What does sales tax percent mean?

Answer 1

Whatever the sales tax percent is means that you will pay approximately that many cents of sales tax for every dollar that you spend.

I say approximately because most states charge no tax on the first small amount of sales (maybe 5 cents, it depends on the state) and this pattern continues for the first few cents in any dollar amount. There is also rounding because of money involved. You can't charge a fraction of a penny. With sales now much of this is programmed into a computer that runs the cash register and automatically calculates the sales tax because some states don't tax food items. In my state there are actually 3 different tax rates depending on what you are buying. The computerized cash registers use the bar codes to automatically find the correct rate for each item.