{"id":1061,"date":"2004-06-19T16:38:00","date_gmt":"2004-06-19T16:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=1061"},"modified":"2018-08-13T14:49:01","modified_gmt":"2018-08-13T19:49:01","slug":"1061","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2004\/06\/19\/1061\/","title":{"rendered":"Lose\/Lose"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hey, everyone&#8217;s a loser in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stltoday.com\/stltoday\/news\/stories.nsf\/News\/St.+Louis+City+%2F+County\/A6F9B0E2233A57AD86256EB80011B87A?OpenDocument&#038;Headline=Schnucks,+Dierbergs+supermarkets+will+pay+penalties+to+state\" target=\"new\">this story<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Attorney General Jay Nixon said Friday that Schnucks and Dierbergs stores had been adding a surcharge onto video rental bills that looked like a sales tax but wasn&#8217;t. He said the companies had kept some of the money. <\/p>\n<p>Nixon said the two supermarket chains had agreed to stop the practice and pay $110,000 each in penalties to the state. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Salient points:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>Business<\/b>, since Dierberg&#8217;s and Schnucks saw fit to levy a 7% surcharge on video rentals and labeling it a &#8220;tax\/surcharge&#8221; even though the State of Missouri does not levy a sales tax in these situations.  By breaking out the extra portion of the price, these supermarket chains do the same thing telephone companies, utilities, and mechanics do: they hide, deceive, and trick customers with extra line items on the invoice to generate extra revenue.  Listen, you damn creative business types: mark one price that includes all of your costs of business and tell me up front.\n<p>P.S. Thanks for the statements that you didn&#8217;t do anything wrong here.  Smeg off, you stooges.  Even the laissez-faire amongst us recognize you&#8217;re not victims here.<\/p>\n<li><b>The consumers<\/b>, who have paid extra seven cents per $1.00 rental for who knows how long.  $1.07 isn&#8217;t so bad for a video rental, but getting institutionally suckered is.\n<li><b>The attorney general<\/b>, who had to conduct a year-long investigation to net $220,000 in fines.  Certainly not cost effective, and certainly not where I would allocate assets, but unquestionably, the wrong doers were doing wrong.\n<li><b>The taxpayers<\/b>, who had to underwrite an investigation costing more than $220,000.<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hey, everyone&#8217;s a loser in this story: Attorney General Jay Nixon said Friday that Schnucks and Dierbergs stores had been adding a surcharge onto video rental bills that looked like a sales tax but wasn&#8217;t. He said the companies had kept some of the money. Nixon said the two supermarket chains had agreed to stop [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1061"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23179,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1061\/revisions\/23179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}