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Comment by thayne | Hacker News Reader

sales tax should be charged per item, not for the total transaction, so that it's possible to list prices that include the sales tax.

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Sales tax varies by state/county/city. It is generally not cost-effective to have each individual store label all their products with local sales taxes applied.

I see this excuse all the time, but why not? This calculation does not need to happen more often than the product prices are adjusted. There's no difference in effort between labeling something "$5.52+tax" and labeling it "$6".

The difference is where the product is labeled. Is it labeled nationally like Arizona Iced Tea? Is it labeled at a regional bottling facility? Or is it labeled at the store itself? And what about when tax rates change, you gonna go pull all the labels off everything in the whole store and update them?

Most of this could be resolved by not putting the prices on the products themselves, but that isn't as good of an experience for the shopper.

> Most of this could be resolved by not putting the prices on the products themselves

That is already often the case. Prices are usually on the shelves not on the product itself at many stores. And when purchasing online there is no reason that the sales tax couldn't be included in the listed price.

Also sellers could just charge the same price everywhere and take the sales tax out of the revenue.

It generally is, or at least per category of items. Different items can have different (or none) sales tax rates.

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