Retailer's Fuel Surcharge?

All the delivery services except the Post Office are adding a fuel surcharge rather than raise prices every month. In effect, they are raising prices, but they say if the price of fuel comes down, they'll reduce the fuel surcharge. The Post Office is absorbing the extra cost of fuel for now, but it will be figured in to the rate increase in May of 2009. Every penny increase costs the PO eight MILLION dollars a year, so this year's extra cost is over a billion dollars so far.

Retailers will pass that fuel surcharge on to you as part of the shipping charges; they're not going to absorb it because all their other costs are going up too.

That's a distinct possibility. I do see it as a backdoor price increase. While I appreciate that higher fuel prices do hit some businesses hard, some of the surcharges seem excessive. I recently had some mulch delivered and got hit with a $25 surcharge for what was about a 10 mile roundtrip. Seemed a bit much unless the truck only got 1 mpg.

not really.... its just another charge...

raising their prices has the same results...

the bottom line is still the same more or less

different way of writing up the numbers in the books

i use fuel surcharges in my business.. (trucking)

and i write it up as income....

i get 87c mile for my services plus 60c mile fuel surcharge

which is counted and taxed for the whole total amount of 1.47

i get to deduct what fuel i used ,which is around 90c a mile

my taxes are paid on 57c a mile...

if i use the 60c a mile fuel surcharge to off set my cost..

then i would have to take it off my deduction of fuel cost

90-60 =30....

my taxes would be 87c deduct 30c for fuel.. which leave me

57c which is taxed...

the only ones who benefit would be the consumer who pays for a product from sales tax......

if you product is say.... UPS... they charge a fee.. .plus fuel

surcharge.... you pay tax on the just the fee... the surcharge is extra....

example....50$ plus sales tax on 50... then add fsc...

if they combined the 2 into a single price.... then your sales tax would be more

example ...50$ plus fsc... then sales tax on that total...