Another one is the custom in Austria and Germany of having two single duvets on a double bed. This is something my wife and I have adopted at home. It means no battles over quilt supremacy and the ability to have different insulation ratings as each person requires.
The notion that some languages are simpler than others is at least dubious. There are lots of ways in which languages differ. It may be that ones than are simpler in some ways are harder in other ways.
I don’t see why it isn’t be feasible here even with sales tax varying between jurisdictions, as long as the price listed on the tag (or menu) is determined at the place of sale. So if item x costs $4.99 pre-tax and the local tax rate is 8.75% the price listed is $5.43. In the next town over which has a 7.5% tax rate it would be $5.36.
I think the biggest push back would be from big retailers and restaurant chains because it would make it more difficult to offer a uniform price for a given item. But IMHO the clarity and convenience this set-up would provide to the consumer should outweigh the preferences of the retailers’ marketing departments.
They are useful because they count automatically the occupied/empty spaces, so they can be displayed at the entrance: 132 parking spaces still free! Come in! or: Full, don’t bother, Or 3 spaces still free in five levels, come in and see if you can find them. In Europe they often show panels indicating how many free parking slots are still free in several parking houses (Central Station: 245 free, Pl. de la Republique: 12 free, Bismarkplatz: full). It is a service for the people driving there. I find it useful.
Never heard the concept of an anchor city before, I like it. As an aside, there is the E19 highway from Cologne, in Germany, that goes westwards to either Brussels, Belgium, or Paris, France, that forks halfway. The highway runs in a more or less straight line, while the frontier between the French speaking and the Flemish speaking parts of Belgium (Wallonie and Flanders) zigzags up and down. The fork to Paris/Brussels happens to be in the Flemish part of the highway, and while in the French speaking parts of the highway they always write Paris/Brussels until you reach the fork, when you have to choose wether you go left or right they write Bruxelles on the right, but Bergen (Mons in French, but even that they ommit) on the left. I guess many people who wanted to drive to Paris drove the wrong way. Linguistical battles are one thing that is seldom in the USA, I guess. GPS should have solved that problem today. It is mean nonetheless.
That was my thought the first time someone mentioned the metric system in this thread. The metric system has been adopted worldwide… almost.
I noticed all four casters swiveled on the grocery store shopping carts in Europe. The carts can easily move in any direction. Except up or down, I guess.
I think of the idea of this thread as being “What things you experienced on one of your few trips outside your own country would you like to see in your own country?”. Like it or not, the Straight Dope started in the U.S. The majority of the posters are still American.
[quote=“suranyi, post:118, topic:943094, full:true”]
Along much of I-87 in upstate New York the anchor city for northbound is Montreal.
[/quote]Perhaps my most vivid and romantic mental snapshots of Africa was an old roadsign near Kabale, Uganda, pointing a turn to “Congo” referring to Belgian Congo, by then renamed Zaire. That simple Congo with a faded arrow flashed me back to realize I was really in the land of Livingstone,
Twice in Japanese hotels I’ve encountered coin laundry machines that have you set a PIN at the start of cycle. The door remains locked through the cycle and for a short time afterward.
I thought this was great, especially since the machines had accurate countdown timers. Put your load in, set a phone alarm, and go do something else. I use a laundromat, and it’d be cool to be able to go run an errand and know my laundry’s secure.
Both machines were wash/dry combos, by the way, although there were various options for skipping drying/extra heat/whatever. Still, you’ll be leaving your stuff in for a while without switching machines.
Also, the larger of the hotels had gender-segregated laundry facilities, which seemed odd until I realized how isolated those rooms were, especially in the middle of the night.
I actually believe large retailers would set the prices at the highest regional or the state tax rate and send the difference straight to the bottom line.
And I suspect more people than one might realise are sensitive about who gets to see their undies - often with good reason.
German McDonald’s has mcribs all year round 
And beers.
I know there’s a bit of snobbishness of some people considering the West of the river being “real” Shanghai, but calling longyang rd station a “distant suburb”, and not Shanghai proper, is beyond a stretch. It’s a short walk from Century Park and a short bike ride to the central business district.
It’s about as close to the center as, say, Harlem.
Business costs fluctuate all the time, not to mention inflation. So the enormous problem already exists.
Except of course…if a business’ rent goes up, say, they probably won’t pass that on to the consumer, at least not immediately. Because the price is carefully calibrated as a function of what people are willing to pay, competition in the market and so on. The price must be higher than the costs of course, but there is no specific ratio. So they often have to temporarily just eat certain added costs.
Never with sales tax though, since culturally people have bought into the idea of this being explicitly separate and the buyer’s obligation.
A Florida man I know took me out fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. No land in sight, in only four feet of water, there was a post sunk into the gulf. On top of the post was a weathered piece of wood with arrows painted and “Mexico” and “USA” on either end.
Though the consumer in me agrees with everybody who would like to see the “fully loaded” or “all in” (ie, tax included) price on display, the former retailer in me thinks it’s highly unlikely.
It raises the ‘sticker price,’ and that doesn’t tend to increase sales.
Ever notice how many e-commerce websites don’t give you shipping charges, handling fees, tax, etc., until the very last page ? At least in our e-commerce company, that’s because our analytics showed that the page that included all the “ups and extras” was the page where the greatest percentage of customers left the website.
I’m curious how that works in the countries that do use this practice (tax included in pricing): is it legally required ? Have they simply ‘trained’ their consumers differently than the US has ? Are they losing sales as a result of this practice ?
Hm.
Yes it’s legally required (UK), the tax is outlined on the receipt, it’s always been this way so your ‘losing sales’ question doesn’t really compute.
It doesn’t matter when there is no competitive difference between companies.
As for consumers getting used to seeing a higher sticker price bear in mind the aforementioned inflation, as well as currency exchange rates. People might grumble for a while about a $4.50 (plus 50c tax) coffee suddenly costing, OMG, 5 dollars! But in general people would adjust pretty fast and it wouldn’t affect coffee demand.
I understand the point you’re making, but I’m not sure it’s that simple. It depends on the price elasticity of demand of pretty much each and every product.
Economists have found that the prices of some goods are very inelastic. That is, a reduction in price does not increase demand much, and an increase in price does not hurt demand either.
For example, gasoline has little price elasticity of demand. Drivers will continue to buy as much as they have to, as will airlines, the trucking industry, and nearly every other buyer.
Other goods are much more elastic, so price changes for these goods cause substantial changes in their demand or their supply.
Maybe American consumers have proven to be easier to fool in terms of hidden charges than the consumers in most other nations. I’m not sure.
A company like Starbucks may be able to compare sales in stores with similar demographics across different countries, but it would be very hard to tease out the effect of this particular component.
Where I worked, we frequently conducted price testing, lowering and raising prices on a huge number of SKUs in order to determine the sweet spot for sales and profit.
The difference is that the tax rate is the same across the whole country. It doesn’t vary by state, as in the US.
So you can compare prices from any seller, and the tax is always included.
I have noticed that upscale bars, where everyone pays by credit card, are now not including tax in the drink price. That never used to be the case when you had a decent number of people paying cash, who wants to make change for a drink costing $6.27 or some other weird figure.
I’ve only seen this in a small number of places.
Indeed, in the US there can be different tax rates by county. We live in Armstrong County. I’ve seen things for sale in Allegheny County, which has an additional 1(?) percent sales tax. I just wait and buy it in Armstrong/Westmoreland/Indiana/Butler County and save some money.