Sure there is. When the price label is affixed by the factory/warehouse then you would have to track where everything is going and be unable to share inventory. Also, if the sales tax rate changes then all the labels become wrong. These would ultimately increase costs for consumers.

Adding sales tax is also not at all misleading because the customer is not going to be surprised by it and there isn't going to be a competing merchant across the street who can avoid charging it.

There are also business customers with their own sales tax ID and they can buy things without paying sales tax when they're being incorporated into a product where they collect the sales tax themselves.

> There is no reason why a restaurant should be able to charge a 20% service charge instead of increasing regular prices by 20%.

This is actually true. A mandatory undisclosed fee is BS. But it doesn't help much, because if they want to do it then they just make it "optional" where the way to avoid it is more of an inconvenience than paying the fee.

> They can upsell you on additional services, but they can't suddenly notice in the last checkout step that your price is higher because the website you are using is charging a fee; that fee was known to them at the beginning of the transaction and should have to be disclosed at that point in time at the latest.

The last step is where you disclose your address. Before that they may not even know which country you're in, much less the city/state, and there are a thousand legitimate reasons to have different prices or fees in different jurisdictions.

> If you want to go even further you can also dictate that shipping and handling fees are only allowed to include reasonable costs of actual shipping and handling.

That doesn't really help, they're typically charging the actual cost. They just don't include it in the advertised price because it makes you inclined to make the purchase online instead of saving $10 by picking it up for the same price but no shipping charge the next time you go to the competing local store.

There's a reason Amazon's major competitive advantage is free two day shipping, derived from having the scale to achieve low shipping costs themselves.

Price tags are pretty much universally handled at the stores. There are some goods where the price tag is attached, but that's more the exception and not the rule.

This is a solvable problem. So much so that if you've traveled in most nations you'll see that all prices include tax. Not including tax is a particularly weird aspect of US culture that simply doesn't exist in other nations, even those with a large amount of imported goods.

Advertising isn't. If the same ad is viewable by people in different states, what price are they supposed to put on it? Shouldn't this be the same price as what they show in the stores, or else people will have trouble knowing if the advertising was deceptive?

> This is a solvable problem. So much so that if you've traveled in most nations you'll see that all prices include tax.

Don't most of those other nations have a uniform tax rate?

Anyway, you can always advertise 9.99 + tax and show the actual price with tax in the store tags.

California has a 7.25% sales tax. Oregon has a 0% sales tax. A 7.25% difference is larger than the entire net margin on many products.

> Sales are mostly about moving items, so they are already losing huge margins at that point anyway.

It seems like we've now gone from "there is no reason they can't do this" to "the merchant can just eat the sales tax and go out of business"?

> Anyway, you can always advertise 9.99 + tax and show the actual price with tax in the store tags.

Which is basically what they do now. You see the final price at the register before you pay. You also know that there is going to be sales tax, no one is being misled.

Putting a different price on the tags than there is on the ad would just confuse people and make it harder to tell when you're not getting the advertised price because you have to do fractional arithmetic on every soup can and candy bar to see if it matches.

I was referring to city/county taxes, not state taxes. Tor example, a local city to me in the US had a total of 14% sales tax, while outside the city was 10%.

Anyway, a sale’s motivation is to move products off the shelf and make room for more profitable products; they’re already losing money.

California borders with Oregon. Radio waves cross state lines. People see highway billboards and then drive into another state. People use the internet and you don't know where they are.

> Anyway, a sale’s motivation is to move products off the shelf and make room for more profitable products; they’re already losing money.

A sale's purpose is frequently to bring customers into the store to buy other products, or get customers to try a product for the first time to drive repeat business.

There is also plenty of advertising that isn't discounts. Maybe your product is great and you want to inform the customer that they can get something better than the competition for the same price. Maybe you're just publishing a comprehensive price list for all your products.

And in all cases, "losing money" is not a binary result. Losing a small amount, or not making as much as you wanted to, is very different from losing so much that you go out of business.

This statement has always been BS. If you set the tax rate to a percentage of revenue which exceeds the business's margins, all businesses go out of business. "Maybe grocery stores shouldn't be in business" is so absurd that the statement seems designed to deliberately shut down reasoned debate by stunning people into silence or making them so angry they respond rashly.

And in this context it doesn't even apply. The issue here is that customers in Oregon are going to pay a lower price than customers in California because Oregon has lower sales tax and the tax is part of the price they pay. The business can't eat the tax in California so their only alternative would be to advertise the higher price. But if they have to advertise the higher price then many of them will just charge the higher price everywhere so all you're doing is screwing customers in the jurisdiction with lower taxes out of paying lower prices. This also reduces competition by making it harder for customers to compare prices, because a store that only operates in a state with lower taxes would then seem to have lower prices than one that operates in multiple states and has to advertise the highest price, even if it didn't charge you the highest price where you actually are.

> This isn’t a problem in the EU where countries border other countries and sales tax varies from 6-19-24%

Or it is a problem and you're just eating the cost of getting screwed by the law while defending it.

Unless I misunderstand, isn't this EXACTLY what the US does to ensure certain businesses are or aren't profitable in their smaller jurisdictions? This is how they entice businesses to come to their cities/states and they even compete on giving bigger tax breaks. I assume they also do the exact opposite to keep out businesses they don't want.

> The issue here is that customers in Oregon are going to pay a lower price than customers in California because Oregon has lower sales tax and the tax is part of the price they pay.

They're already doing this ... this just makes it so you can do simple addition in your head while you walk around the store instead of throwing in some multiplication -- and if you live in a state where certain kinds of items have different tax rates, knowing what those tax rates are.

This isn't rocket science, I don't understand why you are making it seem so complicated.

Traditionally this is called fines rather than taxes. The ostensible purpose of general sales tax is not to bankrupt every grocery.

> this just makes it so you can do simple addition in your head while you walk around the store instead of throwing in some multiplication

Why do you have to do any math in your head at all? The register will do it for you at the end.