Taxed to the Max : Both Retailers, Shoppers Grumble, Fumble With New Levy

Lucille Silden, 71, hardly meant to cause trouble. She only wanted a box of ice cream bars. But merely wanting that item on Monday meant a delay--a near meltdown--in the checkout line at the Lucky store on Melrose Drive in Vista.

Silden and the others in line were the disgruntled victims of the new sales tax, which took effect at 12:01 a.m. Monday, raising the rate in San Diego County to 8 1/4%. The confusion Silden unwittingly provoked was whether ice cream bars were taxable.

“You know, I think these are subject to the new tax,” said the woman behind the cash register.

“I don’t think so,” Silden said, checking to see if her ice cream was melting.

“Wait just a few minutes, until I find the manager,” the woman said.

In roughly seven minutes, a supervisor appeared to say that, no, ice cream is immune from the tax, which does affect such “snack” items as potato chips, cookies, granola bars, gum and candy.

“I think it’s ludicrous!” Silden said outside the store. “They should change the tax brackets for rich people. They’re the ones getting a free ride. When is that ever going to stop in this country?

“And they should have been a lot better prepared to handle this in this supermarket than they were. How long have they known about this?”

Silden, a resident of the Leisure Village retirement enclave in Oceanside, found plenty of sympathy from Salina Roberson, a 12-year-old student at Washington Middle School in Vista.

At the same Lucky market, Roberson had to pay 3 cents more for her weekly sack of gum, which she buys with a small allowance.

“Three cents is a lot to a kid like me,” Roberson said, noting that the gum had jumped in price overnight. “I don’t think it’s right to take so much money in taxes. And why do little kids have to pay?”

Merchants were equally unhappy.

“What’s a snack is not exactly clear,” said Sam Awdisho, the manager of Junior Market & Deli in downtown San Diego. He gestured to a row of peanuts, pistachios and raisins that were sold in little packages and demanded of a nearby customer, “Those are not snacks to you? Well, they’re not taxed. And look, cookies are taxed, but muffins aren’t.” Awdisho then raised his voice in disbelief, “Muffins aren’t snacks?”

“It is a big headache,” complained Sam Gorgees, who owns Pick ‘N’ Go Concession in downtown San Diego. “This morning they didn’t pay the tax on the newspaper. This is early morning, and they are not awake yet. They throw a quarter for the paper and go.”

Most of his customers are trying to catch the San Diego Trolley, which has a stop right outside his store, Gorgees said, and he has to be alert to grab people before they go.

“Oh yeah, today is tax day,” said Roz Reed, a 41-year-old receptionist who rolled her eyes and reached into her purse to grab some extra change for her newspaper.

Peering out the window to make sure her trolley hadn’t pulled in yet, Reed added, “The pennies we have hidden in the closet are going to come in handy.”

At the Paras News Stand in North Park, a fixture at the corner of University Avenue and 30th Street for more than four decades, confusion was the order of the day.

Manager Mike Paras said “too many people just plunked down a quarter for the San Diego Union or (The Times) when the counter price of the Union is now 27 cents, and (The Times) has jumped to 38 cents. They run off before I can shout, ‘Hey, what about the tax?’ ”

Paras said the daily New York Times, sold for 75 cents, is now 81 cents over the counter, whereas the Sunday edition totals $3.25 after tax is affixed to the $3 price.

“People are mad at us, but we’ve got nothing to do with it,” Paras said. “I think it’s really going to hurt the newsstand and newspaper business. These pennies add up.”

Susan Wexler, the manager of Seventh Near B, a newsstand near the corner of 7th Avenue and B Street in downtown San Diego, said the hardest part for area merchants is figuring out what is and isn’t taxable.

“It’s horrible,” she said. “It doesn’t affect my baked goods; those have always been taxed, since, technically, we’re a restaurant. But, as for newspapers and periodicals, I have some distributors who pay the tax and others who don’t.

“This is going to affect a lot of people. There’s a little old lady named Tracy who comes in here every day to buy the New York Times and the San Francisco papers. She told me she wouldn’t be able to get them tomorrow because she couldn’t afford the tax. Now, isn’t that sad?”

Yousef Abudayyeh, who owns Uneeda Market & Deli on C Street, near the trolley tracks downtown, said a common slogan heard in his place on Monday was:

Impeach (Gov. Pete) Wilson.

“I hope the governor (and former San Diego mayor) knows what he’s doing,” Abudayyeh said. “As for me, I’m going crazy trying to figure it out. My problem is the cash register. Because we have such long lines, I can’t move fast enough to figure out how to program the changes.

“All day long, people are getting mad when they find out just how much 8 1/4% adds up to. In my place, almost everything is taxable--chips, soda, candies, crackers, newspapers . . . and cigarettes, which have always been taxed, are even higher.”

At The Record Shop, a record store at the North County Fair shopping mall in Escondido, patrons discovered that the $15.99 list price of a compact disc comes to more than $17 with the new tax.

And, next door at the Marie Callender’s restaurant and pie shop, one patron--who asked not to be quoted by name--was miffed that a whole pie was not subject to the tax, but a slice of pie was.

In the eyes of the state, a slice is a snack, but a whole pie isn’t.

The woman behind the register--she, too, asked not to be quoted by name--said salespeople were so confused about what to charge that, often, the tax wasn’t being applied.

“Nobody had much preparation for this,” she said.

Charles Brown, the manager of The Book Works, a bookstore in Del Mar’s Flower Hill Shopping Center, said the number of unprepared merchants and buyers was staggering. Brown said he had to buy new cash register equipment for $25, just so the changes were accurate.

“So many people are unhappy with this,” he said. “In one day, the New York Times goes from 75 cents to 81 cents (with the over-the-counter tax). The mood in general is not good at all. To be mired in a recession and then get stuck with this?”

But, in affluent Del Mar, Brown said people might grumble but ultimately will pay $2.71 for a Vanity Fair that was $2.50 on Sunday. A magazine that once went for $2.95, he said, is now $3.19.

“It’s like tortilla chips,” he said. “If you really want tortilla chips, you’re going to buy them, regardless of a tax. If Joe America wants them, he’ll buy them, even though he might not like it, and he will complain. We, the merchants, get to hear the complaining.”

Times staff writer Peggy Y. Lee contributed to this story.