Buying video games, tax views

[Dib]

23

[Menegrothx]

Lol, hard to feel bad for a kid being disappointed that something costs a couple bucks more than they thought it would. I want to take this kid aside and explain that this is just the first in a series of many disappointments. Welcome to the world, kid.

Not telling the actual price of the item you're selling is BS.
If you're in a super market buying groceries, it's not very likely that you can count with out a calculator, a piece of paper and a pen how much exactly everything will cost if none of the items have taxes counted in their price tags. Sure it's easy to calculate 10% of something costs a dollar, but how about 19.6% (France), 14.975% (Québec) or 4.166% (Hawaii) of something that costs 3 dollars and 75 cents?
There might be different tax brackets too, like for example the tax on food items might be smaller than the tax on chemicals is and so on.

Not a big deal if you're paying with credit card or if you know that you have plenty of money on your bank account, but to a person who hasn't got a whole load of cash with him/her (students, senior citizens, kids) it can be problematic if they find out at the cash register that they lack 25 cents.

Taxes are always included in prices where I live (the receipt tells you how much taxes you paid for each item and how much they would've had cost with out taxes) and yet still I constantly see old women counting their pennies at the cash register. They dont have much money to spare so they must carefully count to make sure that they have enough money to afford everything they're buying. I'm sure they're glad that they dont need to use a calculator for VAT calculations.

[AppleQueso]

Sales taxes should be included in the actual advertised price. It's kinda annoying otherwise.

[Flake]

They are. Every advertised price has the disclaimer that local and state sales taxes apply.

As those tax rates vary by the city, county, and state, there is not really any more elegant a way of conveying to you what the item is going to cost. You can always ask the clerk: Hey, what's the sales tax in this state/city/county?

[AppleQueso]

I'm just sayin' it'd be nice if the price tag said 10.81 instead of 9.99.

mild annoyance

[Flake]

Can't do that. Let's use Gameslop as an example: Their prices are first set by the manufacturer but quickly drops to whatever corporate decides in order to move merchandise. Those prices are set either nationally or by regions and these are huge areas. There is literally no possible way for a large scale retail out let to set prices to include taxes without also setting themselves up for a discrimination lawsuit by creating price discrepancies across state, county, and city lines.

[Breetai]

23

Dreamcast4Ever, did you make a new account?

[jfrost]

Can't do that. Let's use Gameslop as an example: Their prices are first set by the manufacturer but quickly drops to whatever corporate decides in order to move merchandise. Those prices are set either nationally or by regions and these are huge areas. There is literally no possible way for a large scale retail out let to set prices to include taxes without also setting themselves up for a discrimination lawsuit by creating price discrepancies across state, county, and city lines.

They can put the prices with included taxes on the price tags of a given store.

[Flake]

They can put the prices with included taxes on the price tags of a given store.

No, actually they cannot. Taxes are assessed on an item at the point of sale and have to be assessed separately because that money has to be reported to the county and state tax assessors by the store or the store's parent company. The store does not charge you tax. The store assesses the taxes that the state is charging on that purchase.

So for the store to put the final taxed price on an item's price tag, they'd have to include the number separately and distinct from the MSRP / store price.

So basically a company can either publish several different prices for the same good online, in store, across state lines, and from city to city but that would be grossly inefficient and make for really terrible marketing...or they can just put the percentage of the tax on the tag and assume their customers can run a couple of numbers in their head really quickly. Which is what they do.

[Breetai]

So for the store to put the final taxed price on an item's price tag, they'd have to include the number separately and distinct from the MSRP / store price.

So basically a company can either publish several different prices for the same good online, in store, across state lines, and from city to city but that would be grossly inefficient and make for really terrible marketing...or they can just put the percentage of the tax on the tag and assume their customers can run a couple of numbers in their head really quickly. Which is what they do.

Which really is incredibly annoying once you have been around and noticed that is exactly what stores to in places in Europe and Asia that I've seen (I suspect this is the standard thing to do, with USA and Canada being the exceptions). The total amount, with tax included, is shown in large numbers on the tag, and the amount without tax is shown in smaller numbers (or not shown at all).