Tim Rogers: Not in our best interest

DALTON — Good morning.

I am not a shopper.

I don’t particularly enjoy going to a mall or outlet extravaganza of stores and restaurants.

I recognize that they are necessary and have no problem telling my wife and daughters to have a nice time when they leave to hit the sales, but on the whole I would rather stay home and see if a baseball game is on or read a book.

In the same way that I am unmoved by a sign that says everything is 50 percent off, I am also not a big reader of sales circulars and inserts unless I am looking for something particular.

Once again, I count on Deb to point out the things that seem like they are a good value and that we actually might need. In that regard I am lucky. Deb is good at finding bargains and making our dollars stretch in ways that would make a gymnast envious.

But because I have three children of school age, there is one annual sales event that I actually am cognizant of every year — the back to school sales tax holiday. (I am excluding Christmas from this list because it is light years beyond any other shopping event.)

I think that I, like many people, respond to this chance to buy back-to-school clothing and supplies without paying the sales tax because it seems like more of a deal than your standard 10 percent off.

It doesn’t hurt that back-to-school shopping is now the second busiest time of the year, behind only Christmas, and that many stores would hold sales to run in conjunction with the no sales tax weekend.

So it came as a surprise to me this week when I read an item in our paper that said the back to school sales tax holiday has been suspended in Georgia for 2010 because of its cost to the state.

It seems that state bean counters figured out that the sales tax holiday — which was scheduled this year for July 29 through Aug. 2 until it was canceled — cost the state $12 million in revenue, and that a similar sales tax break usually held in October for energy-efficient appliances and other items cost another $500,000 in tax revenue.

That, the state decided, was simply too much for the state to absorb at a time when it is trying to make up for billions of dollars in lost revenue.

In a story that appeared last week in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, state Speaker of the House David Ralston was quoted as saying in March that “What I hear Georgians say is they’d rather have their classroom teachers in the classroom teaching than have that sales holiday.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that either Ralston or other state officials took the time to figure out what the cost of suspending the sales tax-free weekend would be to shoppers and businesses before they went ahead and did it.

Because if they had been talking to business owners and the thousands of Georgians who make their living working in the retail sector they would have heard a whole different story.

The state officials would have heard that this is one weekend where they can count on good sales, where they order extra inventory and actually have extra staff on hand to handle the crowds.

And if they had talked with shoppers, they would have heard that this is one weekend where they were actually planning to go out and buy things. I know that spending money seems awfully old-fashioned these days and that the polls show that we are holding on to our pennies even more tightly right now, but many of us would still have gone out and purchased something.

In that same AJC article, John Heavener, president of the Georgia Retail Association, said he believes the state actually netted about $20 million during the sales tax breaks from salary, corporate and other tax revenue generated.

“We were hoping as retailers that the common sense approach would work, and that looking at the facts and figures would convince them it was worth it in a year when everything was up in the air,” Heavener told the paper.

According to a report by the National Retail Federation, retailers estimate a 30 percent increase in sales during tax-free shopping.

The state says that its retailers will still have healthy back-to-school sales and that consumers will still get good deals, but that may be little consolation for some businesses.

If you have a clothing store on the border of South Carolina, Florida or Tennessee, all of which have a sales tax holiday weekend, you might think you have been put at a competitive disadvantage. Stores in Dalton and Whitfield County already feel enough heat from Chattanooga, why add to that load?

When it decided to suspend the sales tax holiday, the state made a decision that was in its own best interest. But I don’t think it made a decision that was necessarily in the best interest of its businesses and residents.

It certainly begs the question of who is the state looking after — us or itself?

Tim Rogers can be reached at 706-272-7735 or timrogers@daltoncitizen.com.

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