Online sales tax considered in bid to save the high street

Hagar said:
You are all going to be so ****** when things go wrong online.
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Does seem surprising no one hacked/ransomed Amazon, or supermarkets yet ... like garmin.

Better suggestion this morning - fixed tax per online delivery, to address the ungrouped purchases/deliveries people make, and the consequent inefficient infrastructure costs,
if you don't have prime you do this anyway.
 
Hagar said:
You are all going to be so ****** when things go wrong online. No more corner groceries, bike shops, clothes, furniture shops etc.no cash payments, no person at a counter to sort out your ransom ware or fraud enquiries. No footfall on the streets, those not WFH are in their electric uber self hires failing to notice street robberies or property fires. The police and fire services have all gone online as well with automated answering services (oh **** gone down again). Cinema going is superceded by Netflix and you can alternate with your fave pron server. Libraries, what were they? You just order a couple of ebooks from your sofa alongside a 12" pizza for one. On the other hand make it an audio book then you don't even need to read it yourself.
Eventually you are all so ******* fat you cannot climb out of your custom sofa with built in commode that you die of exhaustion or the fire that the brigade cannot respond to burns you to a crisp...
...no one notices.
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This made me lol. You’ve been watching too much sci-fi.
 
Hagar said:
Just ranting.
Some posters just do not realise what the majority still want from a high street. Maybe in 50 years the systems will work. I won't be around.
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It’s hard to imagine every shop disappearing. What’s interesting is that so many of our towns/cities are built around a high street. I wonder if we’ll move more to countryside living if the town centres change in this way.
 
I always support my local shops if possible.
As for city centres, they are a very toxic and unfriendly place.
 
to save the high street they need to sort out business rates and stop gouging the little man, and then they need to stop gouging the shoppers with out of orbit parking charges to just go shopping.
 
wildman said:
to save the high street they need to sort out business rates and stop gouging the little man, and then they need to stop gouging the shoppers with out of orbit parking charges to just go shopping.
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It’s all too easy, that’s the problem. One of the suburbs near me has a load of unnecessary parking restrictions along the row of shops. Of course the parking wardens are all over it and as you can imagine the shop owners are furious as there is nowhere else near to park. It’s madness like this that just doesn’t help. We need some common sense from the powers that be.
 
CaptainRAVE said:
It’s all too easy, that’s the problem. One of the suburbs near me has a load of unnecessary parking restrictions along the row of shops. Of course the parking wardens are all over it and as you can imagine the shop owners are furious as there is nowhere else near to park. It’s madness like this that just doesn’t help. We need some common sense from the powers that be.
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Isn't it a vicious circle of local councils funding gets cut so need to generate the deficit? Slap some more yellow lines up and send out the wardens. Quick Google and councils made 0.5bn off street parking fines income last year.
 
hyperseven said:
Isn't it a vicious circle of local councils funding gets cut so need to generate the deficit? Slap some more yellow lines up and send out the wardens. Quick Google and councils made 0.5bn off street parking fines income last year.
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Even if that is true. All they are doing is speeding up the inevitable.

By increasing rates and parking fines and restrictions. Means more businesses fail and close down. Meaning a domino effect on other businesses and then nobody is paying rates or fines so now they have a bigger hole than before.

Business rates should be free for any business with a turnover less than £5 million per retail outlet.

Parking should also be free and restrictions in place only where there is severe overcrowding.
 
Aren't we all still paying 20% VAT on most things still?

Why dont they just reduce VAT on transactions done offline? That would stimulate the high street because everything would be cheaper.
 
Europe is rotting.

USA and China are the two mega powers. And we bicker amongst ourselves when really only hope we have is to come together as a block.

We import everything, we are holding on to status by. Thread w it h service sector nd finance.

Good Times are over. Just need to hope the hardware I've got lasts. As life is going to get more expensive.
I'll just have to make cuts. Clothes, takeaways, dropping the tier of hardware. Stuff like that.
 
Online shopping sucks.
You can't ever look at something or try it for size, you have to order it and then get stuffed with return postage costs when it doesn't fit or is the wrong size... and it takes ages for turnaround. I can do all that in a single day with a real shop. I've wasted more money through shopping online for stuff that not only turned out to be unsuitable, but also not worth the hassle and costs of returning for refund.

413x said:
What do we do with the excess population if the high street died in 5 years?
That's a horrendous amount of job losses.
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They'll all be assimilated into the Amazon warehouse slave collective.
That, or we just drop some Covid parcels around their housing estate and let Nature take its course.

Alternatively - Who cares? We're already working from home and shopping from home and socialising from home. Pretty soon there will be absolutely no reason to go outside ever. You'll never leave your house, never meet any real life humans, never go anywhere without wearing a mask... It'll be like some post-apocalypse B-movie (hopefully starring Michael Ironside).

Psycho Sonny said:
What I don't like though is monopolies. Amazon and the supermarkets are too powerful. They need to bring in competition laws where if a single company holds more than x% of a market it should be forced to break up.
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No no no, can't do that. Free market economy and all that... Let the market decide.
Besides, you paved the way for these companies, you made the bed, and now you must slumber with them in it... hope you ordered enough lube online with your Prime customer account!!

Psycho Sonny said:
Would need to be a different percentage for different markets and a fluid amount subject to change regulated and governed properly by independent trustworthy individuals.
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And just where the **** do you think you'll find any "independent trustworthy individuals" this side of the galaxy??!!
Everyone involved in that will be out purely to get as much as they can by bending every rule and screwing over everyone they can. Why do you think all our industry regulators are such toothless wastes of space, and why we can get away with murder and utterly ignore all the customer complaints?
The only time things ever improve is when we're under a Labour government and standards end up dropping so low that we have to privatise the industry in order to get the cash investment required to fix things.... But now we're leaving Europe, there'll be no-one to punish such failings and enforce improvements!
 
SonicSW20 said:
Make it easier to shop in the high street. Free park and ride / free parking for shoppers would be a start for your typical town centre that's not London etc.
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Eurofighter said:
I would use the money for free parking rather than giving it to the shops. No point in a load of empty shops.
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It's interesting for you both to say offer up free parking etc. But personally even if my local high street did have free parking, it wouldn't entice me there any more than it does now.

My main reasons i'd never shop on the high street:
1) Choice - there's very few shops that i'd actually walk into (this is unfortunately part of the high street dying - most big named brands moved away from the high street years ago)
2) Cleanliness - i can't think of a single high street i've visited that just looks clean and welcoming. It's generally a row of prefab concrete blocks that look aged and dull, with little to no scenery around it.
3) Convenience - i guess one downfall of our society has become laziness. Rather than walking/driving to your local high street to buy something necessary, it's just as easy to order it on Amazon and have it delivered same day or next day. It also means it takes 5 minutes out of your day, as opposed to several hours.
4) Cost - leaving the obvious one till last. Cost is a massive factor for most people, and unless it's something you need immediately, most people would rather wait a week for delivery knowing they've saved 10-20% on the price.
 
Convenience is the main thing for me. I’ve spent more (time & money) to buy on the day in a shop and I would still buy clothes and high end electronics (think TV / stereo) in store over online.

problem is Local Authority’s making the high street so difficult and inaccessible. No reasonable public transport round here. Local Authority run parking is expensive and only takes change so can’t use contactless so the result is I just don’t bother..

sone of the restaurants started offering to pay parking charges to get people in it’s got that desperate.

for reference the car park sits mostly empty most of the day and even on weekends.
 
Stu999 said:
I always find this page (https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/9178)and the graphic at figure 2 on tax revenue sources interesting. Business rates are included in property taxes and are 9% of take. Income tax, national insurance and VAT and nearly 2/3rds of total tax take.
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Let's say you have one property. You can be employing 30 people all paying ni and paye. You then also have all the customers coming into that property paying 20% vat on every purxhase and all you need to make is a turnover of £20k a week to be handing over £200k in vat a year.

Yet you will need to pay rates once.

That is why it's a small percentage.

You won't get it unless you own commercial property.

Rates are far too high for small businesses. In fact they should be abolished. It makes the barrier to entry far too high.
 
ttaskmaster said:
Online shopping sucks.
I can do all that in a single day with a real shop. I've wasted more money through shopping online for stuff that not only turned out to be unsuitable, but also not worth the hassle and costs of returning for refund.
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I can't do it the same day. If I need a pair of Jeans for example i've got to wait until Saturday or Sunday to then go into town as everything here shuts at 5:30pm and unfortunately i'm stuck at work!. If I order it online I can have it here tomorrow and if it needs to go back sort it out tomorrow too after work, and any return postage is generally cheaper than driving into town & takes less time than messing about driving there, parking, walking to the store etc

I could go to Sainsburys/Tesco & buy some of course but i'm not really a fan of the stuff they sell or alternatively I can drive to a retail park which closes around 8pm but it's a 27 mile round trip & last time I went there to collect a phone some inconsiderate ****** smashed my car door in whilst it was parked up.
 
Rates is the issue here, taxation will not help.

I'm a little out of touch but you pay more for shop per m/2 than warehouse etc
 
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