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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30723 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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It's clearly intended to communicate to the consumer that they're assuming the whole burden of the tax. This simply isn't how taxes work.

Sales tax is also not 100% burden on the consumer but it's very frequently broken out as a separate line item in the US.

Agreed. That's deceptive in just the same way. I don't think there's any particular movement to get sales tax repealed, though, so I suspect the motive is slightly different: advertising a slightly lower price in the hopes that marginal customers will be too lazy/ignorant to calculate the true price before getting far enough into the sale for the sunk cost fallacy to set in.

Looks like Amazon has given up on this idea; were they planning on hiding the tariff charge until checkout? At least on Chinese goods, I suspect it's high enough to overcome sunk cost reasoning anyway, though I suppose there's always some marginal consumer on whom it'd have worked.

But that’s in part because they want to say the price to the consumer is X. They then say the cost is X plus Y (the sales tax).

Amazon already paid the tariff prior to selling to a customer and indeed didn’t pay tariff on the price charged to the customer (unlike sales tax).

It is more akin to CIT which Amazon doesn’t break out.

I don’t really have a problem with Amazon doing that but at the same time wish they’d do it for other government taxes or inefficiencies.

I always assumed that was less as anti-tax sentiment and more as a misleading "this is a low price (oops no you'll be paying more than what we said once tax is applied)". Same with car ads: "Taxes, tags, and fees extra".

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