The FTC wants to ban hidden ‘junk fees’ that jack up the price of your purchases::A new rule proposed by the FTC targets hidden and “bogus” fees businesses often add onto their services at checkout, aiming to do away with the deceptive practices.
Can we please include sales tax in that price too? It is also a bullshit hidden fee the way the US does it.
The argument the idiots use is “We want to see government theft!” instead of just having a line item at the end of your receipt showing tax collected and the breakdown. It’s not like we don’t have toiletpaper roll length receipts already.
The kicker is we already do the “price at point of sale including taxes” thing at gas stations. If it’s $3.09 or whatever per gallon, that’s including state and federal sales tax.
We already see the line item thing on most receipts anyway. We basically do everything except roll the sales tax into the sticker price.
CVS near me gives you a store credit if you let them email your receipt to you. It’s silly.
How would a company advertise pricing across multiple states? E.g. on the web…
Use your ip address or GPS location or address to get your location and use a sales tax api product like: https://www.avalara.com/us/en/products/integrations/avalara-api.html
Not an endorsement, just an example that companies already consider this.
It’s an imperfect solution. VPNs are an issue - and even if you don’t use a VPN, the API only knows the location of the ISP’s servers - which can be in a different state.
My point was that, the law should leave tax inclusion in pricing as optional. There is no way to implement automatic detection cleanly, other than prompting the user to confirm their location, which is a huge annoyance - so the ‘tax inclusion’ rule would not make things better or more convenient.
that would very much wreak havoc with caching since you basically can’t cache pricing including sales tax as it depends on your very specific location.
of course, for things like event tickets, it’s the venue’s location that matters for tax, so it works out to be a non-issue.
They could also just charge one price to everyone and then pay taxes after. I don’t think they have to pass the tax onto the customer like that.
Just charge everyone $10, note where they live, and when taxes are due figure out how much of everyone’s $10 needs to be paid to government
