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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Can we please include sales tax in that price too? It is also a bullshit hidden fee the way the US does it.
The argument the idiots use is "We want to see government theft!" instead of just having a line item at the end of your receipt showing tax collected and the breakdown. It's not like we don't have toiletpaper roll length receipts already.
The kicker is we already do the “price at point of sale including taxes” thing at gas stations. If it’s $3.09 or whatever per gallon, that’s including state and federal sales tax.
We already see the line item thing on most receipts anyway. We basically do everything except roll the sales tax into the sticker price.
Only 3.09 per gallon? We pay 2 per litre!
CVS be changing their tape rolls every other customer…
CVS near me gives you a store credit if you let them email your receipt to you. It's silly.
It's very profitable for them to sell your email + buying habits I'm sure.
CVS has entered the chat
Government: no not like that
My weed dispensary includes taxes in the display price. It's awesome
How would a company advertise pricing across multiple states? E.g. on the web...
Use your ip address or GPS location or address to get your location and use a sales tax api product like: https://www.avalara.com/us/en/products/integrations/avalara-api.html
Not an endorsement, just an example that companies already consider this.
It's an imperfect solution. VPNs are an issue - and even if you don't use a VPN, the API only knows the location of the ISP's servers - which can be in a different state.
My point was that, the law should leave tax inclusion in pricing as optional. There is no way to implement automatic detection cleanly, other than prompting the user to confirm their location, which is a huge annoyance - so the 'tax inclusion' rule would not make things better or more convenient.
that would very much wreak havoc with caching since you basically can't cache pricing including sales tax as it depends on your very specific location.
of course, for things like event tickets, it's the venue's location that matters for tax, so it works out to be a non-issue.
Companies have no problem doing it to comply with EU regulations which require tax to be included, so I see no technical reason why they couldnt figure it out for the US.
Fair, I admittedly don't know how one would implement it, but the sales tax data is being used by their clients for something.
Looking into it further, some states, according to Shopify's FAQ on the topic, have different rules with regards to destination-sourced vs origin-sourced sales. 🤷♂️
Maybe you could do more localized caching. Localities with different sales tax are finite and few. Cache pages based on those localities and then serve pages based on the IP of the client. It's not ideal or as optimal, but it's not that unreasonable in my mind. If it became the norm we'd build the infrastructure to sustain it.
But considering there are algorithms to change price based on the data the site has on you, I don't think that would be a very big ask to change it for the state you're in.
The same way most sites show it today, "Enter zip code:"
I'd rather see prices without tax, than have to enter my zip code before I can see any pricing for anything online.
They could also just charge one price to everyone and then pay taxes after. I don't think they have to pass the tax onto the customer like that.
Just charge everyone $10, note where they live, and when taxes are due figure out how much of everyone's $10 needs to be paid to government
And cities. Even some surprisingly small cities charge additional sales tax