The nation’s GST holiday wrapped up on February 15, during those two months taxes were not collected on dozens of items, including children’s clothing, car seats, food and beverages, and more in a bid to ease affordability during the holiday season.
Now that the dust has settled, business owners are taking a look back to see if the juice was worth the squeeze.
Chris Chubert is the owner of Rosies on River Street in Moose Jaw, and from his estimation, the tax break didn’t change spending habits much, at least for customers.
“I don't know if it actually moved the needle a whole bunch for consumers per say, it definitely helped us out more on the other end of things, with us ordering beer and stuff like that, because the GST was removed from the kegs of beer and stuff that we would bring in.
“We benefited from saving that five per cent just because the amount we outlaid over the course of those two months. It added up to a decent amount of savings anyways, but I'm not too sure if the average customer even noticed.”
Chubert said that he personally didn’t note any real changes to his personal spending habits during the GST holiday, stating that saving five per cent was not much of a motivating factor for him to alter his purchases in the end.
He did, however, point out that the process of implementing the GST break on numerous items within his point-of-sale program was a bit of a challenge.
“Within the restaurant industry, that was one of the factors that was a little more challenging for us to implement. It wasn't just a blanket thing for all our offerings, like hard alcohol wasn't covered, but beer and wine were.”
“With our computer systems, we couldn't just go in and flip the switch and take the GST off. We had to kind of manually remove it from the things that it applied to and make sure that we were still charging on the things that the holiday didn't cover.”
He speculated that other businesses, such as grocery stores, likely saw far more of an impact on consumer spending during the GST holiday.
Chubert said that, within the restaurant industry, if saving five dollars for every 100 spent were to draw in a significant number of extra customers, you would see far more places implementing a system like that full-time.
“I like to think that our food and our service brings people in more than price sensitivity,”
Although the impact of the GST holiday is up for some degree of speculation for consumer trends nationwide, Chubert was keeping an eye on his numbers from the past two months.
“Sales wise, as far as the data goes, we didn't notice a spike. It was pretty close to identical numbers from the same time frame as last year...”
“I would say we didn't really see a drastic increase in individuals going out or spending more as a result of the tax holiday.”