ir0×0r

Hmmm, where to start. How about the positive? Much of CA has great weather. Well, there you have it.

Sure there’s great food but it’s crazy expensive. In fact everything is expensive. Admittedly I don’t live there but I visit all too frequently and I can’t remember ever sitting in a restaurant eating something unique to California and thinking about how reasonably it was priced.

Honestly I try to avoid CA as much as possible but it seems like CA keeps coming to find me. Now it’s causing me tax headaches.

While building an e-commerce site for a CA-based company I’ve learned about the fantastic idea the California State Board of Equalization for varying the tax rate based on where you live.

How did I miss this? It started April 1 and I haven’t heard anything about it in the news. Come on people. The Board of EQUALIZATION is applying tax UNequally. And as if that wasn’t stupid enough, it’s based on county. What you may not know is that ZIP codes do not coincide with counties. Or cities. Why should they, really? A ZIP code is used by the post office to get you your mail.

But the reality of e-commerce requires you to base things on a ZIP code because that’s the easiest way to do things. I can import a list of ZIP codes and associate a tax rate with them and then apply that tax rate to the order. My e-commerce software doesn’t ask you what county you live in and that’s what it needs to do to collect the correct amount of tax.

WTF.

So the software has to be changed at a fundamental level just to accommodate CA. I wonder how much that’s going to cost? I probably shouldn’t complain because it really makes sense to do this now. Since the economy is down people aren’t selling as much as they used to. Clearly we all have enough time to reinvent the wheel since we’re not that busy.

Thanks to California I won’t feel so bored. I can’t wait to see how many orders don’t get completed because people are (rightly) confused when they get asked what county they live in by a shopping cart.

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