Hacker News Reader

Comment by Name_Chawps | Hacker News Reader

The price should be the price. Advertising any dollar amount less than what the customer actually has to pay should be fraud.

Even taxes should be included in prices.

And this has to be a top-down, legal thing, rather than something companies can opt-in to, because I think the business consequences of being the only one in your industry with transparent pricing would generally be lethal, and I've heard stories of restaurants going out of business due to including taxes in their prices. People want to pay less, and they'll go to the place they think will charge less. So this has to be enforced top-down.

View on HN

>> Even taxes should be included in prices.

Many people are dumb as bricks and hold insanely weird beliefs such as "if the displayed prices include tax, you will become desensitized and won't notice it if the government increases the tax rate!" or "I want to know exactly how much is going to the business and how much is going to the government!" Some US states have even codified this and explicitly ban tax-included pricing.

This is also why people will fight tooth-and-nail against very obvious methods to drastically simplify things, such as by having the IRS handle your taxes for you and simply send you an "is this correct or do you need to make changes?" form every year.

> "if the displayed prices include tax, you will become desensitized and won't notice it if the government increases the tax rate!"

Which is also a weird position to have, since nobody suggested getting rid of the price breakdown that gets shown at checkout. I'm sure companies would still love to show tax if half of their price is tax.

I doubt they would... Its not going to make someone more likely to buy their product just because they know how much is going to tax.

I wonder how those people feel about gas stations.

Do you personally know how much your employer pays in tax to employ you? I bet most people dont have any idea. I just had to look it up myself. I would never know if the rate changed provided I didnt read about it in the paper.

I can see it on my paystub, it has a nice breakdown of where everything goes.

I’d argue you could do the same with anything, in the case of restaurants just show the actual total on the menu and include a breakdown on the receipt so people who care can see how much is going to taxes and such.

Your paystub or W-2 show how much tax YOU are paying. Social security is two-sided, you pay half and the employer pays half, unless you know that already, the paycheck itself doesn't say so. There are also additional types of taxes, such as unemployment, the employer pays that aren't shown on your pay stub.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com