But you’re not the only one. I’ve seen several people on SD do it, and I have no idea what it means. It could mean anything from “This is ridiculous” to “This is exactly correct”, or anywhere in between. Could someone do me a favor and clue me in?
The sales tax rules can be complex. Sometimes dine-in meals aren’t charged sales tax while take-out food is. Or freshly prepared food might be free of tax while packaged items like a can of soda or a bag of chips are not. It’s entirely possible that a restaurant owner might be confused.
I believe that the law here is that food is never subject to sales tax (6.25%), but it is subject to meal tax (5%). Groceries are not taxable. When I worked at a deli many years ago, if someone got a soda with their sandwich, we’d have to charge them tax on the soda because it was part of a meal. But if someone just bought a soda and nothing else, it was groceries so we wouldn’t charge tax. I have no idea if that’s what we were supposed to be doing.
The Russian government passed a law (earlier this year, I think) setting a minimum price for vodka. This minimum price was absurdly low (something on the order of €2/half liter). No surprise that the alcohol consumption in Russia is so high.
[hijack] It also made me wonder why we weren’t inundated by cheap Russian vodka. Since I noticed once that despite the names or use of cyrillic character most of the vodka sold in France was in fact made in France, I began to check this up, and I’m yet to find a single bottle of Russian vodka. French, Polish, Swedish, Italian, whatever…but never Russian [/hijack]
It’s been about 8 years or so since I’ve been in Ontario. At the time, the only place to buy beer was The Beer Store and LCBO and I thought both of those were government owned entities. Have things changed or was I mistaked about the ownership of these stores?
Several years ago in Center City Philly, people were parking and letting the meters expire: paying for the parking ticket was cheaper than going into a garage!
Garages were losing money hand over fist, so they got City Council to raise the parking fines until they were “competitive”.
Is it possible then that the meal tax was recently increased and the employee is (incorrectly I assume*) blaming the entire price increase on it?
*Since I doubt the meal tax would’ve increased 15%
My bet is almost always on the employees making up shit because they simply don’t want to say they figured out they could make more money or that they needed to increase prices for whatever reason.
My bet is almost always on the employees making up shit.
I manage about 15 employees. I can’t tell you how often they seem to put words in my mouth. For example a few weeks ago I heard one of my employees tell another one “Joey doesn’t like it when the cashiers use calculators…” I cut him off to correct him and tell him that what I actually said was “I was walking past the register and saw [cashier] use a calculator so I knew there was a problem…I never said I have a problem with the cashiers using a calculator. I’d rather they used one then got tried to guess at the change or had a customer confuse them.”
That’s just one quick example. I have employees seemingly just make random shit up all the time. At least there I knew where he got it from, but sometimes it seems like they just make crap up for fun.
If you [the OP] want to know the real, or at least the best answer you’re going to get, call the owner. He might give you the real answer, he might give you a BS answer, but whatever he tells you, it’s probably better then what the employees tell you.
As noted, The Beer Store isn’t government owned, although it does have a government monopoly.
Along with the two stores you mentioned, breweries can also sell their own beer, and they’re also constrained by the minimum price ($29.35 per 24 bottle case, I think).