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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

That conservative argument is just an excuse. The price is not shown in full, to make it harder for customer to know how much they are spending before they are at the counter.

It is fully possible to show full price along with tariffs and taxes, if you want to show them. It does not necessitates misleading prices. This is just conservatives being pro-manipulation and against informed customers.

When I was ordering package to a country that had tariffs, an online store shown me item price, shipping, tariffs and total price. Nothing new or shocking about showing a full price along with its breakdown.

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How do you show the final price to someone when dining in and carrying out food have different tax rates? You won’t know the price until they complete the purchase.

How do you put the final price on an ad that will be broadcast over a large area or distributed in a newspaper that goes to same, with different tax rates in different parts of the area? You won’t know the price until you know which location they’re shopping at.

You simplify the tax code so that, like the vast majority of other developed nations, these situations do not apply.

However that requires a centralization of power that is politically unpalatable in the US currently.

In practice, I think that this issue largely persists in the US because of tipping culture though. It perpetuates an acceptance of final cost uncertainty that makes the insanity of all the examples you describe seem somehow not so weird after all.

> How do you show the final price to someone when dining in and carrying out food have different tax rates?

I show two prices. Or, I show price for food and then price for packing separately. This is not a difficult problem at all.

>ow do you put the final price on an ad that will be broadcast over a large area or distributed in a newspaper that goes to same, with different tax rates in different parts of the area?

Are we now in some kind of completely different hypothetical example that is neither online shopping nor "prices in the store" we discussed before?

What they’re getting at is not applying tax to the price is the standard consistent way to show price in the US. If you have a national ad campaign you wouldn’t be able to show the price with tax because every state and city has their own tax rate. So then, as a consumer, you’d have to guess if you’re looking at a national ad or regional that has tax applied. This also applies to products that have their price printed on the packaging for national distribution. Sure the price could have fine print that says if tax is included or not, but now there’s more than one way to display price — even in a store. See: https://xkcd.com/927

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