Re: Why does Amazon.com now charge sales tax?
This is actually kind of rediculous and its going on with my state as well.
Mass just increased its sales tax to 6.25%. New Hampshire has no sales tax whatsoever. Mass sued town faire tire because MA wants them to collect sales tax for anybody with MA plates on their cars. Town faire obviously objected to this (still have no idea what why they singled them out??)
Its still in court waiting to be tried. The arguement is if TFT has to collect taxes for MA. Then stores in MA should credit back sales tax to out of state purchasers. Which MA obviously wont have. MA wants it both ways.
It got so bad over the summer that I was reading newspaper articles over the summer in which Deval Patrick said he was going to send special tax agents over the borders to sit in parking lots and see who comes out of big box stores with what packages and what license plate cars they get into. John Lynch said that if Patrick did that he would have NH state troopers arrest and indefinitely hold said agents untill its settled in court.
In reality this is nothing new. MA and NH have been fueding since the 1600's. There is a story of why the MA border is straight after the merrimack river because of tax fueding that goes back that far.
In MA when we file are taxes we are supposed to claim (voluntarily hahaha) anything purchased out of state to pay sales tax on.
It gets even worse with beer/liqour/wine. MA has a hidden tax on all alcohol, and it was sales tax free for the longest time(because of the hidden tax). But when MA upped the sales tax a few months ago they applied it to alcohol. NH in turn put "TAX FREE" banners on all their state owned liqour stores. I live on a border town, and the long and short of it is I can drive 5 miles south to the closest liqour store any buy a bottle of kettle one vodka for 35ish bucks. Or I can drive 5 miles north and if its 20 bucks, 17.99 if its on sale. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out wich way those within reasonable distance of NH are going to drive.
Miller lite 30 pack.... $25 in MA, $16 in NH.
Its worse with wine. The women and I are red wine drinkers. $20+ bottles in MA are typically $10ish in NH. And the price difference percentage wise goes up considerable the more expensive a bottle is. I'm doing some wine shopping now for thanksgiving and I just bought a bottle yesterday of Gaja Babaresco, nice italian red. It was $60 in NH. In MA places wanted 100 to 130 a bottle. Its not profit your paying...its all taxes.
It gets especially worse in MA because if your a MA resident you can't have wine shipped to you. (or even to a distributor who would mark it up, and tax it up, before selling it to you. So lets say you took a trip to Napa Valley and sampled some fantastic wines. If you got back home found out your new found flavor isn't available in the stores and tried to buy some online to have shipped to you, you can't, its illegal.
In NH on the other hand. They have sommeliers(sp?) at most stores. If you want to mail order wine and have it shipped to you it is not problem, but they encourage you to go to the stores for a better price. NH wharehouses alot of things not on the shelves. All you have to do is ask, and if they have it great, if not, they will order it for you and often less than at what it would cost to buy it directly because of the bulk discount NH gets.
Either way, it will be interesting to see which way the supreme courts start siding on all these tax issues.
