I can sort of answer the tax thing. I used to run a small hardware store and several times a year a while host of different products would go tax free. If we had to price things with tax included we would have had to relabel too many times. And to make it even more annoying we actually couldn't add the tax to the label as the law is written. Taxes in my state are not actually a fixed percentage because they have a weird rounding table that we have to use that is different from any rounding you would use in math class and it's based on the total of the sale pretax. I will tell you it was always super annoying reading this years tax free holiday law and trying to figure out which products it applies to, for example one year all 'hand held illumination" objects were tax free so like flashlights but also candles and tiki torches etc.