Canada’s holiday tax break a source of huge headaches for Kamloops toy store

It may save consumers a few bucks over the next two months, but Canada’s two-month holiday tax break could cost some small business owners their sanity.

Vanessa Gamel, owner and founder of Tumbleweed Toys in Kamloops, even predicts that it’s going to cost businesses more to implement all the necessary changes than it will save their customers.

“It just doesn’t seem like the hassle is worth it,” she told NowMedia video host Jim Csek during an interview this week.

According to Gamel, Tumbleweed Toys has over 26,000 SKUs (stock keeping units) in their system, essentially the barcode associated with each product, and not every item they sell is included in the GST break.

She estimates that a third of their stock wouldn’t need to be changed – like Lego for older children, games, crafts, art supplies and decorative items – which means it will all have to be done manually.

“With the program that we use, we would have to download it all into some Excel files and go through manually and change all of the ones that need to be changed,” Gamel explained.

The GST break begins Saturday, Dec. 14, which means there simply isn’t enough time to execute that process in the 12-hour period between closing on Friday and reopening the next day.

Her workaround that issue is that staff will be changing each item, as needed, as they ring them in at the till over the next few weeks

She’s made a cheat sheet for employees at the till to help them during the process, but has concerns about this process as the store deals with large crowds of holiday shoppers.

“At Christmas, we’re already quite busy, quite overworked, and it literally rolls out on the busiest retail day of the entire year,” said Gamel.

“I’m hoping, for my staff’s sake, people will be patient and understanding and know that this was given to us with not enough warning and not enough clear rules set around what’s taxable and what’s not.”

And while it’s already proving to be a stressful and headache-inducing process for small business owners like Gamel, the cherry on top is that they’ll have to do it all again when the two-month break ends in February.