It’s been said a couple of times in this thread but if you take an Amazon gift code in exchange for your coins, you get 100% of your money back. They also offer gift cards or codes for other retailers and sometimes you can get a slight premium, so you get 110% in exchange.
I called the new bank and they do have a counting machine for use at no charge to their customers. Now to get the heavy bottle down the stairs and in and out of the car. The money will be deposited in savings.
I don’t think vending machines are to blame. I know someone who owns a vending company. Some percentage of the machines are serviced (meaning food/drink restocked & money emptied) every day & all of them are serviced regularly, though some more frequently than others.
Some percentage of his routes can’t be accessed, particularly those in closed athletic facilities & some can be accessed but business is way, way down; makes sense, if hardly anyone is in the office, no on is buying snacks.
The point is he always has $x tied up in coins in the machines & $y tied up waiting to be counted & deposited. Sure some of those locked up machines are filled & were ready to be emptied but then others were emptied the last day before the lockdown & don’t have much money at all in them.
… and then ones in the store were I work were left to be filled up and when they shut down because they were full the vendor said “Oh, sorry - not sending anyone around because of covid”. They’ve started servicing them again, but that’s only been in the past two weeks.
Fingers crossed we get at least SOME of our coin order tomorrow…
I’ll bet you bought your first kayak with it, right?
Nobody is forced to collect these disks, as you put it. If you don’t want any coins, just tell people to keep the change. You’ll never have to deal with any unit of currency smaller than a dollar bill again.
You’ll obviously be throwing away a lot of money but you’re talking about how inconvenient it is, so maybe that will be a bonus for you.
How does that have any reference to coins? It’s the same price whether or not tax is added in later or in the regular price. $9.99 plus tax is the same as something just being $10.86. I’m still getting back change.
But things wouldn’t cost $10.86, they’d cost $9.99 or $10.99, including tax. Retailers will still want everything to have a nice round price tag, just like they do now.
I know, because in my country all prices have to include tax, and they’re just as round as in the United States.
You may already know this, but sales tax in the US varies from state to state, and can be different even within a state. Having prices include sales tax would make it hard to advertise for stuff. It would be impossible to print flyers for supermarkets.
Modern advertising is a lot more targeted and focused than it used to be. I’m sure that they can work it out that potential buyers only see the prices that apply to them. They can print a lot of different flyers.
Besides, so what? If a chain charges the same prices throughout the county, but makes less money from them in places with higher taxes, I don’t see how that’s consumers’ problem.
Face it: paying round prices is a lot more convenient for consumers, and American consumers are all about convenience.
No, they can’t work it out. For example, my state (Kansas) has one of the more insane sales tax regimes; here in Shawnee County (a maximum of 24 miles both north-south and east-west) there are fourteen separate sales tax jurisdictions ranging in size from a single address to several hundred square miles, and with rates from 7.65 to 11.15 percent. (Plus, the city of Willard is mostly in Shawnee County, but residents on the west side of Carlson Road are in Wabaunsee County, and hence in a 15th jurisdiction, while people who have Willard postal address but live outside of city limits to the west are in a 16th.) Radio, TV, and newspaper ads are not that specific; internet advertisements based on IP address would be only a guess, and even postal carrier routes drift back and forth across jurisdictional lines. This isn’t the worst county either: the city of Overland Park, Kansas, all by itself has twenty-four separate sales tax jurisdictions, and it is located in the middle of a metropolitan area (Kansas City, Kansas-Missouri) with dozens more.
That’s not even considering that different buyers in the same store may pay different prices. We charge sales tax on food in Kansas, unless you are buying it with EBT benefits (food stamps) or for Meals on Wheels or similar groups. Goods purchased by a government agency, a school, a non-profit hospital, or selected other non-profit entities are tax-exempt, as long as they are paid by the entity itself via check or voucher or purchasing card; cash sales to the entity’s agent are taxable. A work-site utility vehicle sold to a construction company is taxable; that same vehicle sold to a farmer is not. Etc., etc., – there are plenty more variations and exceptions where those came from.
Plus, we have destination-based sales tax, which means the delivery point affects the rate charged. You may pay a different sales tax for delivery pizza than if you go to the restaurant for dine-in (assuming that is allowed again) or pickup (and I think the rules may differ depending on whether it is the restaurant’s own employee or an Uber Eats driver doing the delivery).
Many big chains are franchised, so the one making less money may be an individual owner rather than the chain, which is an incentive not to put a business in a location with higher taxes, or not to make deliveries there (regardless of whether the higher taxes are necessitated by other factors). That becomes the customer’s problem as his/her choice is limited.
Some towns and even counties also have their own sales tax.
I know that. It’s why I said that sales taxes “can be different even within a state”.
It takes time to return money to a debit card, same as a credit card, and most people grumble enough, since actual money has been taken out of their account, as opposed to a credit card, that now a lot of places do this. Some places ask.
I suspect right now, too (well, back in March and April), a lot of people were returning things bought in Jan & Feb they realized they couldn’t afford when they suddenly had no cash flow.
But each franchise is already paying different property taxes, different income taxes, different rental fees, different wages… what’s one more variable payment? Or look at it this way: deliveries cost the same if they have to drive one minute or fifteen minutes, despite the difference in fuel and labor prices, and yet, businesses usually just live with it. I say, charge all customers the same and let the accountants do the math.
Remember, for all effects and purposes, consumers aren’t the ones paying sales tax. The vendors pay the taxes from their bank accounts, and they’re the ones liable if the taxes don’t get paid. If you refuse to pay sales tax, the government won’t go after you - it’ll go after the seller. Therefore, there’s no need to add it to the price, because it’s not the buyer’s problem.
I think this might be a bank vs credit union thing - my credit union has multiple branches with coin counting machines, and most people I know don’t find that unusual.
Most if not all of those are within the control of the franchisee, however. If property taxes are higher in a particular area, the owner can look for a smaller space or one with fewer taxable amenities; rental payments can be negotiated. If wages vary, then the owner can make some decisions about staffing levels, machines replacing people, etc., while judicious financial planning can have a remarkable impact on the income taxes actually paid. Even with deliveries, the owner can make decisions about limiting the delivery area, or charging more beyond a certain radius. With sales tax, there’s no wiggle room.
This is not true. The amount of the tax very definitely comes out of the customer’s pocket; refuse to pay the tax, and the vendor refuses to sell to you.
There’s also the point that from the vendor’s perspective, being able to point to the government as the bad guy for a chunk of the high prices is a good thing. “It’s not our fault your new car costs an extra three thousand dollars; blame the government.”
Not true, at least in Pennsylvania. The seller has to pay the sales tax and almost always does that by charging it to the buyer, but the seller is not required to do it that way.
Years ago my business primarily sold a service, which was not taxable. I had a few cheap items that were taxable. Rather than collect the tax from the buyer, which would have been a pia for those running the cash register, I just marked the items up (for a profit) and then the business paid the sales tax.
Once I had more taxable items for sale, I bought a new cash register and everyone learned to do the sales tax thing.
Right, there is no need to itemize the sales tax, it can be paid as a percentage of sales. However, if sales of non-taxable items aren’t recorded separately the seller usually ends having to pay extra taxes to cover the total amount of sales.
Oh, I’m not saying it is legally required; in most states the seller can choose to pay the tax without charging the buyer.
As a practical matter, however, the only cases where sellers are willing to do that are when 1) the tax due is much less than the cost of collection [such as yours] or 2) the tax is so much less than the profit being made that the seller can consider the tax as a marketing expense (obscenely expensive jewelry and ‘buy-here, pay-here’ used car dealers come to mind).
With typical consumer goods or B2B transactions, however, what’s the seller’s incentive to absorb the tax? Once you had a cash register that could handle tax easily, what would you have said to a buyer who told you, “you know what, I’m not going to pay the tax; you pay it”? What would Walmart or your local grocer or auto parts house say? (For that matter, “I just marked the items up” means that the customer was in fact paying the tax, just not seeing a line item for it. You weren’t absorbing the taxes or letting them affect your bottom line.)