Waaaaall Defender ol’ pardner that’s jus’ the li’l ol’ way we Yorkshire folk imitate US hicks,
Which just goes to show how ill informed and ignorant anyone can be if they try, seems to come quite naturally to you though.
And why don’t you give Ireland back to the Irish?
Guin, as much as I think Defender is acting like a total wind-up merchant, it’s sadly not as simple as “Ireland for the Irish” and that’s half the reason behind the Troubles.
Do the French get the right one? That is, the one on the right? Just curious.
You don’t, but if you are going to bitch about people “that can’t speak English properly” when your own syntax is sub-par, don’t be surprised if people call you on it.
Your OP is like a bad stand-up comedy routine about American price tags and the occasional word difference. Did you ever consider that your OP isn’t hilarious? Of course not. The problem is with a nation (or as you claim, “race”) of 270,000,000 people all devoid of humor.
<snort>
Methinks Defender is just a blithering putz trying to Yank our chains (pun intended).
Can you hold out 'til March 16th, dear? 
DDG, all those and you didn’t include “Glouchestershire”?
The price tag on the item has the actual price to be paid? Not quite likely!
I distinctly remember that one could buy a take away meal at a fast food outlet in the UK (back in 1982) and thus pay less than the posted price.
I also distinctly remember, in Japan, having a sales tax added to my entire purchase after the labeled price for all the items was tallied at the register.
There’s two examples which each refute “the rest of the world” comment of yours above.
Defender,
Please don’t be an ass/arse. Why not try to make a friend or two, and/or start an actual reasonable debate instead on whatever concerns you?
There are more of us than of you. We have bigger guns, a larger Air Force, and a much better Navy. We take what we want when we want it. We can beat you up. If we don’t like it, we change it. If it’s wrong, we fix it. That’s what we did to English.
In fact, we’re thinking of changing the name of the language to Merkin because we don’t want to be associated with some puny little floating sheep corral anymore.
What we say goes.
:::now removing tongue from cheek:::
At least our president doesn’t refer to himself in the first person plural.
Well, there are these concepts called “courtesy” and “civility” which you* are obviously not familiar with.
[sub]*And by “you” I mean just you, not the UK or wherever you’re from[/sub]
DEFENDER –
::feigns confusion:: Whatever are you talking about? I always pay exactly the price listed on the tag. Oh, you mean sales tax. Well, we don’t have that up here, ducks, so we don’t worry about it much. Why do not you brush up on the fact that not every corner of the U.S. is subject to your banal generalizations?
Because saying “fuck off” and meaning it tends to piss people off. Plus there’s an art to saying “have a nice day” and conveying “fuck off.”
What blather is this? Do you imagine that you speak an unchanging language? Do not be ignorant as well as offensive.
Over here, a footpath is an unpaved trail through the woods. And tap is a verb, not a noun.
This made me laugh. Damn it CASDAVE! If you can’t keep your backwoods (where should we say you’re from? Alabama?) Alabama opinions to yourself, you’re going to alienate all the posters who aren’t as good Americans as you are.
DEFENDER, you have a nice day now.
Defender, little buddy.
C’mere. Sit down. How about me and you have a little chat?
For starters, I think Alphagene hit the nail pretty squarely when he said it isn’t that we don’t have a sense of humor, It’s more of the case that your OP was about as funny as the last Ernest movie. (Was it Slam Dunk Ernest, or Ernest goes to Africa? I never can remember. Anyway, it’s not important.)
I have now seen three of you assuredly insightful seven posts. These two and your “great debate” about why Americans use a different convention for writing dates than do the English. I would search for your other four posts, but I have this homemade enema kit (all you need is some surgical tubing and the radiator from an '83 skylark!) that sounds much more inviting than does reading the rest of your sniveling drivel.
So, you’re going with one of two plans here. A.) For some untold reason (let’s keep it that way, alright? I’m sure your reasoning is more craptacular than the three posts of yours I’ve seen) you have a bone to pick with every facet of American culture and habit. B.) You actually are trying to by funny.
If it’s case A, then rest assured that you are not the first to try this, but you most definitely are the most tedious. If it’s case B.) I think your routine needs a little work. I suggest trying to find some old video tapes, namely that one episode of *The Soupy Sales Show * where Nipsy Russell was the guest. It put me in a coma, but that’s still a better result than what reading your bullshit has done to me.
Well, first of all, we don’t usually have shops. We have stores because when we were first stealing this land from the natives the Brits enacted laws laying specific taxes on various goods at the point of sale. Since we had to store all the products for the tax agent to assess, we got in the habit of directly buying from those stores and have continued the practice out of habit.
Just in case some other recent visitor is curious about the original point and does not realize that we have already answered it, before:
U.S. sales taxes differ by state and also by locality. I can buy a widget for $4.95 at the K-Mart one mile from my house and pay 5% tax. (4% to the state and 1% to the county.) If I drive due west for five miles, I enter a different county where their aggregate tax is 7.5%. Some states have no sales tax at all. K-mart (and Wal-Mart and Target and…and…) all buy products that are pre-packaged with prices on them (often from Taiwan or Japan or Spain) and have them shipped to central warehouses. From those warehouses, the products may be shipped anywhere in the country, depending upon demand. By placing only the raw price on the product, the retailers have no need to re-compute and re-price every item in every case before it leaves the warehouse. They simply program the cash registers to handle the taxed items. (It also means that the truck that brings items to my local store does not have to be as fussy about which boxes it would drop here as opposed to at the next town with different taxes.)
Additionally, several states have tax rates that are cumulatively variable. E.g., for years, Michigan had a nominal 4% sales tax that actually garnered a penny at .13, two cents at .32, three cents at %.57, and four cents at .67 (not sure of the last one). An object sent to a store for .14 (one cent included tax) would have resulted in an overcharge of .01 if two were purchased. (I know that doesn’t make sense, but we’re talking taxes here.)
Driven by that logic, the habit of omitting the sales tax from the item has become firmly entrenched.
I know this is the Pit, but I’d like to thank our American colleagues for restraining themselves so reasonably in the face of this kind of provocation. Cheers lads and lassies!
(and finally I’ve posted this in the right forum)
Well, IP numbers are such a joy sometimes. I can confirm that Defender is not posting from the UK. I can also confirm that the English that is spoken from whence Defender is posting does not exactly resemble the Queens English either - charming as the local accent may be.
Jaysus!
Not yet, anyway. He might get confused and do it sometime in the future, though.
Coldfire, you hoser. What makes you think we’d want to suck the left one when all those Limeys and Yanks are done with it, eh? You may think it’s business as usual for us to do this; and show you our tulips besides, but remember, we saved your bacon not long back. So just put your thing away, man. We’re not aboot that.
Let me explain things by way of apology to those from the US.
Dates escape me but in the UK we had a mixture of purchase taxes at differant rates that related to the category of goods purchased and these were taxed at differant rates.
This meant that goods and services considered essential to the maintennance of life etc not taxed at all and there were differant rates for differant categories of goods and services, so-called luxury taxes.
Thus there was a hugely confusing rate of taxes for similar services and goods since manufacturers found ways of blurring distinctions.
Some purchase taxes were as high as 25% and actually rose to 33% during the '70’s oil crisis, some items were taxed at zero with several gradations between.These gradations varied with the political climate at the time.It has to be said that this led to anomolies since goods were either in one group or another, distinctions had to be drawn somewhere, some goods were classified as food yet others were classified as luxury food thus attracting differant taxation.
The tax paid was always by the manufacturer of the items and this was always added to their profit margins.
This was all swept away in a taxation revolution introduced by the Tory government led by Edward Heath around 1972.
The revolution when Value Added Tax was introduced was that every increase in value of conversion from raw materials toward finished product was taxed and paid to the exchequer(IRS) at point of sale and was reclaimed back from the tax authorities.This is what led to Value Added Tax(VAT) which is a practice that is standard in virtually all European economies.
You will not be surprised to learn that VAT was introduced along with the entry of the UK into the Common Market.
There is still a hangover from this, goods are quoted excluding VAT so that items purchased for the purpose of carrying out business can put the ex-VAT value on their accounts and reclaim the VAT they have paid.
The idea is that the end user of a product pays the tax on the increase in value that the raw materials have undergone so the tax is loaded toward the non-investement(consumerism) end of the production chain.
Goods in the UK are often quoted as excluding VAT to make it easier for companies to account for their tax liabilities.
This might need several readings to understand but explains why UK goods are quoted ex-VAT but in outlets geared only for end consumers(retail)this explains why it is possible to quote one price for those goods since Joe Public has no call to reclaim VAT back from the tax authorities.
Some industries are geared in such a way(such as hotels) that prices are quoted excluding VAT so that calculation of reclaimable tax is easier, many business travellers can reclaim VAT, this is why Anthracite and other professional consultants (this incudes reps) are billed in this way.
To be honest I really do not want to go into the way goods were defined and taxed in the UK prior to 1971 or even as recently as fuel taxes which were harmonised with European rates during the last Tory government as there was an incredibly detailed and arbitary system tied up with trading laws which defined which items could be sold by which outlets on which particular days of the week.
This led to strange definitions which allowed newsagents to sell porn on Sundays and forbade the sale of shaving equipment on the same day.
Suffice to say that we are such a small nation that the use of city and state taxes in the retail sector is simply not applicable.
City taxes are derived from levies based on local real estate values and the grant delivered to local authories by central government.
Seems to me that Defender has little recollection of the history of the ramshackle purchase and taxation laws in the UK and thus finds it difficult to understand that the requirements of other nations require differant solutions.
As for language, well there is plenty of evidence that the US has preserved the way that certain words and accents from the UK are spoken rather than having corrupted them.Certainly I recognise phrases such as ‘son of a gun’, ‘Sheriff’ and ‘cowboy’ which originated here in the UK.
Looking at the way the OP has been written I’d say the the UK is not guilty of this aberration, my guess is that it’s someone who has UK relatives over to visit them in the US or perhaps Australia.
Jeez I am so pissed on a Saturday night that I would not be at all surprised to find this makes no sense at all in the morning, achohol I love ya.
PS I’d recommend that you do not underestimate the intelligence of the US posters here, watch, look and learn.