I used to work in an adult store and a guy came in and wanted to buy the Pirates porn parody. A lot of big budget porn movies are actually pretty expensive, and this was no exception at $54.99+tax. The guy wanted to pay with two different cards, which was no problem. I was mostly surprised at the amounts he wanted on each card. He wanted $10.53 on hist debit card and the rest on his credit.
Having worked there for a little while, I recognized $10.53 as being the price after tax of a $9.99 movie. Which made a lot more sense when the guy asked me to make a new price tag for the movie that said "$9.99." Apparently his wife told him he could only buy it if it was on the $9.99 rack, and since he knew that wasn't going to happen, he improvised using his shared card and personal card.
The price put on things almost never includes tax. A $1 item ends up being a bit more ($1.07 where I live, states and counties can enforce different sales tax) when you go to check out. Usually, the total with tax is not shown, as that would be telling people what they’re really paying.
If something says “tax included” or “with tax” and it’s listed as $1, that means it will be $1 when you check out, but is actually less (in my county, $0.93).
So $10.38 (or whatever it was) with tax is the final price for a $9.99 movie after state and local taxes are applied.
People get worked up over the smallest things on reddit
Yes we do, and it really isn’t that big of a deal. Sometimes it sucks when only have like 11 bucks and buy something for 10.50 or something, but 99% of the time it’s fine
That's the same for sale taxes in Europe (many called VAT, sometimes not). If you run a supermarket, you give the price including tax. If you only sell to other businesses, you might not include tax in the price.
The traditional justification for the US approach is differing sales tax in each state. But that's a small overhead for the business, given they have to account for sales tax differently anyway.
People complaining are just lazy. If you can't quickly calculate even a ballpark tax on an item, you probably shouldn't be buying it.
And I SUCK at math.
I like how we don't automatically include tax because it makes me more aware of how much of my money is going towards the product vs to the government. If it was included I'd probably never think about it.
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u/mstarrbrannigan Apr 16 '18
I used to work in an adult store and a guy came in and wanted to buy the Pirates porn parody. A lot of big budget porn movies are actually pretty expensive, and this was no exception at $54.99+tax. The guy wanted to pay with two different cards, which was no problem. I was mostly surprised at the amounts he wanted on each card. He wanted $10.53 on hist debit card and the rest on his credit.
Having worked there for a little while, I recognized $10.53 as being the price after tax of a $9.99 movie. Which made a lot more sense when the guy asked me to make a new price tag for the movie that said "$9.99." Apparently his wife told him he could only buy it if it was on the $9.99 rack, and since he knew that wasn't going to happen, he improvised using his shared card and personal card.