Bricks-and-mortar stores aim to nail down sales tax

The Washington Times ^ | November 24, 2011 | Valerie Richardson

[TexasFreeper2009]

I am also willing to pay a “little” more to get it right then, but I won’t pay 50% or even double in some cases.

The biggest scam at Best Buy are the HDMI cables, if you go there to buy those, be sure to bring some vasaline.

[rbg81]

Well, you can always just plug in the title of the book. Borders folded ‘cause of the Internet and it had less inventory and a worse atmosphere than Barnes & Noble.

[HiTech RedNeck]

All manner of crud would have to be placed into Internet portals to support that. And what is the treatment if you have multiple computers looking into the email on one server? Or if you have your own server with a dynamic or static IP that can be looked up via DNS?

That would be like charging telephone users by the spoken word.

[HiTech RedNeck]

A large regional hardware retailer like Menards (where it exists) is probably the best place to get data hardware. You have to know what you want because it’s all blister-packed in spartanly printed packages. But it’s oh so cheap, even compared to someone like Compusa.

[Still Thinking]

A bipartisan consensus appears to be forming in Congress in favor of legislation that would close the tax loophole.

It's not a "loophole" unless you consider freedom in general a "loophole". Sales taxes on interstate transactions would fail the Constitutional prohibition on interdiction of interstate trade and they know this, else why would they try to disguise it by using a different name, when the tax is identical in amount to the legal sales tax, and only "due" on transactions where sales tax is not collected?

[MSF BU]

Sponsors in the House? Likelihood of passage in the House. I would hope & expect that it would be zero.

[Trod Upon]

They also filled up with an ever-increasing jumble of non-book...crap, and played games by making you use coupons to get what was the normal retail price everywhere else. I was not at all surprised to see them go TU.

[Myrddin]

I've been having trouble tracking down an EIDE/PATA 3.5 inch drive to repair a couple Linux boxes. BestBuy had them in stock for $79 each. The same size drive was on the shelf at Fry's for $129. Had I been willing to wait a week for shipping, a site on pricewatch had them advertised for $59. No guarantee that they actually had product to ship. I writing this post on the freshly installed Fedora 16 on the new 320 GB Caviar blue (7200 RPM) disk. I didn't get the best price in town, but I did find product at an acceptable price that was in stock.

The 2nd drive will go home with me in December to repair the machine with the crashed drive. It has been down for a couple months. It's hard to fix stuff sitting 925 miles away.

[Louis Foxwell]

bricks and mortar are more expensive than online drop shipping. It costs more to run a store than a web site.

[Graybeard58]

I do not agree with 999.

[buccaneer81]

Zappo’s. How I wear $100 Nikes for $59.95.

[rlmorel]

That , and you don’t have to hunt around for books like “Unfit For Duty” because the liberal turds who work there hid them away. Then, when you ask them to get a copy they make a face at you. That was at a Borders up here in Massachusetts...

[napscoordinator]

That is why I never shed a tear when these Mom and Pop stores close because Walmart comes to town. You would never hear Walmart complaining about this. Good riddance to all small store owners. Most don't offer enough to go anyway. Spoiled brats!!!!! So instead of smiling and thanking them for coming in. They complain and ruin it for all customers. Good luck with people going to the store now. If you are going to pay a sales tax than most people won't go into the store AT ALL. Good going idiot!!!!!

[TheRobb7]

I might be missing something here, but if you oppressively tax something, you’ll get less of it, which means that there would be less e-mail, and less revenue....which would defeat the purpose for the tax in the first place.

[AlmaKing]

Another utterly idiotic post by the same nap coordinator.

[napscoordinator]

Another utterly idiotic post by the same nap coordinator.

Another worthless person AlmaKing on Free Republic. And shut up you newbie. Who cares what you think anyway. I don’t. Never heard of you anyway. You are worthless to Free Republic.

[lastchance]

Many online retailers may not have the same overhead as brick and mortar stores which gives the former an unfair advantage. To fix this we must make online retailers who do not have such overhead pay a fee to make up the difference. We could also demand that if people get lousy customer service from brick and morter stores that online retailers do their darndest to up their ratio of consumer complaints (if they have not already). It should also be noted that people may not like to go out in all kinds of weather to make various purchases. Something must be done to bring discomfort and inconvenience to the online shopping experience.

Bottom line, no merchant should have any advantage over another in presenting items for sale to the public. Every thing should be standarized so that no one merchant is more attractive to the consumer. It is downright unAmerican to indulge in the gross inequalities encouraged by competetion for the retail dollar. Shame, shame.

We should also break the legs of marathon runners who consistently out perform the slower entrants.

[GeronL]

lol

[Joe Bfstplk]

My solution to this unfairness is to eliminate sales taxes.

[sickoflibs]

RE :”Republicans traditionally have opposed the online sales tax as a new “Internet tax,” but their resistance is crumbling. The bill was introduced Nov. 9 with five Democratic and five Republican sponsors. .....
The House version, the Marketplace Fairness Act, also has Republican support. Both bills include an exemption from the online sales-tax requirement for businesses with less than $500,000 in remote sales. Opponents of the online sales tax said the proposals would harm remote sellers and noted that previous bills offered $5 million exemptions”

Bipartision stab in the back??