If you are anything like me, you do a lot, if not the brunt of your shopping online these days. I mean, Amazon just makes it so easy, right? And this year, the convenience of getting what you want sent right to your day is more important than ever.
With COVID still very much a threat, many stores are still closed if not more than a passing irritation. And if they aren’t, population capacities are limited, and masks are pretty much required everywhere. Besides, once you get to a physical brick and mortar store, chances are selection is limited, and they’re out of what you really wanted or needed.
And then, of course, there are liberal governors after progressive elected officials saying you should avoid going out, with some even putting stay-at-home orders in place.
Luckily, these changes to our shopping routines have allowed many businesses to really make a go of having an online presence or make online shopping far more available than before. Hell, even grocery stores are taking their sales to the worldwide web, offering such things as delivery to your day or curbside pickup of your house favorites.
However, for those living in New York City, the pros of staying in and ordering online are about to go up in smoke – or at least get a bit more expensive.
As you well know, the city, as a whole, is experiencing what one might call a financial crisis, thanks to COVID-19 and the poor way it was handled there. And the city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority is no exception.
Now, naturally, they are trying to rectify the situation. But how they plan to do it is rather bizarre, if not wholly abominable. According to the department’s leading Democrats, the only solution is, of course, more taxes.
This time, the tax will be taken on your mail packages received.
As WNBC-TV reports, New York State Assemblyman Robert Carroll proposed the idea via a new bill that would require all New Yorkers to pay a $3 surcharge on every online package ordered, except those that contain medicine or food.
Carroll, along with the international president of the Transportation Workers Union, John Samuelsen, says that the bill will raise about $1 billion per year for the MTA but would also encourage NYC residents to do more shopping in person and help with climate change.
In an op-ed the pair wrote for the New York Daily News on Monday, the bill, in theory, would also change how Amazon does their business, although it’s hard to see how.
They wrote, “Instead of shipping someone a pair of new sneakers on Monday, a pair of socks on Wednesday and a toaster oven on Friday, Amazon could put them into one box and (gasp) make you wait a little.”
Note, the keyword here is could.
Amazon (assuming this is the company everyone is ordering from) would indeed be helping out the environment. Instead of three shipping packages and three trips down your road by a fossil-fuel operated vehicle, the instance above would only be reduced to one.
But who’s to say Amazon is everyone’s go-to shopping store? Plus, they are putting a bill forward that could charge customers not, not Amazon. So why would Amazon need to change their shipping process, particularly for just one city – albeit a large one?
And while paying a surcharge of $3 only once is a heck of a lot better than doing it three separate times, won’t your shipping charges increase. In my experience, the more items in one box means a larger package, which means more expensive shipping.
But even more critical than the sheer stupidity of this plan, it only increases the government’s control of us. Since when does the government (something that is supposed to of and for the people) get to decide how we shop or get our packages shipped to us? I mean, they might as well be rationing our goods, like they do in socialist nations.
No wonder people are fleeing the Big Apple in droves for greener and far less taxed pastures.
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