Luna
Death Scythe
I always thought the prices included the tax within the prices, except for some extra taxes that may come be added at checkout, if you are in some specific state. (For Amazon orders within the US, there is an extra taxes, which gets added when Amazon has a warehouse in that state.)A couple of suppositions on my part but:
Doesn't the majority of the USA have to pay that kinda tax rate anyway? I always thought they just have to work it all out themselves.
The most common argumentation for such fees is, that the postage has to pay the customs beforehand, basically before even they got the money from you. (And might not even get it and must wait until they get the reclaim), which they say is expensive, due to Banks wanting interests. At least at least they claimed it in Germany. Which might be, why many packages just got dumped to the local customs office, even when the invoice was attached. At first you could have send the documents to the customs office and have the post relay it to you for free, but then they charged some 30€ for that. And then a flat fee was also introduced. =/As for the royal mail extortion fee: I always thought that the majority of it goes to paying the *insert expletives* that work in customs as opposed to the royal mail delivering it hence why RM has always said it doesn't profit from it.
I bet that part was there for staff payments. They have been cutting staff where ever they could, so they probably didn't want to waste any more money on a free service. Seems like other countries just made that move right from the start.