As shoppers prepare to hit the Web to find the season’s best deals, Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., told reporters on Monday he would continue to push for an online sales tax that would put Vermont’s downtown retail stores on equal footing with their virtual counterparts.
“Downtown retailers are willing to compete, but you have to have a level playing field,” Welch said at a news conference at Onion River Sports in Montpelier. The purpose of the event was to encourage Vermonters to shop in their local stores this holiday season.
Welch is one of several lead sponsors of the Marketplace Fairness Act, which passed the Senate this year. The bill, S.743, gives states the authority to collect a sales tax at the time of an online transaction. Many states require consumers to pay a tax on Internet sales, but unlike brick-and-mortar retail locations, many online retailers don’t collect them.
“You can’t have a two-tiered system where retailer A is required to collect it and retailer B isn’t,” Welch said. “It would be no different than if you had retailers on the south side of the street obligated to collect and retailers on the north side of the street who don’t.”
There is significant bipartisan support for the bill, including some “anti-tax Republicans,” Welch said.
“They see this not as a new tax but as a due tax,” he said. Rep. Steve Womack, an Arkansas Republican, for example, sees an Internet sales tax as a way to revitalize downtowns.
The bill also has support from retail trade associations and some Internet giants such as Amazon, according to Marc Sherman, president of the Vermont Retail Association’s board of trustees.
Sherman said an Internet sales tax would help many downtown Vermont businesses struggling to enter into the ever-changing landscape and competition of the online marketplace.
“In some ways, it’s really uncharted territory how Main Street going to now survive with the growing online marketplace,” he said after the news conference. “And the Marketplace Fairness Act would be a big part of, I think, making it easier for Main Street to compete.”
Sherman, who is the founder of the country store Stowe Mercantile, said the Internet marketplace is more complicated than it was 10 years ago.
He said small retailers have a tough time getting traffic because search engine ranking systems put them at the bottom of the list. As a result, many retailers have a dim presence online, he said.
For this holiday season, lawmakers and business leaders came to Vermont’s capital to launch a “shopping in Vermont” awareness campaign inside Montpelier’s outdoor recreation retail store, Onion River Sports.
“Buy Vermont,” Gov. Peter Shumlin said during the news conference. “If you spend your money in Vermont, it keeps money in Vermont, it creates jobs, economic opportunity and it keeps our downtown strong.”
