My favorite example of this lunacy is the restaurant nearby that sells pies. If they box your pie for you to take home, it's a grocery item and not taxed. If they give you utensils to eat it in the store, it's a restaurant meal and therefore taxed.

They literally can't know the price until you tell them whether you'd like a fork with it.

Now, this restaurant works around it by having both prices listed, but I can imagine a million freaking variants of that for an online sale: "you have to pay our local taxes, but almost maybe yours, unless you check out on a Sunday between noon and 5PM, which is a tax holiday on your block (but not your neighbors' across the road), so understand that the price may change between when you add it to your cart and when you click the 'pay' button."

I'm only a little bit exaggerating.

Then put two freaking price tags: "pies to go" and "eat here". Problem solved.

There are zero legitimate reasons not to show true prices.

Stopped reading after the first paragraph, huh.

You can't print the price on a price tag because different customer pay different prices.

Bullshit. First, you absolutely CAN JUST PUT TWO PRICES on a price tag. Moreover, business customers (in a grocery shop, yeah right) can just get a discount at a point of sale.

> And if you can do that, then you might as well print it on the price tag (along with pre-tax price if you want).

Fun fact: sales tax rates are not stable. Our state publishes quarterly tax changes at the county level; city-level changes are presumably too numerous for the state to publish in the same format.

Inclusive pricing can obviously be done in-store, but it also more or less ensures that some of the items in your store will have incorrect prices some of the time.

At least here in California, the state collects the sales tax on behalf of all the local jurisdictions, so they publish and update them all simultaneously (twice a year) and in the same format.

Interesting...there must be a state law that requires jurisdictions to synchronize any changes to sales tax rates to a single calendar.

Technically, jurisdictions could try to collect the taxes directly, but they generally lack the infrastructure for it, and it isn't feasible to set it up. Instead, they must play by the state's rules if they want the state to collect for them. Jurisdictions also can't customize exemptions; they can only add an incremental percentage amount to the existing general state sales tax. In general, it's in everyone's best interest to play along.