A new rule proposed by the FTC targets hidden and "bogus" fees businesses often add onto their services at checkout, aiming to do away with the deceptive practices.
The FTC wants to ban hidden 'junk fees' that jack up the price of your purchases::A new rule proposed by the FTC targets hidden and "bogus" fees businesses often add onto their services at checkout, aiming to do away with the deceptive practices.
The argument the idiots use is "We want to see government theft!" instead of just having a line item at the end of your receipt showing tax collected and the breakdown. It's not like we don't have toiletpaper roll length receipts already.
The kicker is we already do the “price at point of sale including taxes” thing at gas stations. If it’s $3.09 or whatever per gallon, that’s including state and federal sales tax.
We already see the line item thing on most receipts anyway. We basically do everything except roll the sales tax into the sticker price.
that would very much wreak havoc with caching since you basically can't cache pricing including sales tax as it depends on your very specific location.
of course, for things like event tickets, it's the venue's location that matters for tax, so it works out to be a non-issue.
Maybe you could do more localized caching. Localities with different sales tax are finite and few. Cache pages based on those localities and then serve pages based on the IP of the client. It's not ideal or as optimal, but it's not that unreasonable in my mind. If it became the norm we'd build the infrastructure to sustain it.
Companies have no problem doing it to comply with EU regulations which require tax to be included, so I see no technical reason why they couldnt figure it out for the US.
Fair, I admittedly don't know how one would implement it, but the sales tax data is being used by their clients for something.
Looking into it further, some states, according to Shopify's FAQ on the topic, have different rules with regards to destination-sourced vs origin-sourced sales. 🤷♂️
It's an imperfect solution. VPNs are an issue - and even if you don't use a VPN, the API only knows the location of the ISP's servers - which can be in a different state.
My point was that, the law should leave tax inclusion in pricing as optional. There is no way to implement automatic detection cleanly, other than prompting the user to confirm their location, which is a huge annoyance - so the 'tax inclusion' rule would not make things better or more convenient.