Sales tax holiday

This weekend is a sales tax holiday for Massachusetts. Some year I’ll actually be organized enough to order something significant like replacement windows during the sales tax holiday, but it hasn’t happened yet. The only things I was ready to buy this year were a few Costco and Best Buy items and a laptop.

Costco charged sales tax online, and required me to call in to have the rep fill out a form to email to a different department at Costco to refund the sales tax.

Apple charged sales tax online, and said that they’ll refund the sales tax to my credit card. Not clear if that’s automatic or because I called.

Best Buy charged sales tax online, and had to redo the order on the phone, and then lower the item price by the amount of the sales tax so that the new total with sales tax would be slightly less than what the order should have been without collecting sales tax.

These are all retailers with significant presences in Massachusetts. I’m a bit baffled that none of them could handle this correctly, but it makes me feel better about the fact that my own web site has the same problem.