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Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

A business already has to take care of the sales tax. So they can just show it on the price tag.

No they cannot. Taxes are not uniform. Walmart probably won't deal with this, but in many states business (read farmers) do not pay sales tax on some items (read likely to be used on a farm) and so stores that want to sell to business will have the ability to verify you are a business to give that discount.

It is worse for online where until you log in they have no clue what taxes will apply. If you are buying a gift for someone in a different area I don't know what tax rules apply but there is good odds they won't know until you get to the shipping information what the real taxes are.

If you sell a widget in a store, you MUST be able to compute the sales tax. Otherwise, you can't sell it.

And if you can do that, then you might as well print it on the price tag (along with pre-tax price if you want). No buts.

Ditto for online, after you get the customer's ZIP code.

You can't print the price on a price tag because different customer pay different prices.

Bullshit. First, you absolutely CAN JUST PUT TWO PRICES on a price tag. Moreover, business customers (in a grocery shop, yeah right) can just get a discount at a point of sale.

My favorite example of this lunacy is the restaurant nearby that sells pies. If they box your pie for you to take home, it's a grocery item and not taxed. If they give you utensils to eat it in the store, it's a restaurant meal and therefore taxed.

They literally can't know the price until you tell them whether you'd like a fork with it.

Now, this restaurant works around it by having both prices listed, but I can imagine a million freaking variants of that for an online sale: "you have to pay our local taxes, but almost maybe yours, unless you check out on a Sunday between noon and 5PM, which is a tax holiday on your block (but not your neighbors' across the road), so understand that the price may change between when you add it to your cart and when you click the 'pay' button."

I'm only a little bit exaggerating.

Then put two freaking price tags: "pies to go" and "eat here". Problem solved.

There are zero legitimate reasons not to show true prices.

Stopped reading after the first paragraph, huh.

> And if you can do that, then you might as well print it on the price tag (along with pre-tax price if you want).

Fun fact: sales tax rates are not stable. Our state publishes quarterly tax changes at the county level; city-level changes are presumably too numerous for the state to publish in the same format.

Inclusive pricing can obviously be done in-store, but it also more or less ensures that some of the items in your store will have incorrect prices some of the time.

At least here in California, the state collects the sales tax on behalf of all the local jurisdictions, so they publish and update them all simultaneously (twice a year) and in the same format.

Interesting...there must be a state law that requires jurisdictions to synchronize any changes to sales tax rates to a single calendar.

Technically, jurisdictions could try to collect the taxes directly, but they generally lack the infrastructure for it, and it isn't feasible to set it up. Instead, they must play by the state's rules if they want the state to collect for them. Jurisdictions also can't customize exemptions; they can only add an incremental percentage amount to the existing general state sales tax. In general, it's in everyone's best interest to play along.

The issue with online sales is real, but customers exempt from sales tax could just have their final price lowered. That would be the opposite of the current situation. Since there are many fewer tax-exempt sales, and tax-exempt buyers are presumably more sophisticated and less price-sensitive, this would be a net win for customers.

> but in many states business (read farmers) do not pay sales tax on some items (read likely to be used on a farm)

The legislation in most of europe clearly handles this - the price displayed is for the intended customer. If you go into B&Q (home depot equivalent), you'll see prices including sales tax. If you go next door to a timber merchant none of the prices have sales tax included. If you're a business, you don't pay the sales tax. The businesses know what their taxes are, and are required to have accurate accounts anyway. For those that are maybe numerically challenged - they'll never pay more than they see on the sticker.

> It is worse for online where until you log in they have no clue what taxes will apply.

Enter your shipping address to see pricing. Exactly the same as it is now. Give an estimate based on IP. Exactly how it works in Europe, which has the same problem.

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