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Walgreens.com Overcharged on Sales Tax in MA

January 23, 2024January 22, 2024 by Edgar (aka MrConsumer)

Just before the holidays, MrConsumer spotted a bargain on Royal Dansk butter cookies at Walgreens.com and ordered 10 of them for pickup at his local Walgreens just outside of Boston.

In the ordering process, he noticed that inexplicably he was going to be charged $1.79 in sales tax on them.

Walgreens tax

Food in Massachusetts is not subject to sales tax except in restaurants by law.

*MOUSE PRINT:

sales tax rule in MA

So before finalizing the order, he called the Walgreens 800 number to see if they could adjust the total to the correct amount. They could not, but said to call back after making the pickup and they would provide a credit.

Upon pickup the next day, I asked the store manager to correct the bill but he could not because it was an online order. Then I called online customer service again and asked for the credit as I had been promised the day before. “Oh, we don’t give back sales tax” was the customer service person’s response. After she started saying that they base sales tax on where the company is located — in Illinois — a total misunderstanding and misrepresentation of how sales tax works, I asked for a supervisor. All that representative was able to do was fill out a form to be sent to the Walgreens tax people for their review.

Of course, MrConsumer’s long-held belief is if a company was going to overcharge anyone, they would never choose him alone to do it to.

So I went back to the Walgreens website to try to figure out the extent of the tax overcharging in Massachusetts. I put some test purchases of various nontaxable items in my cart to see if tax would be charged. Here’s one of the them.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Consumer World Photo Illustration

Sure enough, it appears for some unknown period of time Walgreens.com had been charging a 7-percent sales tax on cookies and crackers here wrongfully. And that isn’t even the right sales tax rate in Massachusetts. We pay 6.25-percent on taxable sales, while 7-percent is the meals tax rate.

After a total of four or five unsatisfying contacts with Walgreens’ 800 number and their online customer service department, four days after placing the order, they corrected the website. And the day after that, I was issued a $1.79 refund for the tax overcharge and a $50 e-gift card for bringing the matter to their attention.

tax refund

Consumer World asked Walgreens PR folks how such a taxation mistake could happen, how long they have been overcharging customers, how much money was collected, and what they were going to do to refund the overcharges. They first said that the problem was limited just to that one brand of butter cookies. But after suggesting they were minimizing the extent of the issue, further research they did revealed the problem was much broader affecting baked snack foods like Twinkies, as well as all cookies and crackers.

In a conference call with two Walgreens officials in December, the company admitted the problem was of their own doing and not of an outside contactor. They explained that they erroneously categorized certain snack foods as bakery items which they thought were taxable.

When pressed to answer the rest of our questions, they later said that they could not determine how long the overcharging had been going on, and due to system limitations, they could not make automatic refunds.

The company also provided this emailed statement which said in relevant part:

If customers believe they have been impacted and now owed a sales tax refund, please contact 877-250-5823 for assistance. We ask that impacted customers who call this number have on hand the order number found on their receipt to assist with the query. Walgreens does not profit off sales tax errors of this kind, as all tax collected is turned over to the state and local taxing authorities.

Consumer World is pleased to see that Walgreens at least fessed up to the problem and corrected it relatively quickly after our contact. We’re disappointed they can’t make automatic refunds since they already have two-years-worth of receipts right on their website. Shoppers should not have to scrutinize and recalculate the tax on every sales slip to figure out if they have been overcharged.

This is not the first time Walgreens has been accused of overcharging on sales tax. They were sued or called out for improperly charging tax on toilet paper in Pennsylvania last year, on COVID test kits in New York in 2022, on milk in Massachusetts in 2019, and on bottled water and certain unsweetened beverages in several Illinois areas in 2015 and 2017.

Many retailers have been accused of overcharging on sales tax over the years, so getting this bit of retail law correct has been a challenge for stores because of the complexity and varying nature of state and local rules.

None of that, however, excuses stores for not getting it right.

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Verizon to Refund $100-Mil for Hidden Fees

January 8, 2024 by Edgar (aka MrConsumer)

Verizon Wireless has tentatively settled a class action lawsuit that alleged the company advertised a price for cell plans but then jacked-up consumers’ bills with hidden administrative charges.

*MOUSE PRINT:

The complaint specifically alleges:

The Administrative Charge is not disclosed to customers either before or when they agree to purchase wireless service from Verizon, and in fact the Administrative Charge is never adequately or honestly disclosed to customers.

The current amount of the Administrative Charge is $3.30 per line per month—a more than 8X increase from the original amount of the Charge [40 cents].

The first time Verizon customers can possibly learn about the existence of the Administrative Charge, or the amount of the Charge, is on the customer bills… [but] Verizon’s paper bills fail to mention the Administrative Charge at all, stating instead that a customer should “[c]heck your online bill for all surcharges, taxes and gov fees.”

[F]or years, Verizon explicitly and falsely stated on its monthly bills that the Administrative-Charge is a surcharge imposed on subscribers to “cover the costs that are billed to us by federal, state or local governments.”

For its part, Verizon has denied the claims, but says it has changed the way it describes those fees.

Verizon customers who purchased postpaid cell or data plans from the company between January 1, 2016 and November 8, 2023 are eligible to share in the $100-million proposed settlement. The maximum payment is $100, but that could be reduced based on how many consumers file claims and for how long they were a customer.

Claims must be filed by April 15, 2024 at the settlement website. Most customers were just notified via postcard of their eligibility to file a claim and were given a notice ID and confirmation code to enter on the website. If you did not receive that, here is the official claim form.

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Kohl’s Sued for Exaggerated Savings Claims

January 1, 2024 by Edgar (aka MrConsumer)

Kohl's bargain Recently, a Wisconsin consumer sued Kohl’s for deceptive pricing practices alleging that the retailer inflated it’s regular and original prices on price tags and in advertising to make the savings they promised seem greater than they really were. The complaint also alleges that in many cases the goods rarely or ever sold for the so-called “regular” or “original” prices.

The consumer’s lawyer tracked Kohl’s prices for a 15-month time period, and found over 9,000 products on its website were on sale more than half the time. And…

*MOUSE PRINT:

… some products were perpetually on sale for as many as 90 days out of every 90-day window. In short, the data shows that Kohl’s turns the concept of a “sale” on its head: for the vast majority of products, the so-called “sale” price is the regular and normal price, while the higher advertised “Regular” or “Original” comparison price is the temporary and unusual exception.

MrConsumer says so what else is new? Twenty years ago, he tracked the prices of 20 items at Kohl’s for 103 consecutive days, and found that 55-percent of items rarely if ever sold for the so-called regular or original price. And one-out-of-four items was always on sale and never sold at full price, not even for one day.

Years later, we exposed the ambiguous definitions of regular or original prices used by Kohl’s back in 2006 and spotlighted a similar lawsuit to the current one against the company in 2013.

Nonetheless, we as consumers, should all continue to be outraged that companies use deceptive practices like this year after year, and no one has gotten them to conform to the law.