From Brian Hulme.
YOU may recall that I wrote to you back in May before the 3% tax, underlining how much higher the increase in prices would be.

I have waited some six months to see what would happen, and I am sorry to say that (and everybody knows) the increase has been far greater than the forecast. Accountants are by nature business historians who without doubt are a very clever bunch of people and are an absolute necessity to companies for their accurate state of trading at the end of each year. It amazes me how accurate they can be and how valuable their services are.

While giving that service, most people believe because of their qualifications they can advise the future behaviour of a business. The truth is that the majority of them have little knowledge of human behaviour and consequently the advice they may give may not have taken this into consideration. They are experts as business historians, telling us what has occurred during the last year, but they are not experts at telling us what to do and what might happen in the future.

• A trader has marked down a product at £9.99 for its obvious attraction, but now with the tax it will sell at £10.30. It has therefore taken the attractive price away from the buyer. So why not put the price back up to what it should have been in the first place; probably £10.60 or even more?

• A shopkeeper, having added the 3% tax, finds that the cash change that he would have to give a customer runs into many small coins. As it is a regular item, he is certainly not going to have a till full of small coins, so he raises the price to help the cashier and himself, as he has every right to do.

• A hardware shop, for example, selling do-it-yourself products such as six-inch nails, bits of wood etc, will round up the price at the end. This was confirmed to me by a DIY shop only recently.

• Large companies with thousands of products clearly make allowances in their increases for the amount of extra staff they have had to employ. Can we honestly expect them to accept such expense when all this could have been avoided by the tax being at the till?

• Restaurants . . . who imagines that the constant problem of altering the menus is going to be at their expense?
These are just a few examples of what firms will do to ensure that their margins are not eroded. The States have placed the ball into the retailers’ court to implement the tax. What else can they expect when 19,000 people wanted it to be at the till? I am sure the States will eventually revert to the means of collecting tax when they realise what might happen if they decided to raise the tax by ½%, which without any doubt whatsoever will be 1½ at a stroke.

I started this letter talking about accountants, and I must finish by saying that you will not find many accountants running their own businesses. The few who do are usually successful men who understand human behaviour.

I experienced all of this in the 1970s when we had the greatest price increases ever when we went from pounds, shilling and pence to decimalisation. If the States announced that they were going to revert to the till, we would hear the roar of applause across the Island.
7 Seacrest,
Route de Petit Port,
St Brelade.