XKCD: It's more than a comic

Why would there be? They're telling you what they're actually charging. Not their fault if Uncle Sam wants a little extra.

But they're only telling you at the till, not on the price tag.

From the buyer's point of view, the important thing is how much it will cost them, regardless of the amount of tax. If the tax is higher, then the price is higher, of course. In Europe it's the common practice to show the price with tax, except when the target buyers are businesses, in which case both are shown.

Here's the thing: on the shelves, let's say something's advertised at an even $10. When you take it to the till, you pay $11. The store is still only charging $10; the government is charging the rest. Therefore, the advertised $10 price and the store's actual $10 charge match, so there's no false advertising involved.

It does encourage American shoppers to learn how to estimate small percentages in their heads.

I usually just add 10%. It's easier than trying to figure out fiddly numbers like 8.5 or 9.25%.

In Massachusetts, where Randall lives, there are no taxes on unprepared food (the fact that this applies to things like candy was a big talking point a while back in the campaign to get sanitary products reclassified from toiletries, which are subject to the GST, to medical supplies, which aren't). That said, I'm wondering where she is, since most places charge by weight for apples, and most of the places that don't are places with high markups, like farm stands or convenience stores, whereas a dollar an apple is about what I'd expect at a Stop & Shop. (Checking, Peapod's apples, bought individually, bottom out at a dollar exactly.) The one brick-and-mortar place outside that union I can think of would be a TJ's, but don't they usually use psychological pricing? I mean, even their famous N-buck Chuck is $(N-1).99...

That's actually the first time I've seen a point in favour of having that system.

When I talk about this with Americans, they always say it's because you can't print the price on a product that's sold in many states because the tax will change from state to state. Fair enough, but that doesn't explain why the price tag at the actual shop doesn't show the full price (including tax) until you're at the till. I just can't help assuming that it's because showing a lower price will make people more inclined to buy more stuff.

The alternative scenario would be that shops don't print the price tags that are attached to the shelves themselves, but get them delivered from some central warehouse that serves shops of the same chain in many states and can't make different tags for different shops.

Incidentally, $1 for a single apple sounds a bit high-ish for me. I'd expect to get about 2-3 apples for that, at least. (Well, rounding $1 to €1.) Now, this is actually one place where a particular chain in Finland can trick you a bit.

When we buy produce that's sold by weight (such as fruits and vegetables, typically), there's a scale that you use to print a price tag for what you're buying. When you pick what you want, you check the price and see a number that corresponds to a button on the scale. Put your product on the scale and press the correct button, and it'll print out a price tag (with a bar code) that shows you what the quantity you wanted will cost. If you want to figure out the price without printing out a price tag, you have to check the weight on the scale and then calculate it in your hear, or print a price tag and throw it away (which is wasteful).

A German chain, Lidl, doesn't use this exact system. They do have scales near the produce, but you can't print out your own price tag; instead, it's weighed at the till. That means if you didn't count right or didn't bother with the scale at all, you can't know exactly how much it will cost until you're at the till. I've bought more of a given product than I was planning because of this before. (Basically, "this feels like about half a kilo" followed by checking the receipt to see it was actually more like 0.8k, which I could've known by using the scale but couldn't be bothered. At other stores, I would've had to use the scale to get the bar code and be able to buy it at all, so I would've noticed then that I had too much.)

"The alternative scenario would be that shops don't print the price tags that are attached to the shelves themselves, but get them delivered from some central warehouse that serves shops of the same chain in many states and can't make different tags for different shops."

This is the case for a great many items that Americans routinely buy. I would hazard a guess that most consumer shopping takes place in retail chains that own stores in multiple states. This is even true for groceries. We have weighing scales for produce in grocery stores, but I have never seen one that prints a price tag for you. They are all like Lidl over here.

I think its all about what you are used to.

Edited by DeMarquis on Jul 15th 2018 at 6:41:17 AM

I know that the big chains operate in multiple states. What I'm surprised by is that individuals stores don't print out the price tags they put on the shelves, but get them delivered from out of state. I mean, maybe here, shops also get their price tags delivered from some central hub and I just don't know it. I've always assumed the tags get printed at the actual store.

Most of the bar codes Ive ever seen have the bar codes printed directly on the package, except for some clothes and groceries. I think they are mostly printed by the manufacturer.

This is a situation where I am obligated by law to brag that, as an Oregonian, I have no experience with sales tax.

There are some prices listed as "base price", most notably the price on books, and some packaging has values, but usually, they either use a price gun to print the label so that they can modify values on the fly or put general labels up on the shelves (base price without tax, of course) and then trust to bar codes and the computer system.

Bar codes are usually UPC, which is registered by the manufacturer with an international standards organization (I'm not sure if it's the ISO or another one).

Books might have the ISBN instead/in addition to the UPC, and I think ISBN is also an international registration.

I know that bar codes are usually in the product's packaging when they arrive at the store. I'm talking about the price tags on the shelves. I thought the shops print those. My point is that if those are not printed at the store, it explains why chains that operate in multiple states wouldn't have the final price on the tags on the shelves. If the individual stores still print their own price tags for the shelves, though, it makes no sense to still not include VAT in the listed price.

Those states are not so small. Even if the price tags are not printed in the store itself, they can still print different tags for each state, so it's quite a poor justification. It's just that businesses have a tendency to find holes in the law to make their system more obscure so that customers can plan their expenses less efficiently.

The same way that when you send money from your bank account, the banks will hold it back as long as possible. I don't know how it goes in other countries, but in Hungary transactions are only finished on bank opening hours, and while transfers within a bank is done immediately, transfers between banks take 4 hours (since there is a law for it; before that, it took a day or even more). These delays had justification when all transfers were processed by hand on both the sender and recipient side. Nowdays, everything is done automatically, but banks kept the practice to hold the money back, which they use for high speed trading. I guess that they justify this with theoretically they are allowed to require manual confirmation of any transaction, but of course it is only done with larger sums.

Going back to the .99 point, I've actually seen some stores (like Hudson's Bay here in Toronto) use the cents to demarcate whether or not something is on sale. I.e. "anything whose price ends in .49 is on sale, everything else is full price". It's an interesting way to acknowledge that cents don't matter much once you're above $20 or so.

My understanding is that it isn’t a state thing, it’s actully a level smaller than that, it’s a county and city thing.

Having the same sales tax across each state would probably enable things to be shown at the tax-included price (same way retailers that work across multiple small countries manage it), but when simply leaving th city limit can cause a change in sales tax it becomes much harder.

Negative Results.

High-speed trading is one of the big problems with a modern economy. It makes things more confusing and prone to collapse. While we haven't had a major stock market collapse in a long time, individual companies can get screwed over in seconds because of a bad rumor, since computers can do a million trades per second. A small fee (say a tenth of a cent?) per transaction would force traders to slow down and think, but nooo... /end rant

No, it's a state thing. Well, specifically, I've never heard of cities and counties having different sales tax. I suppose there could be a state that does that. But as far as I know, every state has a uniform sales tax across the state.

Edited by Discar on Jul 16th 2018 at 8:36:24 AM

I live in the Bay Area, and I know for a fact that sales tax is different in, say, Los Angeles.

I imagine those might be special cases, though, since those cities are so big.

Most stores I shop at dont have price tags on the shelf, but even if they did, Im confident individual stores do not set their own prices.

Edited by DeMarquis on Jul 16th 2018 at 5:08:42 AM

Who's talking about setting their own prices? They can just display the actual price, since presumably they know what the local taxes are.

You mean a central location that prints out different price tags for different locations, and ships those to the appropriate stores? Thats an extra expense businesses dont want, I presume.