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.
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.