Canada has implemented a new tax savings from December to February for some things like taxable groceries, crafts, and gaming physical media. I wanted to get a new Xbox controller and found the best price at Walmart for $55 a week ago. The tax holiday starts today and I now see that the $55 has increased to $62 and change, which is about how much tax I should be saving. Great to see this thinly veiled attempt to help Canadians ( /s - win votes) is just going to be extra profit in the corporations’ pockets.
Seems like an opportunity to use this in attack PP’s tax-cut rhetoric, and to attack the oft-repeated talking points from business that tax increases will be passed on to consumers.
Tax cuts are eaten by businesses, so long as the businesses believe that people will continue to buy. Tax increases will also be eaten by businesses, so long as the businesses believe that people will refuse to buy at a higher price. It’s all being taken by or from shareholders.
It’s a shame no political entities will actually touch this with anything more pointed or useful than “that’s appalling!”
This is exactly what the “Taxation is theft” morons don’t understand. They think if the government no longer takes their cut, everybody will just have X amount of money more, and the market won’t just swallow that up without giving you a single thing in return.
Is that legal? (Am American - idk about Canadian legal strictures around that, but it definitely feels like it’d run afoul of some sort of consumer protection legislation or something like that)
That’s probably illegal.
It is in the US.
The FTC’s Guides Against Deceptive Pricing generally require that a seller offer an item at a price for a reasonable, substantial period of time in good faith, and in the regular course of business, before advertising that price as the former or regular price (16 C.F.R. § 233.1). The FTC considers it deceptive to offer an item for sale at a higher price for a short period of time in order to support a claim that an item is discounted when the price is then lowered. This practice is prohibited.
Additionally, most states have consumer protection statutes that prohibit sellers from making false or misleading statements of fact concerning the reasons for, existence of, or amount of a price reduction (for example, Cal. Civ. Code § 1770(a)(13)). Several states also expressly regulate the length of time an item must be offered at a regular price and amount of time it is on sale (for more information, see Practice Notes, Promotional Pricing: Specific State Laws and “Up To” Discounting Law and Practice: Promotional Pricing: State-by-State Requirements).
From here
The price hike in Canada’s instance, wouldn’t violate US law.
They aren’t advertising a “sale”. You just aren’t paying taxes on what you buy, and it isn’t wal mart doing it, it’s the government. Wal mart is just choosing to screw over the buyers and the government all in one go.
tell that to amazon and every other retailer that jacks prices up the week or so before a ‘sale’
For Amazon, I use camelcamelcamel to see price history. Personally I’ve not seen price increases just for holiday sales but I also don’t buy a lot of stuff on these sorts of days, I just set a price alert and wait for the email.
Sites like these are why amazon has been using more coupons at check out instead of straight discounts. Messes with the price tracking
How does that help Amazon if on the price tracker it appears $20, but with the coupon it’s actually $10?
If I’m using a price tracker and see it for $20 pre-coupon but another site has it for $15, wouldn’t that just drive my business to the other site?
It seems like with using coupons it’s just artificially inflating the price on whatever trackers, and that seems like it would be bad for sales to me.
The goal is to mess up price history. So it will have a list price of $50 but with a coupon to make it $35. Then a sale day happens and they lower the price to $40. It’s 20% off! Good deal.
It doesn’t really help if you’re comparison shopping with alerts. I don’t know that Amazon thinks you’re going to go to another site.
Ah, yeah that makes sense now.
It is, and they don’t care.
When fines are “the cost of doing business.”
Fine should be a direct cut of company value or profits. Proportional, not an absolute value.
It was so hastily-implemented that I think it’s either an oversight or by design.
It has been ruled illegal in the Netherlands only last year but companies still do it and het away with it.
See, trickle down economics works ladies and gents /s
Fuck this is gold.
Well, unless people realise the actual worth of gold… But until then.
How would trickle down work with gold? I’m picturing some kind of golden shower?
sigh
unzips
This has nothing to do with supply-side versus demand-side economics.
EDIT: Actually, I take that back. It does to the extent that it is aiming to provide an incentive on the demand side, which is the opposite of what you’re complaining about.
That’s not really relevant. A break in sales tax that just targets consumer necessities should be a progressive tax.
The problem is that a lack of competition in this country means that grocers can raise their prices with no fear of losing customers
It doesn’t matter how much competition there is of they’re all going to do it anyway.
It does. Competition is literally the only mechanism that drives greedy actors to lower prices or improve their service. Without competition they hoarde.
literally the only mechanism
You forgot about laws.
No I didn’t, price control laws don’t work. Companies will find another way of maximizing profits and screwing you.
“only the market can fix this”
Gestures broadly at the market
Multiple competitors just results in them all agreeing to raise prices when taxes are lowered.
Out of curiosity, how do you propose increasing the number of competitors? Or is this a situation of “gee, that would be nice. Oh well, I guess nothing can be done.”?
Multiple competitors just results in them all agreeing to raise prices when taxes are lowered.
Price signalling happens in situations with low competition, in a healthy, competitive market, if you raises prices someone will undercut you to take your business.
Out of curiosity, how do you propose increasing the number of competitors? Or is this a situation of “gee, that would be nice. Oh well, I guess nothing can be done.”?
You literally just break up grocery store companies and stop them from merging in the future. The solution is not complicated.
That’s more than mildly infuriating.
It’s not all bad - now instead of saving $7 I will be saving the whole $55 since I won’t buy it!
Guess they’re using the “black Friday” technique to lure in shoppers, again!
Kroger (grocery store) is doing the same thing this week. They’re doing a 20% off “holiday bonus” discount on a one per-customer basis (20% off your entire order). The catch? Every item in the store is at least 20% more expensive than it was last week.
I don’t buy soda often but fuck I’m tired of their soda sales. Buy 2 get 1 free on 12 packs. (9.99) A piece. Then 1 week out of the month or so they are buy 2 get 3 free. Still 9.99 a 12 pack.
So that’s:9.99 for 12 cans. (.83 cents per can) 19.98 for 36 cans (.56 cents per can) 19.98 for 60 cans (.33 cents per can)
I really don’t need 60 cans of soda, but I don’t want to pay .83 cents per can. So all it’s done is make me stop buying soda all together for the most part.
It can’t be coke doing it either, because it goes for “all Coke, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper products”
As someone who somehow managed to never get hooked on drinking soda, it baffles me how expensive soda is
Time to introduce the “lowest price from the last 30 days” requirement like in Europe.
Can you explain this? Never heard of it.
EU for online purchases mandates that the lowest price from the last 30 days be displayed alongside the actual price and discount. So they can’t pull the “make the price higher and discount to a higher price than it used to be” trick, best they can do is make price higher and discount it to what it has always been. Which is pointless to them because they’ll just get less sales in the month before. Also a month is enough time for the loss of sales to be significant that it isn’t worth it to keep the price high to create a “bargain”.
I’m guessing J.C. Penny’s doesn’t have EU stores?
Ah, the very store that tried “no sales so we can give you year-round low prices”!
Until they found out we consumers ain’t gonna buy unless somebody puts the word sale somewhere every once in a while.
dont expect it to go back down
the prices probably won’t go back down in february, either.
Prices go up and stay up.
They’ll only go down if customers stop buying, which they won’t.
Might be betraying my age here, but do you remember when GST was 7%? EXACTLY the same thing happened.
GST breaks strictly pad the revenues of business AT THE COST of funds to the public purse. Does a fat fucking zero to the wallets of consumers.
GST?
Sales tax, has different acronyms in different countries such as Value Added Tax (VAT), Goods and Services Tax (GST)…
General sales tax we have had in Canada for years. Tax on all goods and services. Used to be 7% but dropped to 5% a number of years ago
Ah gotcha, thanks
Report them
Report them
How?
I have not been able to find anything about restrictions to stop the price gouging.
It’s a by province thing, search customer protection [province]
It is hard to believe but apparently these laws do in fact exist at least in the US.
Government doesn’t care though, call the police prole.
I am just really glad none of the crap I sell is included. The list and logistics to comply with this “holiday” is insane.
Lets say you run a liquor store:
- Beer, cider, sake and wine are now not taxed
- But wine, cider and sake over 22.9% is still taxed
- Spirit coolers and premixed alcoholic beverages are now not taxed
- Spirit coolers and premixed alcoholic beverages over 7% are still taxed
- Gift boxes/baskets are taxed
- Unless those boxes/baskets have more then 90% the value in beverages that meet the tax holiday requirements
This is not even opening the other categories (Oh don’t even think about child car seat/strollers). The cost of this program on stores and taxpayers (the cost of it is payed by the lack of tax and also the tax collected being diverted to this program) is not worth the 5% off some people will see (since most places will just up the price 5%).
Edit: and as the radio just pointed out this is a tax break on mostly luxury goods so it only really helps the people who don’t need the help. (the example given was a dinner party would be 5% cheaper but a single parent’s heat is not).
It would cost thousands in labor to set up temporary tax rates based on alcohol content. Most systems have tax rates which apply to product categories, not alcohol content. Liquor store pos systems in the US, at least in my state, typically don’t even store the abv in the price book, which would make this taxation virtually impossible to comply with.
Yeap, this is Canada where stuff like this is rolled out in a month or so and businesses are just told to comply.
(Oh and those examples are from the Canada.ca official list not hyperbole)
Edit: it also comes with a friendly threat!
"Make a reasonable effort to comply
Businesses who make reasonable efforts to comply with the legislation will not be the focus of our compliance actions.
We will be focusing on situations where businesses willfully and egregiously refuse to comply with the temporary measures, such as a business that collects the GST/HST and does not remit it to the CRA."
Crazy, they’re basically saying, ‘we know this is impossible so just do your best, as long as you remit everything you collect then it doesn’t really matter what/how you collect’.
This is very unfair to the small business because inevitably there will be some customers who will be pissed off when the store doesn’t collect properly, and small business won’t even come close to doing it correctly.
Making temporary short term massive changes to taxation is a very dumb idea. Canada must be drinking uncle Sam’s koolaid to be acting this foolish.
Most people don’t even care and did not know this even started, its just another failed attempt of the current government to gain support.
This one is extra silly, but the silver lining is that it has got people of drastically different political viewpoints something to agree on. You could have a talk show with the most rabid pundits from opposite sides discuss this and the only arguments would be what the worst part of this plan is.
There is also another component to this as well, everyone is supposed to get $250 in the mail (or direct deposit). And that’s also just bad tax policy that has been made fun of in the past. On top of that they have not managed to actually pass legislation or even figured out how to do this at this point. Oh and the post office is still on strike.
If the controller was $55 yesterday and $62 today there would definitely be shenanigans, but a week ago? It could just be that a sale ended since you last looked.
Anyway, I don’t see $62 Xbox controllers on their site, checking from Nova Scotia. Official controllers are the usual $70-something and there’s PowerA brand for $55.
They are ridiculously expensive to begin with, thus my waiting for a special occasion to spend that much money to get a first-party one. Here it is, probably priced lower than the others because of the ugly colour that I kind of like.
That controller is the same price on Amazon, and Camelcamelcamel shows it went up to that on Dec 6, Friday of last week. It was probably the same with Walmart.
companies will 100% of the time do anything even illegal things to make more money.
that’s the thing that pisses me off: the tax often increases the perception of how much people are willing to spend. even if you remove or decrease the tax, the companies just inflate the price to fatten their margins. Rule #1 of capitalism: the consumer always loses.
You didn’t happen to take screenshots did you? It’s something that should be reported to the media as well
You didn’t happen to take screenshots did you? It’s something that should be reported to the media as well
I wish I had thought of it. I tried the Honey extension which sometimes shows historical prices, but no luck this time. I couldn’t find any other way to double check the previous prices either.
See if it’s on the Internet Archive (web.archive.org)
