Prices - What do They Mean?

As everybody knows, the price you see when you buy things is not what you will pay at the register. When buying online you will need to pay extra for shipping. When buying in store you will need to pay extra for sales tax. When reserving a room in a hotel, you will need to pay additional taxes and fees. When renting a car you will need to pay for the insurance and some extra hard to understand fees. When ordering game or concert tickets online you will need to pay some other fees.

Therefore, what does the price you see actually mean? What is it actually for? Is it simply the "minimum" amount you will pay? Sometimes when I go to the mall, I actually pay less than the price shown because of some sale that was not being advertised yet. So it does not necessarily mean a "minimum" amount you will pay. The price you see seems to be some "guess" number and you will pay somewhere around that - usually more, sometimes less.

My question here is, why do we see this "guess" number instead of the actual amount we will pay? It completely makes no sense. Let's say I have $10 in my pocket. I go to a store and I see a t-shirt for $10. Can I buy it? No. I cannot buy a $10 t-shirt when I have $10, because $10 is not enough for a $10 t-shirt. To buy a $10 t-shirt in a store, I need $10.70 (that's in my county). If you read this sentence to anyone who does not know how the system works, he or she will say that these sentences do not make sense. They do not make sense to me either... but they are true.

This is all because of a 7% sales tax that the county has established. Different counties have different amounts, which makes things even more complicated. I might leave in a county where sales tax is 6%. Then I will go shop at a store that is in another county. I will see a $10 t-shirt and I will have $10.60 in my pocket. I will think, "hey, I have enough to buy a t-shirt". And then the cashier will give me the final price - $10.70, because the store is in a county with 7% tax.

Do I really need to do a research on the tax amounts in different counties before I go shopping? Apparently not - you will get messed up anyways. There are stores, like Food Depot, where the taxes are even different. For some reason instead of 7% sales tax, I see some types of food with 10% sales tax. Then I will go to a thrift store nearby and I will pay 1% sales tax. And these taxes are not even depending on stores only. Even in a single store I am being charged different % for different types of items I buy. Because of that, there is no way for me to predict how much money I will pay at the end.

One time I went to a dealer. I liked one car for $11,000 and I test drove it. I was used to buying cars from private sellers and I was used to negotiate the price. After I test drove it, I offered $10,000 for the car in cash. Apparently the sales people were stopping themselves from laughing at me. I could not understand why, what was so funny. The funny part was not that I wanted to pay $1,000 less than the advertised price. The funny part was that I actually, unknowingly wanted to pay $3,000 less than the amount I would have to pay. The $11,000 was the regular, advertised price, add to that 7% sales tax, plus dealer's fees - $700, plus tag and title fees, plus God knows what was and this made the price ending up somewhere around $13,000. Thinking I would buy a car for $10,000 or $11,000 in worst case scenario, I was actually targeting for a car for $13,000 - the real worst case scenario with horns and coming from hell.

When I rented a car for $24.99 a day for 3 days, somehow I ended up paying almost $200. When ordering game tickets online, I ended up paying over 30% more than advertised price. When buying airplane tickets to Hawaii through Orbitz, I ended up paying $150 extra for some "traveler's insurance" I never agreed to pay - this one was added to the total amount after I entered the credit card information and pressed the "Submit" button - a super stupid way to make people run overdrafts on their checking accounts.

Go ahead and share your "surprise" stories with prices and the actual amounts you had to pay.