I disagree. If you want to sell something to a market then you should tailor your product to that market. That means doing some basic research about what the local taxes and laws are.
Ideally, the seller should list the price + tax if it is physically sold in a store. This should be fixed (along with the tips culture in US).
Online retailers still have this problem. Sales tax is literally based on the zip code you enter during the checkout page.
So how can this problem be solved? The only solution I see is a federally controlled fixed sales tax similar to EU. But, that would be unconstitutional in US. States hold the power and additional municipal taxes are at the county level.
I think you're trivializing the matter. I've had several conversations with Europeans about it and we eventually come to an understanding that its not easy. On surface, it sounds simple if we assume is a simple nation-wide VAT tax.
If the former, I already said:
> Ideally, the seller should list the price + tax if it is physically sold in a store. This should be fixed (along with the tips culture in US).
Living in couple of countries In EU and Asia, I can't imagine not knowing total price up front. It's pushing legislation problems on the end customer.
So, now, you have a new problem. Top counties with lowest sales tax in the US will massively attract more businesses forcing the rest of the counties to reduce their sales tax too.
The entire problem boils down to federal vs. local control. US is structured with a balance between local, state and federal powers.
The online retail problem is also trivially solved. If I got to the US version of any online shop as a EU resident I'm usually first greeted by a "which version do you want to browse" popup asking me if I really want the US version and not a different country. This affects the default language, currency and locale as well as pricing. There's no reason they couldn't ask for your zip code if they already have to do these calculations at checkout anyway.
The problem is that there's no reason US companies should do this because there's no competitive advantage in having transparent pricing. This would require legislation (probably at the federal level) but once there's regulations, you'd see these solutions pop up everywhere overnight.
It's funny to hear Americans lament about how it's hard to do business in the EU because of the many differences between countries and then turn around and use state or county differences as an excuse why it's "just too hard" to do what companies are doing in the EU. At this point I wonder if Californians are seeing the same "sorry, we can't figure out how to show you this website without harvesting your data" error pages on US news sites given how strict their new privacy laws are.
Can't you ask the zip code before checkout, a popup like "If you want to see the real price enter the zip code now"
On the physical store don't you have in US prices printed on paper stickers? Are prices printed on the bottles and boxes and all stores will have the exact same prices? So if this is something you never seen in US let me explain how is done, some products have a recommended price printed on them but shops can put their own larger or smaller price. You will see also labels with full prices s tricked through and discounted prices printed under.
I also seen shops rotating the prices daily, like if they have 2 products A and B , you have prices like
Monday A: 10$, B:20$ Tu: A:11 , B:19 We: A:12 , B:18
so on, I am surprised that the US does not use this scummy price rotating tactics. The "scam" is that the shop will put an ad on radio and say "bananas only X$" , next day the ad will say "milk only Y$" , and each time you will hear the ad you think "this shop has cheap products, I should buy from there" but when you visit the banana will be cheap but in that day mil is expensive, 3 days later will be reversed.