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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Some of the jurisdictions I have businesses in require all taxes to be shown on the receipt, and individually. We have to show 4 different taxes for each night of a hotel stay, that is 5 lines of charged breaking down the cost of a hotel room might. A week long stay is a multiple page receipt.

My ATT receipt for my mobile phone shows 8 different state and city and county taxes, from general sales tax to 911 specific ones to mental healthcare tax.

Zero reason for all this to be broken down for the end customer.

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Broken down or not, I want to know that my $75 phone bill will be $75 and not $87.62. Prepaid phone services manage this just fine, so it isn't difficult.

As an end customer I want to know when I am being swindled with unnecessary fees. As a business owner you want to hide them.

So yeah, there's plenty of reasons. Oh no, a long receipt. Won't somebody think of the ... ignorant people?

How would you know what an unnecessary fee is? No one goes around and examines the taxes applicable at every business they patronize.

The amount of money coming out of your pocket is the only number worth caring about. The rest is for government auditors to worry about.

I want to know if it could be less but for "fees", and there should be a mandatory amount of transparency in all pricing. Opaque pricing is anti-customer.

I especially love it when business types tell me what I should be caring about with regards to my money.

We can take this even further and demand cost-plus pricing for all things (with a regulated and controlled definition of 'cost'). This idea that pricing should scale to the customers' means needs to die. Good business means leaving money on the table, sometimes lots of it.

That would be a ridiculous overreach of government, not to mention a political disaster.

> with a regulated and controlled definition of 'cost’

Perhaps we can start with a breakdown of your quality of life and come up with what is and is not necessary.

I can start by suggesting getting rid of your detached single family house, greater than 3 liter engine car, restrict eating out to once per quarter, and foregoing vacations involving flights. And that would still be better than how the majority of people in the world live.

Obviously, I mean that as a rhetorical device to show the futility in trying to define what costs are and are not acceptable. The market is capable of figuring that out. The businesses that have the better price will have the appropriate costs.

Of course it would. Capitalists scurry when sunlight is shined on them, much like cockroaches.

People are not businesses, we do not exist to generate money for shareholders. The logic does not apply. Quite the opposite: business serves customers, and an expectation of servant leadership should apply here.

In a democracy aren't we all government auditors?

When I feel a price is unreasonable, I want to know whom to complain to. If the taxes are what's making it unreasonable, I want to know to complain to the government rather than the merchant.

It's fine to break them down on the invoice if they prefer/must. But the listed price should still be the final price inclusive of all mandatory fees.

When I buy something here in Europe it will say €2 on the sticker, and then my receipt will say that the price was €1.66 with a VAT of €0.34 for a total of €2.

And then remember that the cell and cable companies had to be threatened with lawsuits to stop labeling some of their fees as taxes.

"Charges can only be labeled as a tax if 100% of the charge goes to a government entity."

I have seen fees labeled as "foo tx" to get around this. Technically, they didn't call it a tax.

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