That's a actually a good point. That's something we don't have to deal with in the UK. Sales tax (or "VAT" as we call it here - "Value Added Tax") is frighteningly high by american standards - 17.5% - but it's constant throughout the UK (indeed, pretty much throughout Europe) so all of the actual displayed prices on shop shelves include VAT. You don't get it added on at the counter. Generally, any advertised price you see will always include VAT except for fairly rare cases where the product in question is aimed almost exclusively at business users. (If your business pays VAT on what it sells then effectively you don't have to pay VAT on supplies that you buy for business purposes, because you can reclaim it).

I've only been to america once, but it was a real pain having to remember that absolutely everything was actually more expensive than the advertised price….

17.5, wow! I knew VAT was "high" by US standard, but that's…Wow! lol. US taxes different things at different rates in different states. Texas, for example, has no income tax. However, like Igabod said, it's 8.25% tax on goods – but zero on food. Where I lived in Missouri was a flat 6.35% on all goods, plus a state income tax, and where I am now in Illinois is 7.25% on all goods (as far as I can tell so far, haven't been here long).

VAT is payed on online purchases too, if I recall right. UK players don't like Anarchy Online, for example, because the company is goofy and fails to distinguish the difference between 15 USD and 15 Euro(+VAT).

This is starting to sound like an algorithmic process complex enough that one must practice it to be remotely effective. I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect everybody to analytically study and optimize their change-giving behavior.


My cynical side says that people don't include sales tax here because they want to make things look cheaper; I don't think it's a legal issue as just a few places will give you actual, real, what-you-truly-pay prices on items that I know are elsewhere taxed. I don't think being constant or not is an issue, because you would just compute it appropriately.


The goofiness there doesn't have to do with VAT, that's just what happens when you live in countries. Why should people pay less than others (as far as the company is concerned) because there's a higher VAT?

The real goofiness is assuming that 1 USD == 1 EUR, because there's actually a pretty big difference. And an even bigger compared to the GBP, which is presumably what you meant if you're talking about the UK.

See, DH, I view the US not including sales tax on the price tag is not only to make it appear cheaper, but due to how often taxes can fluctuate. City votes a new tax raise/cut in? Welcome to new tags on everything in that city ONLY, not even state wide, etc. Updating tax in a computer is a lot easier than re-calculating and printing thousands of labels per store.

I guess it depends on how often your sales tax fluctuates. I'm not sure why taxes would fluctuate more often in the US than in Europe; somehow the Europeans live with changing labels when necessary without having a huge problem. I agree that printing labels is annoying but I'm not sure what you mean about having to recalculate things (that's what the computer is already doing for you, regardless).

Here is the California government's reco.... As you can see, it changes relatively rarely. I suppose different states might have cities changing the sales tax every month or something, although I think that would be slightly silly.

David,

State rates may not change much. It's the county and city rates that bounce around all the time. From my experience in retail, if we'd tagged everything on the shelves to include the sales tax, we'd have been doing nothing but updating price tags all day. And since tax rates vary by city, the tags would be different in each store. It's not a very productive use of your 16hr a week part-time retail employee. :)

As Kline said, it's more sensible to update it all via computer and pop the right price at the register. Also, today, most retail places don't even bother with a physical price tag anymore. It's just a shelf tag, which while more efficient, would still eat up the part-timer's work schedule if it needed to update for tax rates.

I've never seen the city or county rates change, but eh. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "all the time"; it would be nice if you gave some actual data point on how often these things change. I suspect it's not really as often as people are making it out to be. Those crazy Europeans must spend their lives updating shelf tags, though.

If I had access to those databases now I'd be more than happy to provide you your precious data. But since I don't, I guess I must be full of shit or something.

Umm… wow? All I did was ask you for some examples of how often these things change (without even telling you that you're wrong) and this is how you answer…?

This is why we can't have nice things.

I'm putting only coins away to save up for next years mud meet. Phear me and my shinies.

Certainly. It'd probably take weeks to change all the labels in one of those super-center Walmarts.

Yes. Because this isn't debate class. It's a casual conversation. One should not need to provide a sea of links to be able to tell someone else about their experiences at work. I haven't worked retail in 15 years, so I don't have anything to provide you.

Aside from the fact that I don't see why society should suffer because of the people doing things society doesn't want them to do, that is an already solved problem. Just like the Internet, electronic funds can be anonymized. I'd imagine that truly anonymous accounts would be uninsured, but then so is cash, so the people who are interested in continuing to hide whatever it is they're hiding are already used to hiding it at their own risk. Likewise, personal accounts can be kept a secret from a spouse today. Large scale transfer anonymizers make it possible to hide the source and destination of funds even from large government agencies. Nothing could ever stop people from trading precious minerals and goods, either, so it's not like you actually are required to use legal tender to transfer wealth between individuals/organizations/governments/accounts. All you'd need are two gold brokers and you'd be able to swap funds between any two accounts with no electronic trail connecting the two.

Perhaps this is how the sentiment could have been expressed in the first place.

I don't think it's that odd to want substantiation of a peculiar-sounding claim.

Just yesterday I was repeating a story about a 100 year old train being
found in some long-forgotten part of the NYC subway. DavidBailey quite
justifiably mentioned something about it being near a mythical underground
community, and I accepted that the burden of supporting my statement
was on me. In casual conversation, even. Because even casual conversation
isn't exempt from "that sounds made up" points of procedure.

My response to David was more or less "yeah, could be UL, but it's plausible,"
rather than "fuck you, you insufferable ballbreaker," because it's not his
fault that I told a story I didn't feel like substantiating.

-Crat

PS Looks like the story I heard was half-right: http://curiousexpeditions.org/?p=474

Besides, counties and so forth tend to have records that are available online; while perhaps slightly harder to find than the state's records, I would be surprised if there were no examples whatsoever of how often these things change. (I'm not sure what working in retail has to do with it.) In my experience, I haven't seen these wild fluctuations of tax rates, so I thought it was an odd thing to claim. I wasn't asking for exhaustive documentation of tax rate changes. Even in casual conversation, it's nice to, you know, talk about facts instead of just throwing things out there. (In passing, if you thought that that was acting like this is debate class and didn't like it, well, you should be happy you haven't seen debate class treatment! :wink:) There was no need to get all huffy about it; it suffices to say that you can't be bothered to look up data. (But then if you can't be bothered, it's also polite to not be hugely assertive about it, and just leave it at that.)


I'm going to assume that you don't actually mean to support the notion that privacy and anonymity are necessarily only desirable when one is doing something illegal or otherwise undesirable. Because that would be silly. :wink:
Yes, this is solved (or solvable) in principle. But somehow I can't quite picture such a setup actually coming into existence any time soon. It seems rather unlikely that people would pass up on opportunities to gather so much data – it's incredibly valuable data to have, even in aggregate.

Huh, pretty interesting. I'm kind of tempted to go over there and check it out since apparently you can visit it. It's the kind of story that starts out true and gets embellished because the original story is too good to be true. :wink:

I think there are several movies, too, that refer to this tunnel, or at least suggest that there are many abandoned subway tunnels and almost whole stations. I think that Hellboy and maybe Ghostbusters do this, if memory serves.

Because that was the context it came up in, and where I'd seen actual real world proof that the rates change often enough to represent a burden to retail workers. Since I don't work in that field anymore I don't have access to that type of data anymore and it just doesn't make sense to expect me to have that data handy.



Oi. I made one statement about it after you went into your usual "I demand proof" mode. Which you then responded to, which I responded to, etc etc. Maybe you could have just dropped it instead. Maybe we should both just drop it as this isn't going anywhere useful anymore.

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