Slashdot Mirror
E-commerce Sites to Collect Sales Taxes Nationwide
aengblom writes "An agreement between 38 states and some of the nation's largest retailers is bringing taxes to the net, The Washington Post reports. In return for collecting taxes for all U.S. sales, the retailers would not be held liable for taxes they 'failed' to collect previously. Best quote: 'If we disclose who these companies are, it's like putting a target on their back.' The Post reports that Wal-Mart, Marshall Fields, Target, Toys R Us and Mervyn's have all 'independently' announced plans to collect taxes nation-wide." Internetnews.com has a story about the taxes and an article claiming it won't hurt online sales.
Well thankfully in the UK we haven't got this kind of thing yet.. though along with all the other taxes we pay, I shouldn't imagine it will be too long before it arrives on our shores.
:-)
What are you on about? In the UK everyone gets evenly charged 17.5% VAT instead of local state tax. It's not like you get a tax break if you order from a company in Sussex and live in Hampshire!
The whole thing is that you can avoid sales tax in the US if you order from another state. It's basically tax evasion (I believe you are supposed to pay it at some point but nobody does). This is really closing a loophole, annoying as it is.
Just wanted to mention that Marshall-Fields, Target and Mervyn's are all the same company - Target Corp (Formerly the Dayton-Hudson Corp until Mark Dayton became a senator).
Also, Target Corp and Toys R Us are working together with Amazon.com for online sales, so really it's only two groups - Target-ToysRUs-Amazon and Wal-Mart.
I welcome sales tax for these merchants as it will probably encourage shopping in the local economy, which is better for small business and lesser municipalities (though perhaps bad for my home city, since Target Corp is based here).
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
>But I know when Canadians buy from the US they pay some rediculous ass ramming tax.
It's called 'duty'. Its meant to discourage the very mentality posed by the parent poster; namely that shopping outside of your economy is bad for your economy.
The US likely has import duties as well, but you would have to check with your customs agency in order to confirm whether duty applies to the specific products you are interested in importing.
"Old man yells at systemd"
The only thing Walmart.com is really good for is printing digital photos. You can upload your photos there, and have them delivered to any Walmart in the country when they're done, and their prices are the cheapest online. The sales tax will suck, but with no shipping fees it'll still be better than overpriced places like ofoto.
Just taking your photos to the local Walmart isn't an option since there's no ubiquitous read/writeable removable data storage format other than useless floppy disks.
The stores that are affected by this are NOT the mom-n-pop stores that do most of their transactions over the Internet. This deal is ONLY used to tie major retailers' brick and mortar locations to their respective websites. As a specific example, here is a quote from the article:
.com's parent company Wal-Mart has retail stores in those states.
"For example, Wal-Mart has 1,500 stores scattered across all 50 states, but WalMart.com, a separate subsidiary, has a physical presence in only nine states."
WalMart.com's presence in nine states requires them to collect taxes for those nine states. However, this deal would require them to collect in all fifty, since the
A store like mWave.com (a personal favorite), whose only presence is in California, would still be treated the same way they've always been: Purchases from outside California are tax-exempt, just like they would be from a mail-order catalog.
I imagine Dell will be affected by this. They charge no sales tax for orders from "Dell Home", but "Dell Business" charges tax to everyone. It's likely that, if they buy in to this deal, Dell Home will charge tax to everyone.
The short of it is, though, Don't Panic! If you're shopping for bargains online, you'll still find them.
Gamertag: ChrisCasey