VAT rate change. Should we expect anything different?

This post was written 3 years 2 months 15 days days old, so is a bit old now. Feel free to read and comment on this post, just remember some things change with time and any facts in this post may not be accurate anymore.

Many people thought that retailers WOULDN’T drop their prices to accomodate the drop in VAT rate from Monday. Today, I received an email from a company that I’m affiliated with. I’ve changed the text to hide the guilty parties identity:

Further to the announcement that UK VAT will be temporarily reduced from 17.5% to 15%, [we] will not be making any changes to the recommended retail pricing of [our products].

The cost to [our company] of updating its internal systems to reflect the change in UK VAT is such that the company would have been forced to increase the prices.

What a load of cock. It doesn’t cost anything to drop the prices of your products – just change a figure in database somewhere. It’s just that the VAT rate changes isn’t a huge amount, so companies simply can’t be arsed.

Strange then that the retailer I work for is currently busting a gut to get the changes out. This is a brick-and-mortar business which will have huge problems getting an entire estate of stores changing the physical labels in time, let alone anything else. But it’s being done because they don’t want to be seen fiddling the customer. In comparison the business above sells software – online or in shops. It doesn’t run any shops and the amount they’d have to do would be minimal.

It really is pathetic.