I hate to shop. I don’t have the patience for it. I have three kids and if you’ve ever been behind me in line at the store (first of all, I apologize), you know that the whole production takes forever. Add to the timing pressure the fact that I work and I write… And well, you get the picture. This is why I’m a pretty big fan of online shopping when possible.
Around the holidays, I find it particularly convenient because my time is even more crunched. This year, I have a couple of events coming up and I needed something to wear so I decided to whip out the Nordstrom’s gift card that I’ve been carrying around and order a few things online. Easy peasy, right?
I clicked through and put a few things in my cart. Nordstrom’s was offering free shipping with my purchase so I was getting out of the online store without ponying up a penny of my own money. Nice, right?
Except that when I went to check out, I owed a balance. I scanned my cart and saw a charge for sales tax. That was clearly an error since in Pennsylvania, there is no sales tax on clothing. And since sales tax is a state specific charge, for online purposes, the tax is levied on the purchase according to the location of the shopper. In my case, that equaled no sales tax.
So I did what any self-respecting tax blogger would do: I called up Customer Service at Nordstrom. For the record, they were lovely. I asked why I was being charged sales tax and I got this politely worded (but oddly confusing) explanation about how the charge appears in the cart until the order is shipped, at which time there’s an adjustment according to where the package is going. Initially, however, you have to pay enough to cover the cost of the alleged sales tax. I did.
My package shipped out last night. And sure enough, the email that alerted me that the order was finalized noted that there was no sales tax charged to me.
But goodness. So confusing.
I understand why taxpayers want online sales tax to be more simple though I admit that I am not crazy about most of the proposals to fix it. There’s an awfully fine balance to be had here – weighing the rights of states to control their own economic policies against the need for retailers to make customers happy. Quirky tax bloggers notwithstanding, most online shoppers just want to buy a scarf or a Harry Potter DVD with the least amount of effort. Maybe we can figure out a way to make that happen – with no bah humbug required?
