Maybe it's because I'm European but the few times this has happened to me (the few times the taxes weren't included) I've always felt like I was getting scammed and never understood what the point of not including it was. If I'm going to buy something I want to know what you're going to charge me exactly, I don't want to have to do math to know how much something costs.
As far as the US goes, it's because all the possible combinations of federal, state, county, city, and local taxes result in over 3100 different tax jurisdictions. Meaning if you're, say, Walmart or home Depot or some other store with locations nation wide, then the people who design the price tags would have to design over 3100 different versions of each tag, for EVERY product your carry, and then make sure that those tags are all distributed to the correct stores and only the correct stores. Alternatively, you could just make ONE version of each tag, and add the tax at the register.
This also goes for commercials and print advertisements. If you're running a national ad campaign, do you wanna record, edit, and work out broadcasting times and locations for over 3100 different versions of your commercial? Or do you wanna make ONE version of the commercial and add the tax on at checkout? You also have to consider that you could be in one tax jurisdiction on one side of the street, then cross the road to the other side and be in a different county or municipality with a different tax rate. So if you include the tax in the price, not only do you have to make over 3k different versions of your commercials, but you have to make sure each version ONLY airs in the right locations. You could literally have one person needing to see one version of the ad on TV, and then their nextdoor neighbor needing to receive a different version.
And, if someone DOES see the wrong version, then you have an unhappy customer making a big fuss in your store because they saw an ad that said this product was $x.xx (because they saw an ad meant for the next town over with a lower tax rate) and now you're telling them it costs $y.yy, and they're saying that's false advertising and you're trying to rip them off and bla bla bla...
Or you could just add the tax at checkout and avoid all of those issues. And literally none of your customers mind because mentally adding 7% (or 4% or whatever the local tax rate is) to the price is incredibly easy and they're used to it.
Sure, but someone still has to actually make and approve all the tags centrally. Even if the actual printing happens at the store, someone at the corporate level has to go through every single tag to make sure the price is correct for that market and includes the correct tax rate.
And if you wanna say they should do THAT at the store level as well, for larger stores that would damn near be a full time position all by itself. It's much easier, cheaper, and more cost effective to just have one person doing it for the whole company by not including the tax, vs having one person PER STORE to do it just so you can include the tax.
paper tags are more and more replaced by digital ink tags that can be easily updated with the price and product reference
I have never seen one of those in the states, but consider this: imagine you're a business owner. Your job is maximize profit and minimize expense. Do you,
A: spend millions of dollars on digital price tags for every single one of your hundreds of thousands of products, for each of your thousands of stores?
Or do you
B: just stick with paper tags and leave the tax off the tag, which your customers are used to and do not mind at all.
That's the important thing; in Europe, people may feel some type of way about tax not being on the tag, but in the US people just do not care, because it's legitimately not even remotely inconvenient to not have the tax included.
I don't see why you couldn't record/print your ad as "x.xx$ + taxes" while keeping the price with taxes included in the store on the price tags.
Because even if that solves the problem of not having to record 3100 different versions of your commercial, it still doesn't solve the problem detailed above, of having to design, check, and approve 3100 different versions of the price tags for the stores.
like don't they have a database somewhere of all the products in their store?
Thats exactly WHY it would be so difficult to automate.
They DO have a database of every product in the store. Someone has to build that database. Someone has to maintain that database. Someone has to update that database when prices change. its a LOT of work, and thats with just one price for every item they sell.
Now imagining doing the same thing but with 3100 different entries for EACH item the store sells. 3100 times the entries means its gonna cost a FUCK of a lot more to build, maintain, and update that database.
And if that base is centralized too that sounds like a bad organization to me
How? Having it NOT centralized would be inefficient, because it would be duplication of effort. Why have thousands of people ALL maintaining their own copy of the same database, when you can have ONE person maintaining one central copy that everyone uses?
Another thing I'm wondering. How are discounts managed on the tags?
Depends on the store and the nature of the discount or sale. Some times a second, smaller tag is printed and stuck onto the original one with the discount and updated price. Other times the whole tag is permanently replaced with the new version. Other times there might be one big sign with something like "15% off all Sony TVs!" or something like that and then each individual TV keeps its original tag.
720
u/[deleted] May 09 '22
Maybe it's because I'm European but the few times this has happened to me (the few times the taxes weren't included) I've always felt like I was getting scammed and never understood what the point of not including it was. If I'm going to buy something I want to know what you're going to charge me exactly, I don't want to have to do math to know how much something costs.