, this drag (and the other four-lane drags around town) had areas between cross-roads where one could take a stairway down, make a right-angle turn, pass under the street, and make another right-angle turn to ascend steps to street level again. There were also crosswalks and traffic interruption controls at those cross-streets that were big enough to need four-way lights, but it was astoundingly convenient (particularly on windy winter nights) to be able to avoid having to stand and wait for the lights to change in order to cross the street. A few of the stairways also had ‘side ramps’ where it was customary for people with bicyles to dismount, roll their bike down the ramp while walking down (or up) the stairs, and remount at street level. And throughout the year, they were perfectly clean!
Mass Transit + Shopping hubs: This always seemed like a no-brainer to me. Yes, we have a lot of shopping centers and shopping malls where bus and even trolley/streetcar traffic has stops and teminals. But in Japan it seemed like every train station was also a subway station and outside the various exits there were taxi stands and/or bus terminals. Yeah, the USA has those too. But above and below the transportation hubs there were invariably shopping hubs integrated into the building structure, with dozens of specialty shops and restaurants, and often a major department store. [Furthermore, department stores seemed to have a common layout, with groceries and small eateries on the bottom floor and fine restaurants on the top one or two floors.] Bundling your commerce venues with your transportation hubs just seems like such an obvious time- and energy-saving planning concept!
But, then again, Japan is an astoundingly honest place, for lack of a better term. People still return lost wallets with no cash or cards missing; people still leave bicycles at group venus - unlocked - and fully expect to ride them home after their events have concluded. I realized even as I marvelled at them that, in the USA, a pedestrian tunnel would be used as a shelter/toilet for vagrants (at best) or a hangout for drug addicts, or a gauntlet full of thieves or rapists. And it occurred to me that retailers in the USA would scoff at building major retail hubs atop a train/subway station because that would invite too many opportunities for theft with a quick getaway. Plus the automotive industry would hate such a car-obviating petroleum-minimizing arrangement and lobby against such planning.
–G!
** There, for some reason, the usual pedestrian underpass was replaced by a pedestrian overbridge encased in plexiglass.
Yeah I’m going to miss that when I leave China.
It’s one reason why malls are still in rude health here, despite the same issue of people buying online as everywhere else (it helps that the malls have shifted focus to be more about recreation and dining).
Yeah, China is nowhere near as honest as Japan, but nonetheless I have had a similar thoughts about how there are things you can do here in Shanghai that you can’t do in my native UK because vandalism and theft are too common.
<hijack follows>
For one thing, it’s a widely-accepted fact in the UK that “tower blocks” were a failed experiment: you cannot raise a family in a high-rise building; families need to live in houses with gardens and such. British tower blocks are often filthy, in a state of disrepair and frequently havens for crime.
But in China there are vast residential complexes: the equivalent of suburbs is often Blade Runner like complexes of 30 or more identical towers, each one 30-40 stories high, and they are 100% residential.
Not only are they completely clean and with low to no crime, but of course there are a lot of facilities and services that people can enjoy from living in such a concentrated space.
We’ve had a lot of people move from mainland China to Melbourne.Au, and they think that tower blocks are the ordinary way to live.
Before that, it was only ‘social housing’, with broken elevators and low ceilings. The local government building regulations had moved everybody out of the old buildings in the CBD, and the CBD was desolate on the weekends.
Forcing the shelf price to be different to the POS price adds an extra process to the pricing. Done automatically by a big national company, or by hand by single owner/operator in a one-person business, it doesn’t make retail cheaper or easier.
You’ve also mentioned ‘problems with nationally advertised prices’. That draws attention to the main point: even in the absence of sales tax, normal regional market pricing exists for most products, and has to be handled by the pricing process. It’s also irrelevant: the nationally advertised price is not the price you pay.
I read the comment above that Canadian pricing depends on the combination of items at the point of sale. The same as McDonald’s uses for pricing Mac Meals, and the same as my supermarket uses for 2-for-1 specials. Both McDonald’s and my Supermarket have processes that handle that automatically, and it was always something small independent retailers did. So clearly most of the world can handle that problem, but I don’t fault Canadians for choosing to label products the way they do. It’s not a constitutional or business problem: it’s a cultural solution.
Maybe just make a toilet that can handle anything with a modest quantity of water? Several years ago we bought a Toto toilet that uses 1.6 gallons per flush and reliably clears the bowl of whatever you put in there. You can hold the flush handle down to use more water, but we never need to.
I like the nutrition data labeling on grocery items I’ve seen in the EU. They don’t allow manufacturers to decide the serving sizes so there’s no bogus Plain Bagel – Serving Size: 1/4 bagel. The labels show each nutrient’s value per 100 grams so you can easily compare between different brands and products.
So instead of:
“This cake is 300 calories per serving but the ice cream is only 120 calories a serving. I’m watching my weight. Let’s get the ice cream!”
It’s:
“Hmmm. This cake has 300 kcal per 100 grams but the ice cream has 400 kcals per 100g.”
I think collectively the USA population would lose a billion pounds or more just from changing that one labeling regulation.
The price advertised in sales flyers, or elsewhere, is most definitely the pre-tax price you pay (or at least the maximum price you pay), by law.
And it’s not only a question of “national”. Multiple people have pointed out that sales taxes vary by municipality – counties, cities, etc. can each have their own taxes added on to any imposed by the state. Customer bases cross these lines; no advertising is going to reach only the people in a specific municipality, even if you’re talking about brick-and-mortar sales. In many areas you’d need double-digit numbers of prices listed for every item – and half the customers wouldn’t know what county the store they were at was in, or which side of the city line it was on, so even if all those prices were listed they wouldn’t know which one applied.
Local sales taxes are a large part of the income for many municipalities.
Is this the most sensible possible overall system? Quite probably not; but deciding on a different one ain’t simple. Other possibilities have their own downsides.
I am doomed if this ever becomes standard. I don’t use my cellphone for anything but calls and texting. Oh, and the Disneyland app. I certainly don’t have credit card information on it.
Ditto. Plus which, my phone can’t read codes, and can’t add any apps it didn’t come with. It was selected to be waterproof and shock resistant, and to fit into pockets.
Here’s the problem. This product has 40 calories per 100g and it is 250g total. Your average American would have no clue how to figure out how many total calories are in the product.
The labels generally have two columns of info, per 100g and per serving (along with the number of grams in a serving), so you don’t need to do the arithmetic yourself.
The package would instead read:
Package: 350g (close enough to 12.5oz)
100g: 40 calories
Serving size: 92g (ditto 3.25oz)
So the total package calories is 100 * 3.5 = 140 calories. And the package probably has total calories on the label anyway. And the serving size would probably be rounded up to 100g, since that’s only 3.2 calories more anyway.