Michigan has banned the banning of plastic bags
fastcoexist.com
fastcoexist.com
Benefits: 1. Faster to stock items. 2. Cheaper to stock items (because there is no traditional stocking). 3. More environmental efficiency, given the time and energy required to stock items (though its debatable if this is actually more efficient than a few stockers -- humans use pretty little energy).
Downsides: 1. It doesn't look pretty. 2. It may be harder to find things? 3. Difficult to do with many brands (traditional supermarkets probably don't receive enough of a given brand and category of specific item to just dump an entire crate).
Incidentally, neither store gives you the discount for not using a bag at all -- just if you substitute a reusable bag for the disposable one they otherwise give you.
I try to myself, but often don't remember often.
So are wages, another thing state legislatures have started pre-empting local governments on.
>Heck, having local sales tax is already an enormous pain for online sales or mail-order.
I don't really see why "business is hard" warrants destroying local self-government, particularly in such a blatantly unprincipled way as to center power on offices held by a particular political party.
And the harder it is, the fewer small businesses will exist. Striking down pointless restrictions is a small-business boon. Allowing endlessly complexes rules of commerce is another way of solidifying power for the oligarchy. If only Google or Amazon can sort out the rules without getting penalized to death, then goodbye entrepreneur.
It's possible to not want the same policy when it would be executed in a vastly (intrastate/interstate) different context.
Also, "Business is hard, let's destroy freedom and build a one-party state!" is an obnoxiously reductive non-sequitur, disrespectful of arguments made upthread, and not really deserving of a civilized response. HN rhetoric at its finest.
It's plausibly legitimate: I can imagine possible worlds where it works that way for a good reason. I just find it hard to imagine I live in such a world, and it's vastly more plausible that here in real life it's a class-based partisan power grab.
Many of the bag fees and minimum-wage rises haven't even been passed by Party X: they've actually been ballot initiatives. So "partisanship" isn't even an adequate excuse. We really are looking at state legislators directly overriding the will of the voters because they don't like the outcomes.
Oh boo hoo. First of all, your customers need infrastructure and if they choose to fund it from taxes that they pay that's their business.
Second of all, that "enormous pain" can be outsourced to a service that knows the various tax regimes. You have to get it right, but you don't need to know the details any more than you need to know how to design the computer your e-commerce platform is running on.
Well if your buddy doesn't understand how to manage his bandwidth or AWS costs, or doesn't know to switch off the heater when leaving for home and runs up a huge bill, you don't call it a 'small business tax'.
I get it: there are a lot of things to keep track of running a business, and the fewer you have to deal with the better. I just don't understand why taxes are somehow magically terrible while setting up your web site or payment processing is somehow legit.
It's their business how they tax entities that are actually located within their borders. It's not their business to tax entities that are located outside those borders, even in other states, and merely ship into the locality. If the locality doesn't like that, they're free to ban shipping and the USPS, but I don't think the Federal government will take too kindly to that.
They are taxing entities located within their borders: the customers pay the tax, not the company. Sure, in theory you could require all the purchasers to keep track of all their purchases and remit the tax at tax time. Right.
It's hardly unreasonable that the person handling the cash and who already has to keep track of all the transactions should aggregate and manage these taxes.
I'm surprised that a CC provider hasn't offered to take care of all this for small providers.
Placing this burden on the merchant absolutely DOES amount to a "tax" on the merchant. Time isn't free. And using the legal system against merchants who refuse or who make mistakes with taxes supposedly due to some little town that the merchant has never ever visited amounts to a violation of interstate commerce.
If the locality can't get their citizens to remit their own taxes properly, that's their own problem and they need to more strongly enforce their laws on their own citizens.
No it fucking won't.
This is just symbolic red meat for the exurban base and a deliberate poke in the eye to urban liberals (in the American sense of the term.)
If there's upside to this sort of nonsense, it is that the congenital inability of the cussed-mean segment of the American body politic to restrain itself from repeatedly delivering insults of this kind tends to be a major factor limiting its reach. See Pat McCrory.
some will say that a drop of oil can polute acres of sea
or a drop of semen can fertilize a country.
but those don't actually happen in real life.
so the answer to your question can be little to very polluting (a bag requires more than a drop of oil), depend on what you believe.