Canada has implemented a new tax savings from December to February for some things like taxable groceries, crafts, and gaming physical media. I wanted to get a new Xbox controller and found the best price at Walmart for $55 a week ago. The tax holiday starts today and I now see that the $55 has increased to $62 and change, which is about how much tax I should be saving. Great to see this thinly veiled attempt to help Canadians ( /s - win votes) is just going to be extra profit in the corporations’ pockets.
What about other stores?
What about other stores?
They’re $75+ elsewhere. And I refuse to buy from sketchy “marketplace” sellers on sites like Best Buy where I see reviews saying they’re used but advertised as new, missing components, etc.
Did the price go up in other stores as well when the tax holiday came into effect?
This is exactly what the “Taxation is theft” morons don’t understand. They think if the government no longer takes their cut, everybody will just have X amount of money more, and the market won’t just swallow that up without giving you a single thing in return.
Talking point bots will blame Trudeau for this.
I don’t say any of this to say that I think what Walmart is doing here is ethical, onky to say that it is logical from their standpoint if they assume there won’t be any blowback.
Companies charge what they think they can get for a product. The tax is part of the price. If they think an item will sell for $5.26 including tax, it is reasonable for them to think it will still sell for $5.26 if the item isn’t taxed.
That isn’t to say this is nice on their part, but the current system doesn’t incentivise them to be nice. It incentivises profit.
It does seem like they took the easy route to gain more profit. It is likely that, in the a absence of tax, their profit would be maximized by a price that is somewhere between the old pre-tax price and the old post-tax price.
Working behind the scenes with retail pricing (not Walmart) I can say this is 100% how it works.
Also have been given a sheet listing all of my department’s products that were below a specific profit margin. Told that we had a sale coming in 2 weeks so make sure to raise prices on those before then so that I didn’t have a drop in my overall department sales. If the customers noticed and asked, we were to inform them the ‘sale’ was to offset the price hike that just happened because we were looking out for them.
Raising prices then advertising a “sale” at the same/higher price IS actually against the law though. Unfortunately we have terrible enforcement of these laws but they do exist:
Is it against the law if they legitimately don’t lower the price after though as the above poster is being told to give as a reason, but we know isn’t true?
Yeah. Calling something a sale at a price that’s not actually discounted under the regular price (with some caveats on how long it needs to be at said regular price), then yeah it’s a violation of the act. Basically false advertising.
Bumping up the regular price to cover what you’d have otherwise saved on tax is dickish but not against any regulations AFAIK
Yeah, I shouldn’t have been surprised. This is normal psychopathic behaviour for a corporation.
I would support Canadian Tire over Walmart.
Do they sell xbox controllers?
No, but Best Buy does. As does Canada Computers, Shoppers Drug Mart, Gamestop, etc. none of which are as bizzarely aggressive about nonsensical pricing schemes.
The time that product spends on the shelves of a Canadian Tire is just a layover before its permanent move to a landfill. They are Coors quality at Heineken prices.
I bought a Husqvarna chainsaw from Canadian tire and it was garbage. I thought I was getting the same one my buddy got (he got his at the local kubota). Turns out Husqvarna just licenses out their name for the right price. It was a garbage chainsaw with orange plastic and the sticker was even upside down.
companies will 100% of the time do anything even illegal things to make more money.
Removed by mod
“the consumer always loses” good point. and good luck in this dystopian society.
Might be betraying my age here, but do you remember when GST was 7%? EXACTLY the same thing happened.
GST breaks strictly pad the revenues of business AT THE COST of funds to the public purse. Does a fat fucking zero to the wallets of consumers.
GST?
Sales tax, has different acronyms in different countries such as Value Added Tax (VAT), Goods and Services Tax (GST)…
General sales tax we have had in Canada for years. Tax on all goods and services. Used to be 7% but dropped to 5% a number of years ago
Ah gotcha, thanks
the prices probably won’t go back down in february, either.
They’ll only go down if customers stop buying, which they won’t.
Prices go up and stay up.
They may go down 3% for some products and they’ll make a big deal out of it.
Seems like an opportunity to use this in attack PP’s tax-cut rhetoric, and to attack the oft-repeated talking points from business that tax increases will be passed on to consumers.
Tax cuts are eaten by businesses, so long as the businesses believe that people will continue to buy. Tax increases will also be eaten by businesses, so long as the businesses believe that people will refuse to buy at a higher price. It’s all being taken by or from shareholders.
It’s a shame no political entities will actually touch this with anything more pointed or useful than “that’s appalling!”
All prices are set based on what consumers are willing to pay.
The only way prices ever go down is by exercising a decision not to buy something or to go somewhere for an item.
It will not come from the government, unless the government mandates a specific rate.
They could also provide the cheaper alternative, generating revenue for the government, providing goods at a discount and forcing corporations to match prices.
Like that’ll happen, though.
This is why sales tax is silly unless it’s purposefully punitive. Like with cigarettes.
If they want to give back to consumers, then literally give money to consumers.
I think it depends on the area. Places like Florida did well with sales taxes because they have large amounts of tourism. So they can have no state income tax, and no tax on groceries, yet make enough in taxes to do everything else they need. That said, sales tax is 6% from the state, and areas boost it based on other needs. .5% for teachers and .5% for local infrastructure was what I grew up with.
Now living in Tennessee taxes are 10% and they charge it on groceries here… which kind of sucks. I wish stores would just include the tax on the sticker. When running on a budget I really don’t want to be saying 6.99 okay that’s 7.69 in my head and have to keep track while figuring out what I can afford to eat that week.
Well the government can break up corporations which results in more competition. They can also enforce standards which also allows more competition. This gives people more options so they can’t just set prices in a monopolistic way.
Unfortunately there’s not much the Canadian government can do about Walmart and Microsoft as they aren’t Canadian companies. And Kamala’s opportunity economy has been cancelled so it doesn’t look there’s going to be any positive change in the US for foreseeable future.
But they could break up Loblaw’s at least.
They can absolutely tell Walmart they have to reduce their footprint or break up in Canada. They don’t lose their sovereignty just because it’s an American Corporation. If they think Walmart is using global profits to unduly influence Canadian markets they can introduce a tax or even ban them.
Report them
Report them
How?
I have not been able to find anything about restrictions to stop the price gouging.
It’s a by province thing, search customer protection [province]
It is hard to believe but apparently these laws do in fact exist at least in the US.
Government doesn’t care though, call the police prole.
If taxes lower, that’s good for both the consumer and seller. Their profit margin doesn’t even change.
Explain your math. It’s absolutely 100% benefit to the seller and 0 benefit to the buyer.
How so?
Last week, a vendor sold an item for $10. With tax, that item costs $12. Let’s pretend a 50% markup (which is reasonable for retail but insanely high for groceries):
- they made $5 profit
- they recouped $5 for their costs
- they collected $2 of tax for the government
Now the government has a GST holiday and there’s no tax. I went to the store and bought the item and it still cost me $12.
- they made $7 profit
- they recouped their usual $5 for their costs
- they collected $0 of tax for the government
The main thing is that their costs for that item didn’t increase and they’re still selling it at its original ”final” price (because they added the tax amount to the sticker price). That tax savings went straight into profits. It was intended for the consumer to save money but the consumer is spending the same amount and the government isn’t getting anything. That money went somewhere.
Edit: that assumes that the claim made in the post is true. It’s definitely not going to be true across the board, but doubtless there’s some fuckery afoot in some stores.
That wouldn’t pass consumer protection laws in my country.
If they were honest, my claim still stands.
If they are not, well, then it’s probably against consumer laws in Canada too.
Tax credits are always a government gift to corporations.
Reminds me when Alberta reduced the tax on gas, and within a few weeks consumers were paying the same amount again
Betcha you get reminded again when Canada sweeps the cons in because cArBOn tax and then we pay the same by Monday for everything.
Ontario did this too. Took a few weeks tops, and now we pay the same as we always have, except none of the money goes to our roads, just to big oil.
Thanks Ford.
I laugh because he keeps extending it too and I sure and shit bet he will extend it again so the next government to come in has a poison pill in killing his gas rebate effectively raising the price of gas drastically overnight.
This is 100% intentional by the OPC. Bunch of fuckwits.
His supporters say it’s because Trudeau has too much tax on gas
His supporters don’t ever shut up, despite how uninformed they tend to be.
In any reasonable country, that should be illegal. In many places it is
Name one. Price hikes are not illegal in any country in Europe. Changing prices after selling and other shady stuff is illegal in most European countries on the other hand, but this is not it. If the 55 were on sale before, a “sale” price can be axed as most see fit. This screams coincidence and bad luck to me.
It should be illegal for any store to increase prices by more than 0.5% per month for any product in my opinion.
Even if massive inflation hits they can still increase prices by 6% after a year, but they at least won’t be able to immediately increase prices by 10-20% after taxes are lessened or a month before a sale is supposed to start.
All this will do is create a black market full of scalpers who are incentivized to buy the entire stock of a good if the market is willing to pay significantly more.
An authoritarian, controlled economy will fail. We don’t need any more examples to understand why.
You should loose the comma, then i agree with you. An authoritarian controlled economy will fail. A controlled economy is an absolut must.Without rules, that’s anarchism. That will fail either. Case in point: The USA. None of the rules are enforced and capitalism gone wild just bought the government outright.
whatbif it’s a cash only store that wants all post-tax price to be integers or integers + quarters?
In Italy when the government reduced vat on ebooks from 22% to 4% not a single publisher passed the savings to the customer and they even increased the prices
