To your Point:
People in Tn, Drive to KY, AL and Ga right now.
It's called a
Price war, and the problem with them is that in the long run nobody who matters really wins.
A few folks like you and me maybe get cheap goods while the battle goes on, but there's always a silent price for those kinds of cheap goods. Namely in this case, your LFS ends up out of business...also US manufacturers do the same thing.
A quote from the link:
In the medium to long term, price wars can be good for the dominant firms in the industry. Typically, the smaller, more marginal firms cannot compete and must close. The remaining firms absorb the market share of those that have closed. The real losers, then, are the marginal firms and their investors. In the long term, the consumer may lose too. With fewer firms in the industry, prices tend to increase, sometimes higher than before the price war started.
I'm glad for anyone who's still got a local fish store.
I live in a major metro area where there used to be some 80
local fish stores served by one of the
local wholesalers.
Last time I was plugged in enough to know, that 80 had gone down to less than 5 in the present day. No remaining LFS's are close to me, so if I want to partake I'm effectively driving to Alabama or whatever
just to see a local store at all.
I think this is the story that's pretty typical to a lot of folks on here....only most don't live in a major metro area. So they only ever had maybe 5 stores or only one store – but they would have suffered the same attrition rates as all their customers started shopping online. So it didn't take those towns long to go from five (or one) to zero, whereas our last LFS just closed a year ago or so...
:mad:
If I'm not mistaken the Supreme Court ruled that all states can collect sales from online transactions even if the seller does not have a physical location in that state...
That is because, as a citizen of your state, you have agreed to (or otherwise been obligated...IANAlawyer) pay taxes for things you buy.
The tax break you (and the rest of us) were exploiting was a loophole – as long as you didn't report the sale, the state had no way to know of the sale.
Notably, it was also a loophole that online has, in many cases, been leveraging
against your local businesses for quite a while now.
And BTW, the state still has to figure out you spent the money in order to know there was supposed to be a tax....but that gap is surely getting smaller and smaller too.
The fact is that the state governments are, and have been, broke...and taxes are required to make The System go. Citizens generally have to pay sales taxes
You might find some interesting things on here:
Sales taxes in the United States
Yea, that's terrible. It defeats the purpose of shopping online.
Well said. Online has very little real advantage if they're on a level playing field with the LFS's. Which shouldn't be a total surprise if you think about it: A) They aren't magicians and B) the people actually making the products still expect to maintain pricing levels AND to make money.
