Online sales tax considered in bid to save the high street
- Thread starter chaparral
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That sounds depressingly legit.
Soldato
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What's killed the high street is councils and landlords, ridiculous parking charges, extortionate rents on premises, the list goes on.
N
Nope. The endless choice provided by the Internet has given the consumer the power to compare ALL shops, products and prices, from where ever you like. You’re no longer limited to Boots, Burton and Holland & Barret and the other generic British high street brands.
By also being able to compare price, it has driven down the mark up on products driving companies to adopt a more effective model.
the high street has been doomed since internet shopping created.
when the coal mines closed people found other work, so will retail. It may take the government to help change direction to reduce the time taken.
Nope. The endless choice provided by the Internet has given the consumer the power to compare ALL shops, products and prices, from where ever you like. You’re no longer limited to Boots, Burton and Holland & Barret and the other generic British high street brands.
By also being able to compare price, it has driven down the mark up on products driving companies to adopt a more effective model.
the high street has been doomed since internet shopping created.
when the coal mines closed people found other work, so will retail. It may take the government to help change direction to reduce the time taken.
Soldato
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This is from your perspective, a great many people actually enjoy the experience of going to the shops
Caporegime
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Only thing I enjoy is going to IKEA. Everything else could quite happily go online.
I went into my local shop on the off chance to get some nice coasters/mats for a BBQ to be greeted with a selection of three products. Amazon prime can give me 100's to chose from with 24 hour delivery.
I went into my local shop on the off chance to get some nice coasters/mats for a BBQ to be greeted with a selection of three products. Amazon prime can give me 100's to chose from with 24 hour delivery.
When this all settles and the death rate is just like seasonal flu I wonder how the highsteet will look.
Will it be very regional where big hubs (Cardiff etc) still have a lot of for fall, but some of the smaller towns are the ones to suffer?
Also can't imagine the town centre will be very appealing to live. All those flats that were once useful if you wanted to live in a bustling area with everything in walking distance.
Wonder how much council tax will have to increase due to business revenue falls.
Will it be very regional where big hubs (Cardiff etc) still have a lot of for fall, but some of the smaller towns are the ones to suffer?
Also can't imagine the town centre will be very appealing to live. All those flats that were once useful if you wanted to live in a bustling area with everything in walking distance.
Wonder how much council tax will have to increase due to business revenue falls.
they are mostly OAP's and they enjoy it because they can get to the town for free and it get's them out of their houses and they have time to burn wandering around window shopping. FOr the average wage earner getting to town costs more than the delivery charges you might get online, parking charges are basically going into orbit and 9 times out of 10 the shops don't even have what you are looking for as they can't carry endless lines like an online shop.
The mental rates / rents / parking charges / bus fare charges / train fares all serve to accelerate how fast the highstreet is going down, and those glutonous landlords actually don't care as they are the ones gouging the ever living **** out of small businesses.
Where I live there is a local hardware store on the highstreet, however to get there i need to drive 3 miles and then the parking charge starts at 3.50/hour or a fiver for 2 hours. The bus fare is 4.70 return. I needed to pick up a new makita lithium ion 18v battery and I had laready phoned to ask if the store had them in stock, the geeser siad yes and it was £79.99. By the time you add travel costs / parking you can call that around 84-85 quid. I bought the same thing from amazon for £64 and it arived less than 24 hours after I purchased it with no delivery charges. Why am i going to spend over the odds to get the same thing from a physical store. The government would need to put on over 20% online sales tax to even start reching parity and even then I would still order online because why I am going to pay through the roof bus fares or parking charges when i can just order it from the comfort of my own house ?
The online sales tax will do nothing other than line a few governmental pockets, it will not have the effect of driving anyone back to physical stores because the level of online sales tax they would need to apply would be reaching upwards of 20 to 30% to have that effect and there is no way any government of any leaning will slap a 20% + tax on these sales without there being a massive backlash
Not enough to justify saving it. Money talks.
I'd much rather see town centres, offices, etc, reclaimed and converted to housing. It may help even the field for the younger generations in terms of ability to own their own home.
Yeah I think it would have to be at least 10 percent to make a difference.
I think for me it would have to be 20 percent too.
Soldato
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It's what the people voted for so clearly it must be what they want, else they'd have voted differently, no?
I never was.
The majority of the things I buy, that aren't from supermarkets, I still get from the same small, independent sellers and retailers. I purposely avoided the soulless big brand names, yet here we are being dominated and controlled by the biggest soulless, faceless brand names going.
Oh, is that why stuff is getting more expensive than ever, then? 'Effective modelling' strategies?
After 23 years, the damage to the economy still hadn't recovered. It wasn't even halfway there.
There remained a lot of unemployment among those workers, right up until they hit pension age. A good deal of them were simply shunted over to incapacity benefits.
Those comparative few who did find work found it in industries like steel, car manufacturing, and many others that we no longer have these days either.
Remember, this was only a couple hundred thousand people, as well.
High Streets employ millions of people. Heck, they lost 140,000 jobs just in 2019 alone.
https://www.channel4.com/media/c4-news/pdf/coalfields.pdf
They didnt. Whole areas are still decimated from the closure of the coal mines almost 40 years later.
In the coal mining regions 222,000 miners lost their jobs and there was already 160,000 unemployed men in those areas. There has been 86,000 new males added to those areas so the total without jobs is 468,600.
New non coal jobs created since the mines shut is 132,400. Total job shortfall is 247,600.
So they have never recovered and never will. Economically inactive is running at 21.9% in coal mining regions.
In Wales 18% of the coal miners are still claiming incapacity benefit 20 years later.
And we were only talking about 222,000 people. Now you are saying about millions of people will lose their jobs and find new ones.
Exactly.
People saying its all gone because we are ok.
You don't know what you don't see. Most of us don't see these communities.
You certainly will if retail dies. And the scale will be order of magnitude bigger.
When you have that many people out of work, you need population to fall normally. That's what would happen in nature. Not enough food.. Population Decrease. Our culture is preserve life at all costs. So those costs will have to be met by the productive. A small population that you require more from.
Warehouses and delivery is more efficient partly due to needing less people.
These jobs aren't going to be absorbed elsewhere. Anyone who thinks these people will be ok is delusional
This is a very difficult problem for society. Part of it in the UK will also be the high cost of living which is driven by the ludicrous cost of housing. Could be some very tough times in the next 5 years.
Was there a referendum? Was this tax in the manifesto?
Soldato
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Maybe the high street could be saved if business rates, rent and all the other costs involved in running a brick & mortar store were reduced
But that would be too easy and sensible to make the high street competitive again, government will never learn that tax doesn't work, people either pay the tax for convenience or revolt if it's too high
But that would be too easy and sensible to make the high street competitive again, government will never learn that tax doesn't work, people either pay the tax for convenience or revolt if it's too high
Soldato
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I havn't been near the main shopping streets in this town for 20 years no cars allowed ridiculous parking charges everywhere (won't bother cutting the verges or looking after the roads but they'll charge you up to the hilt to leave a car) buses only, utter lunacy.
In a word, taxes. For local councils its their biggest moneyspinner if you think your council tax bill is high its nothing compared to the business rates shops pay not to mention ground rent etc. They don't want it to die because they want the money why do you think the high street is more expensive? All the overheads wages, buildings maintenence, heating, etc etc. But mostly they want the taxes.
In a word, taxes. For local councils its their biggest moneyspinner if you think your council tax bill is high its nothing compared to the business rates shops pay not to mention ground rent etc. They don't want it to die because they want the money why do you think the high street is more expensive? All the overheads wages, buildings maintenence, heating, etc etc. But mostly they want the taxes.
Soldato
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Well, as I understand this from reading the reports, this is a tax on companies not on customers.
I believe they did also have something about increasing Corporation Tax, or at least keeping it the same, but again this is an entirely new tax and is on companies not on people.
So yeah, I'm sure a talented spin doctor could quite easily find how this was technically in the Tory manifesto.
It could be worse - We could be under Labour!
an online sales tax would have to be at the point of sale, so customers would get nailed. If they want to actually get the tax that large corporations owe it means lots of tory weasels having to grow large testicles and going after the likes of Bezos, so that is never going to happen.