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Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, advertised prices should always be inclusive of taxes and fees. Anything less is cost obfuscation. It's like the ol' eBay scam of 1 cent items that have the whole cost of the item built into the shipping just to confuse people.

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Having lived in other countries, the US habit of 'nickel and diming' every sale with taxes and fees that aren't fully announced until payment is one of the most annoying cultural failings. Even governments do it; I recently bought a tree removal permit and my city tacked on a ~15% 'technology fee'. This after I wasted a good hour dealing with the absolutely awful website for the permit application - having to enter the same information on multiple pages by hand, broken address lookup, ugliest imaginable design and layout.

I won't defend most of the practices but sales tax is, in at least some US states, required by law to be listed separately.

example: See Kentucky Revised Statues (KRS) chapter 139 section 210 paragraph 1: (PDF) https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/statute.aspx?id...

edit: cited example

Is there any particular reason why retailers couldn't print both the total price and how much of it is sales tax on the same price tag? The legislative intent seems to me that they don't want taxes to be absorbed by retailers[0], not that they want to force people to multiply things by some percentage in their head.

[0] Read: subsidized by other places with lower tax rates

Not to be argumentative, but:

- laws are often written by lobbyists

- you can list the information on the shelf price ticket/in ads, and still show the out-the-door price most prominently

I don't care for sales tax/VAT as a policy matter, but even less do I like the mental overhead of having to mentally inventory it every time I go shopping. The only exception is when some stores do a 'we pay the sales tax' sale (presumably because it's easier than marking everything down individually), and for once the sticker price is what I pay at the register.

That one penny eBay truck may have been meant to confuse people in some cases, but it was more likely that it was a way to get around eBay fees. For a time, ebay only charged their 15% based on the sale price, exclusive of the shipping cost. Once eBay noticed a lot of people doing this, they changed their fee structure and I very soon after started seeing a lot fewer penny items with high shipping cost.

One complication of this is that sales taxes can apply down to the city level, meaning the amount the vendor collects after tax can be somewhat variable. This would make a lot of sense if we had a federal sales tax that was just distributed to states based on the purchase location.

Consider a merchant in Seattle, Washington, USA that has several stores around town wanting to run an ad on a billboard or on radio or on TV or in the Seattle Times for a product that is available at all its stores.

The total sales tax could be any of the following, depending on the location of the particular store in the city that the consumer actually buys from: 9.2%, 10.1%, 10.2%, 10.25%, 10.3%, or 10.5%.

How should that be advertised?

Similarly for services except the sales tax is based on where the service is consumed rather than on the location of the seller.

The store could advertise the sale price it wants, and deal with the taxes internally based on each location. Some locations have higher tax rates than others... Businesses know that, and could make location decisions based on that if they think the 1% swing is important.

Then you would undermine the ability of Capital to isolate and shame higher taxing areas.

Yes, the full price needs to be listed. At the same time, if there is the need to disaggregate the items so you can see where your money is going. For example, how much is tax that goes to the government (and might be less if you lived in a different jurisdiction), and how much goes to the company? Among the latter, how much is for the base service versus addons (that you might not need)?

The argument against this, specifically with regard to taxes, is that baking in the tax conceals the impact of that tax from the consumer. Obviously this primarily applies to sales taxes since production taxes aren't consumer facing (even if they impact consumers) but it's still better imo than simply not having that information since most laws are already fire and forget type affairs and so their costs can compound over time to degrees that aren't as immediately obvious to the public if they aren't displayed frequently and visibly.

Goods distibuted in samw geographical area generally have similar prices even after transportation, so shop in county A that has lower tax, will be cheaper than same shop 1 kilometer (1 mile) in county B, that has higher tax. Why would the shop want to hide the tax?

In EU shops are made to show price per kilogram / liter too.

I agree that taxes need to be applied separately so the public knows how much they are paying in taxes. Also, if you required including the tax, it would not be possible for most sites to advertise any prices without the user creating an account, providing their shipping address and logging in, since tax rates vary by country, county, even municipality.

Please explain in excruciating detail the need for an account to provide a single input box for zip code to just calculate fees? I need a serious breakdown of the logic behind this position, because from where I'm sitting, it seems to me like you could determine someone's "country, county, even municipality" with that single piece of data and no more.

Zip codes aren't specific enough to determine tax rates. Zip codes are assigned by the post office to facilitate delivery of mail, not to determine which taxing districts an address belongs in. You really need the whole address sometimes. Because the city name on the mailing address often indicates the city, but not always. And some taxing districts don't follow city boundaries anyway. And you need a process to handle exceptions, because boundaries are complex and sometimes mistakes are made.

Fair enough! However...

I'm still not seeing why that experience requires an account, so while this response is academically interesting, it doesn't actually address the purpose of my comment. Any reason why these calculations can't be performed without an account? Any reason why needing to enter the street address is functionally different from needing to enter the zipcode for this functionality, or were you just attempting to add detail/nuance?

I'm not objecting to knowing what the taxes are, I'm objecting to companies being able to hide the taxes to make switching look like a better deal than it actually is.

If Verizon advertises, say, $50/mo cellphone service, they're actually going to charge you an extra $15 or so, but they won't tell you what you're paying in taxes until you've actually signed up for the service and paid the switching costs. I want Verizon to advertise $65/mo ($50/mo base + $15/mo fees).

Or they won't tell you until you receive your first bill, when it's far too late to cancel the contract.

Some phone providers just eat the taxes, and that's fine at some level, but also problematic if you're on a $15/month plan and your city charges a $5/month per line telecom tax and other cities don't. And I'm not a fan of hiding mandatory uniform fees.

But how does Verizon run a national advertised price and include the taxes when telephone taxes vary based on your city, county, and state, and sometimes which part of the city/county.

If they mail it to you, then sure, they should be able to calculate it assuming your main service address is the same as your mailing address. But even if they have it in the window at their shop, they could include the taxes as if you lived at the shop, but actual taxes will be based on your service address.

Don't have a nationally advertised price, because the cost of telecom services isn't nationally identical. Instead:

- Use the highest possible taxes and fees for any address in the service area of the store. Nobody is going to feel deceived if it turns out they had to pay less money for their phone service. - Provide a low and high range of taxes and fees for that same area and fine print that taxes vary based on service location. Verizon can't charge more than the high amount, and the low amount has to correspond to at least one service area that is actually billed that amount. - Provide a table listing out taxes, fees, and total price for each tax zone within the service area. This could be combined with the other two, and probably should be available unless there's, like, 200 different tax zones in the area of the store.

All of these are a darned sight better than "we don't have to mention anything about taxes and fees until you're a month into the contract and they can be any number we please".

Ahahaha, like retailers care about me so much and want me to be more active in local politics. That could be achieved by including the information on the receipt, but omitting it from the advertised price is a low grade scam.

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