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Philly Mayor Blames Retailers of Soda Price Gouging

jonny5

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City puts a tax on soda. Businesses raise price of soda. No one saw this coming.

Philly Mayor Blames ?Price Gouging? for Outrage Generated by City?s New Soda Tax - Hit & Run : Reason.com

The distributors sells five-gallon boxes of syrup that can be used in soda fountains, and each box costs a retailer about $60. Thanks to the city's new tax, though, retailers have to pay $57.60 in taxes for each of those boxes of syrup.

"We're not talking about a couple of bucks on a $60 item," Andy Pincus, who owns Carbonator Rental Services, told Newsworks. "We're talking about $57.60 on a $60 item. It's too big not to pass on."

Then again, maybe this is exactly what govt wanted?
 
City puts a tax on soda. Businesses raise price of soda. No one saw this coming.
When there's an increased focus on things like "Theory Of Gender" and internships for paid protesters and less focus on business, these are the types of policies that get enacted.
 
City puts a tax on soda. Businesses raise price of soda. No one saw this coming.

Then again, maybe this is exactly what govt wanted?

So why would the mayor be unhappy? Politicians want xxxl to go away. Lots of people won't want to pay so much more. I wonder. Will they turn to beer?
 
City puts a tax on soda. Businesses raise price of soda. No one saw this coming.



Then again, maybe this is exactly what govt wanted?

I mean, if they just doubled the retail price of a product, how could one not imagine that retailers would have to raise prices. Perhaps so much so that people go elsewhere for their pop. Still, the tax was far too excessive. Taxes and death, can't avoid them, but there are limits...well maybe not to death.
 
So why would the mayor be unhappy? Politicians want xxxl to go away. Lots of people won't want to pay so much more. I wonder. Will they turn to beer?

Thats what I was thinking too. Isnt this was they wanted? Well, what half the people wanted anyway.
 
Typical liberal, tax the bejeezus out of something and blame businesses when the price goes up.
 
I mean, if they just doubled the retail price of a product, how could one not imagine that retailers would have to raise prices. Perhaps so much so that people go elsewhere for their pop. Still, the tax was far too excessive. Taxes and death, can't avoid them, but there are limits...well maybe not to death.

They did not double the price of a retain product they doubled the price of a raw material, which as I understand it is the among the most profitable items in fast food or corner stores. Fountain soda's are cheap

Non-Alcoholic Beverages
This would include all soft drinks, coffee, and tea. The cost for restaurants in this area is literally pennies on the dollar. This is why many restaurants and chains switched to "free refills" without worrying one bit about their bottom line. These items cost the restaurant between 5 cents and 20 cents per serving. Keep that in mind the next time you want to order a $2.50 Coke. Soda is so cheap that paper cups, when used, represent a bigger expense than the soda itself.
Top 5 food mark-ups where restaurants make huge profits - AOL Finance

The city double the price of the syrup, not the diluted carbonated product people would buy. This of course is just for fountain drinks I dont know what the tax increase was for canned or bottled pop
 
City puts a tax on soda. Businesses raise price of soda. No one saw this coming.



Then again, maybe this is exactly what govt wanted?

Must be what they wanted. Any high school student could tell you that every tax on business ends up on a price tag, ultimately.
 
City puts a tax on soda. Businesses raise price of soda. No one saw this coming.

Sorry, without knowing him or her I would assume the Philly mayor is a moron.
 
They did not double the price of a retain product they doubled the price of a raw material, which as I understand it is the among the most profitable items in fast food or corner stores. Fountain soda's are cheap


Top 5 food mark-ups where restaurants make huge profits - AOL Finance

The city double the price of the syrup, not the diluted carbonated product people would buy. This of course is just for fountain drinks I dont know what the tax increase was for canned or bottled pop

Figure you get 120 32oz sodas out of the syrup box the article talks about. If you sell a 32 oz soda for $0.99 you'll generate $118.80 revenue from that syrup box. If the box, including tax, costs $117.70 that leaves the retailer $1.10 with which to purchase 120 cups, 120 lids and 120 straws for those sodas PLUS pay for the electricity to run the machine, pay cor the CO2 for the machine, pay his employees, pay rent and so on and so forth.
 
City puts a tax on soda. Businesses raise price of soda. No one saw this coming.



Then again, maybe this is exactly what govt wanted?

Just yet another example of liberal policies backfiring. I swear, they just have no brains at all and have no clue about how markets work.
 
Figure you get 120 32oz sodas out of the syrup box the article talks about. If you sell a 32 oz soda for $0.99 you'll generate $118.80 revenue from that syrup box. If the box, including tax, costs $117.70 that leaves the retailer $1.10 with which to purchase 120 cups, 120 lids and 120 straws for those sodas PLUS pay for the electricity to run the machine, pay cor the CO2 for the machine, pay his employees, pay rent and so on and so forth.

don't post facts. we just care about EMO soda bad.
 
Just yet another example of liberal policies backfiring. I swear, they just have no brains at all and have no clue about how markets work.

emotional arguments are all they care about.
 
emotional arguments are all they care about.

I remember watching Bill O'Reilly interview Whoopi Goldberg once. I forgot what they were discussing but O'Reilly was trying to talk facts and figures with her on the subject at hand and Whoopi would have none of it, saying that she didn't care about facts and figures, she forms opinions based on what she feels in her heart. O'Reilly was extremely nice to her as he realized he couldn't have a discussion with someone who didn't want to talk about facts.
 
Thats what I was thinking too. Isnt this was they wanted? Well, what half the people wanted anyway.

Which half? The xxxl ones?
 
I honestly don't understand what the mayor is complaining about. This was the intent of the tax, right? If retailers didn't pass on the cost then people would drink just as much of it as before.
 
They did not double the price of a retain product they doubled the price of a raw material, which as I understand it is the among the most profitable items in fast food or corner stores. Fountain soda's are cheap


Top 5 food mark-ups where restaurants make huge profits - AOL Finance

The city double the price of the syrup, not the diluted carbonated product people would buy. This of course is just for fountain drinks I dont know what the tax increase was for canned or bottled pop

Well from the article it does say that a 60 dollar box of syrup now has about 60 bucks worth of tax. You cannot tax so high and think that businesses are just going to eat it.
 
Well from the article it does say that a 60 dollar box of syrup now has about 60 bucks worth of tax. You cannot tax so high and think that businesses are just going to eat it.

That's the trouble with all liberal policies of wealth redistribution. The left just somehow believes that they can institute a redistribution policy and businesses will just absorb the loss without taking any corrective actions. They really believe that businesses will just lie there and take it up the ass. I just never understood that time after time after time of the same thing happening that they keep on coming up with basically the same ideas over and over. It's like their brains are hard wired for trying to implement socialism under a Democratic Capitalist society. You just can't implement socialist ideas under Democratic free market capitalism but so far it has yet to sink in to them.
 
Well from the article it does say that a 60 dollar box of syrup now has about 60 bucks worth of tax. You cannot tax so high and think that businesses are just going to eat it.

Of course, I would at the least expect 30-60 % increase at the retail level
 
City puts a tax on soda. Businesses raise price of soda. No one saw this coming.

hmmmmm...



Well, is the price increase per ounce, at retailers, equivalent to or greater than the tax per ounce applied to wholesalers? That would seem to be the beginning and end of it.
 
City puts a tax on soda. Businesses raise price of soda. No one saw this coming.



Then again, maybe this is exactly what govt wanted?

Glenn Beck, who we are stuck with for afternoon radio programming on our main station here, made a huge deal about this the other day. Personally I think the whole thing pretty dumb to get in a dither about, but then I don't drink much soda either. I figure the market will fix it because if nobody buys the stuff at high prices, the prices will either drop or they'll dump the tax.
 
Glenn Beck, who we are stuck with for afternoon radio programming on our main station here, made a huge deal about this the other day. Personally I think the whole thing pretty dumb to get in a dither about, but then I don't drink much soda either. I figure the market will fix it because if nobody buys the stuff at high prices, the prices will either drop or they'll dump the tax.
Not unheard of, but still rare.
 
City puts a tax on soda. Businesses raise price of soda. No one saw this coming.



Then again, maybe this is exactly what govt wanted?

The only logical reason for government to put an onerous tax on a consumer product is to drive down consumption of that product. It works, to some extent, with cigarettes and booze, the two historical "sin taxes" but attempts to put such a tax on snack foods has failed wherever it's been tried so far and the backlash from the public, like in NYC with Grandma Bloomberg's meddling, bites the instigators of the tax in the butt.

This is the same argument that is being peddled with carbon pricing/taxes - drive up fossil fuel costs to encourage moves to alternatives and/or simply reduce consumption of fossil fuels. Problem is, most people don't consider gas for their cars or a pop to be a vice the way the nanny state does.
 
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