Taxing on the brain

My buddy who is currently in San Diego wrote the other day about his dislike for the American way of incorporating sales tax into their prices...they just don't.

For example if you go into a shop and see a nice deal like "coffee + muffin = $2" (which I did) guess what, its not two American dollars. Once you get to the till, they will give you the price with tax added AFTER the display price. (when quizzed about it the sales assistant told me "we dont display the full price becasue if we did no one would buy it")
In fact the only place I found that were decent enough to add in tax were the hotdog stands by the side of the road in New York, god bless those weiner men.

The practice of not factoring tax into the display price strikes me as being particularly and inexcusably lazy. In Ireland for example, when determining the sale price of a product, the retailer has to be aware of how much revenue will actually be made by the sale of the unit, a €1.50 bottle of coke will only really give them €1.18. In our system the retailer takes on the burden of factoring the tax into pricing, Seems in America most retailers are happy to leave the confusion, effort and inconvenience on the customers side...nice.