Hi all!
We’re very excited to move to Denmark soon as lifelong Americans. I have a good job lined up, and we’re set on a place to live for a while.
Any advice from people who have done it, looked it up, had friends who have done it, etc? Just in general :)
Wait, stores display prices in the US without the tax? Wth? That can’t be!
I mean I guess stores in places with 0% sales tax don’t, technically. American stores just don’t want to bother doing the math while labeling and make you do the math in your head (and then they do it at the till).
Another consequence of the crazy American tax system.
Which tax? Federal? State? County? City/Municipality? What if some of those are zero?
This is why no one does it. I think smart labels may change that some day, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Edit: ah, to be clear, those tax types can all vary. I used to shop at a place where the same store on the opposite side of the street was cheaper because the tax rate was less.
They know the price to charge at the till so they definitely can show the full price. It’s just convention not to at this point. Why go through the effort when it only makes you look more expensive compared to the competition, after all?
The reason usually mentioned is that the labels are produced centrally or some such. Though "They know the price to charge at the till’ might be slightly off when the tax is calculated on the transaction as a whole rather than on a per-item basis (i.e. rounding shenanigans). That seems like a totally solvable problem to me, though.
I took my wife to meet my parents and had to remind her when we went shopping that we had to add tax to everything (and tip in bars/restaurants/etc.) Some things looked cheaper than in Japan until tax (especially at that time when the exchange rate was awful).
Sending the labels from a central location seems wildly inefficient when label printers are as cheap as they are.
Plus, prices are already adjusted at the state level at the very least, if you’re gonna ship every store their labels from a central location you may as well update the tax info on them.
Even the budget stores here are switching to a digital display system with those small e-ink displays. When that technology hits the US, there really won’t be an excuse not to label things including tax anymore.
When I was last in the US, most of the supermarkets and such had the eink displays, but most other places didn’t yet.
Then there really are no excuses left for those supermarkets. Just a weird Americanism, like using imperial units.
Not even proper ones; they’re US Customary units now so all the names are the same but many have different metric equivalents. As someone trying to convert his family recipes to metric and weight-based, this was maddening when all I could get were cup measures for the “wrong” size of cup. Add differences in flour between countries and that was a fun time.
It’s definitely a thing.