I am glad my shop days were over before the wild open market of the internet set in. We mostly had to worry about product subverting our market area commitment via dealer agreements and "promises" of protected regions; if we piped product into another dealer's area through some non-listed location we would be in violation. Our continued access to those products depended upon adherence to those agreements. The internet has brought out the worst of either enforcement of those old concepts or integrity to them by those who just see the product as the media with which they keep volume flowing to make the maths work.
Andy Cheatham Pittsburgh On Monday, May 20, 2013 6:56:25 PM UTC-4, Jan Heine wrote: > > True story: > > Customer walked into local bike shop. Looked at a wheelset from a local > distributor (Seattle Bike Supply). Decided to buy the same wheelset from a > mail-order shop in Florida. The price is the same, but customer doesn't pay > sales tax, and shipping is free on orders over a certain threshold. So the > wheelset was shipped to Florida, then returned to Seattle, all to evade > some taxes. > > Whether you are for or against taxes, it makes sense to apply them the > same across the board. Small businesses like Compass Bicycles will be > exempt. Rivendell, with 15 employees, isn't that small any longer. In > theory, this gives small businesses an unfair advantage. A national sales > tax that would be paid by everybody would solve that problem, but that's > not feasible for other reasons. (That said, economies of scale are such > that big companies don't have to worry about us small ones having unfair > advantages.) > > There will be software to allow for compliance. Compare this to a bulk > mailing, where you have to sort your mail based on the U.S. Postal > Service's ever-changing routing arrangements. For $ 30/year, you can get > simple software that does the sorting all for you. The price includes > updates every few months... just like you would need because some > municipality has decided to buy another ambulance and increased their sales > tax by 0.1%. > > Jan Heine > Compass Bicycles Ltd. > http://www.compasscycle.com > > Follow our blog at http://janheine.wordpress.com/ > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en-US. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
