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Comment by arielcostas | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I can't understand how Americans can live that way, having to calculate the tax in their head, or adding the fees for everything and all.

In Europe I go to a supermarket, and if something has a 1€ price tag, I only need a 1€ coin. Every price includes VAT,unless the seller is B2B, since companies don't pay VAT. And in those cases, prices must indicate N€+VAT.

And the tips, that stupid model of calculating the percentage and stuff is new, copied from the US. At least in Spain it's common not to tip, or at most round to the next euro and "keep the change"

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We live that way because we have no choice, and the majority of people here are still comfortable enough to not even realize that we're constantly getting screwed over in nearly every way.

> Every price includes VAT

As a seller this absolutely sucks. Not saying it's a bad thing. It's not. But imagine you're a small business, and you price the croissants you've just spent hours making at €1 each and you know you'll only get €0.79 of that. It feels unfair. Especially since you'll end up paying even more tax after that too.

So I guess you could say the US method favors the seller, while the (mostly) rest of the world method favors the buyer.

> But imagine you're a small business, and you price the croissants you've just spent hours making at €1 each and you know you'll only get €0.79 of that. It feels unfair.

Then price the croissant at €1.25 instead? The US method would still make the customer pay that amount; the only difference is whether the math is done once by the seller or every 10min by a new customer.

I bet there is a difference in revenue, too. Customers are not rational.

Lower advertised numbers (even if the out of pocket cost is the same) will likely result in more customers and sales.

If one business excludes tax from the price while every other business includes it, that’s misleading advertisement. I think writing the full price to be paid by the customer should be mandated by law, in which case no business gets a relative advantage over any other.

Where I live, we go even further: if you offer a subscription with a binding period, you also have to write the minimum total amount to be paid by the customer before they can cancel the subscription.

This helps prevent customers into getting tricked into spending more money than they can really afford, which is a good thing?

It is a tax on trade. It hurts both the seller and the buyer. Changing the label does absolutely nothing.

VAT especially at 21% seems like a very regressive tax, as are most sales taxes. Taxing the commoner rather than the wealthy is one way to ensure the supremacy of capital over labor though, protecting entrenched interests.

If you decide to start a business somewhere with a VAT, then you have to factor that into your pricing model, or else you're going to have a bad time. If you can't make a profit anymore, then your profit margins were never big enough in the first place, and you shouldn't be running a business.

I can’t even imagine how anyone could do business like that.

Oh wait. That’s exactly how every small business in the world outside the US does it.

And small businesses in Europe are thriving far more than chain shop laden America.

And when those business owners come to the US they nearly gag at the ridiculous arbitrary pricing they see here.

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