And it just seems like a common thing globally that hotel and event tickets are allowed to advertise wrong prices.
Why do they tend to get a free pass?
The US doesn't have VAT, it has sales tax, which varies geographically by a great deal -- even between neighboring cities.
And advertised prices in the US virtually never include sales tax (in large part due to that variation).
Hotels and ticket brokers aren't getting any kind of free pass, they're advertising prices in the same way as everywhere else like grocery stores or Amazon -- at least as far as sales tax is involved.
Literally the only locations I've ever encountered that include sales tax in the price are a tiny minority of coffee shops (often cash-only) and budget pizza places (often the dollar-slice ones), which is to avoid having to deal with coins.
(The article is about other fees though, which is a different subject from sales tax.)
But the problem is that right now a supermarket chain can advertise in the newspaper that chicken breasts are $4.99/lb at all of its nearby locations.
If sales tax were included, you couldn't advertise prices at all, because they might be different at each store!
How could Apple advertise the price of a MacBook, when sales tax is 0% in New Hampshire, but 8.875% in New York City, but 4.5% in Yonkers just north of NYC? That's a price variation of around $100–200.
That may not be super sensible, but it is how it works. A business on one side of the street may have to collect taxes at a much different rate compared to a business on the other side of the street.
You already have to produce different ads in Spanish, Italian, German, etc. So it's not really any extra work to have different prices in each.
Plus you're only dealing with tens of countries. There are literally thousands of distinct sales tax geographical areas in the US.
Attempting to maintain the same final prices in one town with 3% sales tax and a neighboring one with 8% sales tax simply isn't workable.
I mean, sometimes it's fine for extremely high-margin electronics, or things like cell phone service where marginal costs are low, but it's definitely not the case in general.
Individual items can have >100% markup, there are items sold at a loss to ensure you can complete your trip at a single store or get you in the door or whatever, and the store absolutely has to consider how revenue (not just line-item profit) plays into things to balance out rent and wages and whatnot. 1-3% profits for the store don't imply much about what you need to charge to offset the effects of sales tax.
As a brief example of irrationality, last I checked, on like-new iPhones it made a 30% difference in total revenue to offer "free" shipping rather than split it out as a separate line item. People would really rather pay 1.3x with "free" shipping than 0.8x base price and 0.2x shipping.
Somehow this all works magically here but in the US it is impossible because.. reasons unknown
You're drawing an unwarranted conclusion that just because not all prices are coordinated, therefore none must be.
If you consider that, I believe your reasons unknown become reasons known. No need to resort to magical thinking :)
Also it's not just about the hotel location, but also changes depending on the buyer's location -- which of course often isn't known until the checkout process.
So maybe it's not quite so simple, with so cartoonish a villain, as you assume.
If European countries chose to have VAT that varied geographically within a country, they wouldn't be able to build it into the price either.
Why you think it has anything to do with "national intelligence" is quite beyond me.
That clearly shows rates varying between countries.
Not within a country.
Which is fine, because prices are generally advertised within a country, not Europe-wide.
The result is that business can do pretty much any ani-consumer thing they want and there is nobody to stop them.
So maybe we need some kind of federal agency to, you know, protect the environment.
And since 90% of these issues affect the nation as a whole, and this agency would have the most data, maybe it could, like, set some rules for everyone to follow so we have consistency. That way you don't have to figure out 50 different sets of rules to do business in this country. And 50 states wouldn't have to spend all their money just to re-learn the same lessons independently.
And then we are right back at the issue that strong federal regulation is the only efficient and effective way to run things.
If you think how we handle sales tax is odd, just wait until you see a medical bill from the US!
It’s less about harping on political ideologies and instead provided rationale as to why US prices aren’t transparent.
The commenter who brought up Sales tax variations is partially correct, and the lack of political will to adopt a progressive consumption tax is also partially to blame.
Not because we work our asses off, rather because it’s our duty as electorates (not to mention general good practice to watch your finances).
The focus on taxes is just a smoke screen so you don’t need to offend anyone by suggesting you actually cut spending on say national defense, GPS, weather forecasting, etc etc.
If you actually want lower taxes propose specific spending cuts. Let’s get rid of police and prisons and then see what happens, or no how about…
But hey leaching off other people is a time honored tradition.