No Lockout Here

Taxes Suck

Taxes themselves do not suck, they’re an integral part of our society to pay for infrastructure and social programs. The way tax laws work in this country, however, is actually insane. 

The long and short of the whole thing is that over the past year we have streamlined our inventory into a set of products that are core to our customers. The previous staff of the store purchased a lot of product that never sold and we took possession of when we bought the store. Marking their prices down drastically, selling them online, or donating these items finally got them out of my store to make room for products that people actually want. 

So how this translates to my taxes is: We started with an inventory about about $190,000 and then streamlined to a more focused product line of about $110,000. The government interpets that as a $80,000 loss. Even though we’ve never been in the red, we’ve never missed a payment, we’ve never not been able to order product we wanted, we’ve never missed a paycheck.

How does that affect Parallax?

Well, it really doesnt. Sorta. Without getting into personal things of people or oddly specific examples, the moral of the story is that, “The rich get richer.” 

Our second biggest expense is taxes. The first is buying product to sell in the store. Oddly enough buying product and having inventory is considered income. How? Good goddamn question. I assume it has to do with big companies lobbying to have it done so even if they produce a product no one wants that they have a million units of they can still show their investors they’re profitable. 

Really though, because of the way the laws are written I am not incentivized to expand my inventory because then my taxes will go up, but if I keep reporting a loss our taxes will becomes slightly lower. It’s pretty stupid. 

However…

Some people still fail to understand there were supply line issues from the Covid-19 pandemic that we’re going to see fall out from until at least 2023. We continue to have issues with this stuff in things like just not being able to restock items like we did before 2020. Little things that we could order whenever they were out of stock like sleeves, deck boxes, board games, almost everything is now coming into the distributors on a drip feed. We constantly have to scan the websites for products we need to get them before others do. Before, we could just backorder what we wanted and if it was out of stock at the distributor they’d just send it to us in a week or two when it was back. Now, we can’t backorder anything because they don’t have a clue when it will be back. There are reports that the war in Ukraine will continue to affect the supply chain and that is why our current objective is set in the headling above.