Individual stores generally only have to deal with one. Set the prices at the store, and make them tax-inclusive while you're at it. This isn't rocket science.
Companies serve billions of web pages per second. We can't handle 12,000 tax calculations?
If only it were that simple. Some sales taxes are conditional at the point-of-sale. Different customers may pay a different tax rate. This creates a situation where the display price will be incorrect part of the time and may not round to 5c or whatever the legal quantum is.
I wonder if this could encourage retailers to start advertising tax-inclusive prices. That way there's no rounding in the customer transaction (if they set all their tax-inclusive pricing at multiples of 5 cents), and then the sales tax would just be calculated in aggregate, and paid electronically with no rounding.
We had a coffee shop that tried to do it. Listed prices included taxes, and the total prices were in nice whole numbers (IE, $2 for a cup of coffee, $5 for a latter, $8 for a sandwich, etc.). But regulators stopped them and they had to go back to listing the prices without the sales tax.
It's frustrating how much needless friction gets put into the system.
So you're telling me that when I buy stuff for 12.34 that is not the amount I have to pay, but some bigger amount that I have no way to calculate precisely unless I know exactly which sales tax rules are applicable for my purchase? It's baffling how backasswards the US is.
Is the tax unknown at the time of setting the price? If that's the problem, set the final price at price + tax, deduce tax, display that. What's the matter?
If its a wide region ad (can even be just across a metro area) showcasing a price then yes, they wouldn't know the price at a given store because the tax rates can change in less than a kilometer.
If there's a TV ad for a medium pizza for $10 at a chain they can't possibly know the tax rates for whatever actual store I'm going to go order from.
And the listing on a website won't know until I actually put in my shipping information.
I doubt that most people in the US know the local sales tax. Let alone any change that may occur due to laws changing or traveling. I'd like to see the out the door price listed but that throws the 99 cent game off retailers like. Also I don't shop very often but Aldi US is the only place I've seen the eink price displays, the rest still have paper.
