California Sales Tax Rebate Form: Fill & Download for Free

I am not aware of California law but when I worked retail in Washington state we had a form to be filled out by residents of Oregon and Alaska, the two closest states with out a sales tax, and with proof of residency like a drivers license we did not have to charge the sales tax. I believe on the rare occasion when the customer was not a US resident we could do the same using a passport as evidence. CA might do the same but via an after purchase rebate which is more complicated.

You don’t have to charge your customers sales tax if you don’t want to. At least in Ontario Canada you don’t have to charge the federal GST. And in Quebec you don’t have to charged either the GST or the provincial PST. (The names are slightly different. Forgive the elision.)What you do have to do is REMIT the taxes.So if you sell for $100 and the sales tax is 5%, you can charge your customer $100 or $105 , but you have to give the government $5.They don’t much care where you get it.Also, again Ontario example, when you remit your taxes you can deduct any taxes you paid when you purchased AND the Ontario government gives you a rebate for the work you do in filling the form and dropping off your payment.

I don't know much about retail as an industry, so I'm going to answer completely based on personal experience. With a couple of disclaimers here and there to point out how my experience may be different from yours.On Amazon I can buy nearly every non-perishable item I need, for reasonable prices, within seconds, on my phone or my laptop, and it pretty much always just works and shows up within days and I don't need to think about it.That's really why I like Amazon. It removes a source of boredom, frustration, and distraction from my day-to-day life. If I'm running low on AA batteries or shampoo or laundry detergent, I don't have to add yet another item to the list of things I'm going to have to remember doing and keep in the back of my mind for the next week. I can just push a button and forget all about it until it shows up on my porch, and I think, "oh yeah, I needed that, glad I ordered it right away, because I'd already forgotten about it."And if I need a corkscrew or a pencil sharpener and I have no idea what makes a good corkscrew or a good pencil sharpener, I don't have to worry about learning about corkscrews or pencil sharpeners, or about having yet another substandard gadget that's going to annoy me for the next five years. I just get something with a lot of good reviews and forget about it. Amazon has invested a lot in making sure their reviews are accurate and hard to "game" and it shows.There's some real savings possible here that's not captured by straight-up comparisons of what different retailers charge for the same item, by the way. Without Amazon ratings, I might end up buying a premium brand that has invested a big marketing budget in establishing good reputation. With Amazon reviews, if you're an upstart competitor offering the same quality but without the big marketing budget, I'll probably buy your widget, because the review system can convince me your thing really is up to snuff.Amazon realizes how valuable that is to consumers, and they don't spoil it (much) by gaming the system to their own short-term advantage. I'm sure that Amazon somewhat manipulates which things it shows you based on what inventory they have to clear and which items have the highest margin and suchlike, but as far as I can tell they never try to push anything actually crappy or wildly overpriced. Try searching for HDMI cables, for instance. They'll push their store brand, which I'm sure means higher margins for them than if they pushed Belkin. But guess what... their store brand is cheap and excellent. They could've done a deal with litigious scam artists that charge $20 for a $5 cable, like ACE hardware does, but they didn't, because they understand how valuable it is when people actually trust you for advice on purchasing decisions.Now obviously Amazon is not the only retailer that tries to provide hopeless scatterbrains like me with the convenience and consistency they crave. But in my experience, they do it better than anyone else.As for your particular comments: the general theme seems to be that you are more price-sensitive and more willing to invest time in optimizing consumer purchases than I am. You and I may just be very different in that regard. Maybe you make significantly less money than I, or have significantly higher unavoidable expenses, or you are a lot more organized than I am, or you have a taste for items in categories that Amazon just isn't very good at... That's all perfectly legit, but let me address why I, personally, don't particularly care about the problems you list.Sales tax. Both Walmart and Target charge it, too, for shipping to California. For my zip code they do, anyway. I just checked.Returns. As far as I'm concerned, whether returns of perfectly good items are free is just not that important. I never return anything, basically. Well, I returned something to Amazon once. It was a television set, and the screen was scratched. They actually cross-shipped the replacement, i.e., they shipped a new one before receiving mine back, presumably on the theory that if I failed to ship mine back, they could just charge my credit card. I rarely buy anything as expensive as a TV set on Amazon, though. Mostly it's socks and paperback books and HVAC filters and combs. Things where, if I don't like it, I just won't buy it again. And your comment is specifically about returning things that actually work as advertised. Why would I want to return an SD card that wasn't faulty? If a store lets you return perfectly good things for free and and even pays for return shipping, that means you end up paying for that service even if you don't use it. I'm much more concerned with how often they ship me something that's actually broken or the wrong thing, and Amazon does that vanishingly rarely.Loyalty programs. As far as I'm concerned, when I read that "BestBuy Rewards and ToysRUs Dollars give you additional 2% cash back on every purchase in the form of gift certificates," I just say this: my capacity to deal with administrative bullshit is a scarce resource not to be squandered on retail loyalty programs. I absolutely hate having administrative overhead in my life. There's already enough bills and policies and statements and claims to keep track of. I have plenty of pieces of paper that cannot be lost, deadlines that must be kept... the last thing I want is to invite yet another thing to keep track of. I have an Amazon charge card with a 5% cash back, which gets paid in full every month, automatically, directly from my bank account. That's about the extent of hoops I'm willing to jump through to get silly loyalty program discounts. Anything beyond that and I just know that I'm going to lose the coupon or forget to use the credit before it expires or use the wrong type of ink on the rebate form or whatever.Shipping cost. As I probably mentioned by now, I have Prime. I've had it for years and I think it's a good deal. It often applies even for 3rd-party merchant items. Occasionally, for very cheap items, you'll see that a non-prime-eligible version is significantly cheaper; but that's usually for fairly bulky things that cost like $4. I don't buy the idea that the Best Buy deal you describe is somehow on par with Prime. Only a fraction of what I buy on Amazon is carried by Best Buy, and I definitely wouldn't consistently spend $1000 a year there. Anything that is only valid during "the holiday season" for some definition of "holiday season" falls squarely in the same category, for me, as grocery coupons and mail-in rebates: I'm supposed to keep track of that? Really?You also offer a possible explanation that, as far as I am concerned, personally, I can definitely refute. When it comes to actually going to Target or Walmart, I suppose some people may think it's déclassé, but I can state quite definitively that that has nothing to do with my decision to go there or not. If I need something right now, or I have reason to believe it's significantly cheaper than on Amazon, I'll gladly drive to the nearest Walmart. I dislike driving, I dislike busy places with lots of strangers, and I dislike waiting in line, but I couldn't care less if people think I'm the sort of person that shops at Walmart. If that's not enough to impress you with my don't-care-about-appearances credentials, I live in a house in East Palo Alto (the cheapest, "worst" neighborhood in Silicon Valley) that I filled with IKEA furniture and used appliances bought from a guy named Tony who keeps moving his business to a different run-down warehouse on the outskirts of San José every time his lease runs out.But much as I don't care about appearances, I do like to spend my time on things other than driving around buying furnace filters or undershirts. Most of the time, I don't need things right now, and the amount of money I could save by buying them some place other than Amazon is modest at best, and I really don't much enjoy the process of buying the necessities of everyday life. That makes Amazon an awfully attractive option.