HADLEY — A customer trying to reach Manny’s Appliances ahead of the weekend’s sales tax holiday inevitably had to leave a voicemail. And they weren’t alone; the store had 96 when manager Monte Newman walked in Saturday.
“It’s chaos,” Newman said with a laugh. “It has been nonstop.”
It was the first “tax-free weekend” since COVID-19 vaccines became widely available, and many stores were as crowded as they’ve been during the pandemic as shoppers looked to save on big-ticket items that for two days were exempt from the state’s 6.25% surcharge.
At Manny’s, a steady stream of customers filled the front entryway, spilling out into the showroom to open fridge doors, peer into ovens and compare prices on washers and dryers.
For Lisa Kane of Cummington, the state-sponsored day aimed at boosting spending came at just the right time.
“Our fridge died last night,” she said. “Perfect timing.”
Tom and Carol Kelliher of South Hadley were in the same situation, looking for a dishwasher and hoping to save a little bit on the price.
“The one we’ve got is dying,” Tom said.
However, he said he wasn’t convinced he could get the best deal on tax-free weekend. Instead, he said Manny’s has better promotional deals around holidays. That’s something that Newman agrees with.
“In reality, sales prices during the year are better even if you didn’t save the tax,” he said.
Newman said Manny’s always welcomes a reason to bring people into the store — and the tax holiday certainly does that. But he said doing two months of sales in two days can be taxing on staff, and that spreading the holiday out might be easier on the business.
But that isn’t the concern most preoccupying the business, Newman said.
Like many businesses across the country, Manny’s is experiencing large back orders as the pandemic disrupts supply chains globally. Shortages of everything from microchips to foam insulation mean that customers can be waiting for weeks or months to get the appliance they hoped to buy.
Newman said the company is now recommending that people order what they need as soon as they can.
“Now it’s unpredictable, so the sooner you order the better,” he said.
At Foster Farrar Co. hardware store in Northampton, owner Paul Czapienski is seeing a similar trend.
“This year, very similar to last year, it’s a little bit hard to find the stuff you really, really want,” he said.
Before the pandemic, Czapienski said that the rates at which his suppliers refilled orders was as high as 95% on every order.
“Now they’re like 60% to 65%,” he said. At the low point during the pandemic, that rate dropped to 45%. “That hurts.”
Czapienski said that tax-free weekend does help bring customers to his store, though like Newman he’d prefer to see it spread out over a longer period of time — a week or maybe two. He said a recent proposal by Gov. Charlie Baker to expand the tax holiday to two months was “ridiculous.”
That’s also how state Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa felt about Baker’s proposal, which she called a political stunt that frustrated many. She, like others, is a critic of such tax holidays.
“I know that they’re very popular, and we certainly hear from businesses that they like them,” she said. “We do have to remember that they tend to be really regressive in who they help.”
Sabadosa said that supporting local businesses is great, but that can be done without a sales tax break.
“We do want our economy to be stimulated,” she said. “I really just wish we were focused on providing additional support for them rather than this tax break.”
Those who benefit from a sales tax holiday are those who made it through the pandemic with enough income to buy a big item like a refrigerator, she said, as opposed to the constituents calling her office worried about unemployment checks not arriving for weeks, for example.
And with a foreclosure and eviction crisis on the horizon, extended Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits soon ending and another wave of COVID-19 hitting the state, Sabadosa said it’s worth considering how much those tax breaks cost a state trying to address issues like hunger, rental assistance, unemployment and pandemic safety measures.
“It feels like as a society, these tax-free weekends focus a little too much on the individual and less on the collective good,” Sabadosa said.
Dusty Christensen can be reached at dchristensen@gazettenet.com.