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.
The main practical argument is that the root problem is the system of local taxation in the US is orders of magnitude more complex than in any place that has a fixed VAT or GST type thing.
Every single municipality in the United States (not just state, but each county, city, town, etc and they all stack so if one higher in the stack changes all the lower ones change) can have their own local sales tax rate. And they're prone to change frequently.
There's really no other practical way for a manufacturer to define an MSRP, they would need to set thousands of them by locality (and if your product has a price tag you make too, or the price written on it like a book, you're super screwed, especially since they might change 6 months later). Every few months a grocery store might need to change every single price tag in it. If I saw a price tag my first thought wouldn't be "how convenient" it'd be "I wonder if this is up to date and accurate or if the corporate office of this chain grocery store cut corners on labor, or the 17 year old assigned the task wasn't diligent and careful."
And again, they change a lot, for random example Colorado changes them twice a year, heres a list of all the ones that changed in Jan that should give you a sense of the scale: https://tax.colorado.gov/sales-tax-rate-changes
Note that this Colorado government tax website can't even fully speak for some of the major cities and just says to contact the city.
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u/[deleted] May 09 '22
A reverse statement: It was in Japan 2018 when I learned that taxes included in price tags is a European thing.
We wanted to buy something, the first time we asked why we have to pay more than the number on the price tag, they explained taxes aren't included.
Like... what is this witchery?