Notes from a big country...

[anagathic]

It's the little things that get you...

• The lightswitches work the opposite way
• The toilets... Everyone knows the flushing thing, but I'd forgotten the fact that the bowl is a completely different shape
• The side of the road you drive on seems to effect everything; I've just about stopped going for the left escalator...
• The culture of service is vry

Comments

[randomdreams]

Not only states -- the US has a freak way of doing taxes that, in certain light, seems reasonable. Any group of people can get together, call themselves a district, and vote to tax themselves for a project. So there are scads of local improvement districts for roads, schools, water supply or sewers. I'm in an improvement district for the stupid stadium: anyone who buys anything within about 20 km of here pays 0.1% tax to fund the stadium.
So a business that only has one location can figure out what taxes are and appropriately label things, and a business that has a computerized system with barcodes can function reasonably well, albeit with a lot of extra work, but most businesses would just be hosed.

[anagathic]

I don't see why it would be any extra work - the store has to have a database of products and prices, to allow them to produce the shelf tags in the first place. It has to be able to generate the tax on any given item trivially, or it couldn't do it at the till. So when they're writing the code to print the tag, rather than going "look up name of item, print name of item, look up price, print price", go "look up price of item, calculate tax at this site, add tax to price, print price".

Unless the taxes change more often than the price labels, or you generate all your shelf tags in a centralised location, it shouldn't be an issue.

I suspect the real answer is cultural - everyone who's grown up with it is used to it, so there's no advantage to including the tax in the label, and leaving it out lets you have a smaller number on the shelf, which is always good in retail.

It'd also make it harder / impossible to have the shelf prices end with .99, or your magic number of choice

[randomdreams]

Most of the places I go, these days, have everything done by computer so all the work is hidden, but the tags are definitely printed in some central location. However, the places I go where they don't have computerized systems, they type in all the actual prices, sum it, then check a printed tax table and multiply the total by that, at the very end of the transaction.

[cataragon]

Long after we'd totally adjusted to the driving, and associated walking/passing rules, and the taxes and tips and everything else - it's still the light-switches that throw us.

One of Dan's workmates recently pointed out that it makes more sense this way from a safety perspective - in an electrical emergency it's easier to flick down than up to turn something off, but my lizard brain is still hardwired the NZ way.

The weirdest thing I find about toilets over here is that they are often set quite a lot lower than at home (and if I notice that, I expect it's way more obvious/annoying for anyone with any claim at all to tallness)

[ookey]

Electrical switches in the UK are the same as the US for the safety reason, however light switches are pretty much however the person wants to wire it up but standard is the same as NZ. Nice and confusing!

[ookey]

Erm, as in the ones on power boxes...

[cataragon]

That only works in states like California (and Colorado, I assume), where it's roughly half of fifteen percent - a lot of other states have radically different tax rates.

I just work out ten percent, which is pretty easy, and then add half again and round up for a generousish tip, or do twenty percent if I'm extra pleased with the service.

[randomdreams]

My tip system is to take the (pre-tax) total and shift a digit to the left, if the service was acceptable. If it was good, shift to the left, take that number, divide by two, add. If it was superb, double the shift.