Sales Tax Holiday

rickon66,

You are not alone.  I ordered a computer on Saturday which is right in the middle of North Carolina's tax holiday.  The webpage for the order stated that if I was eligible for a sales tax holiday waiver that it would be reflected on the invoice.  In the meantime, Dell sent me a confirmation of the order with the sales tax included and no mention of the sales tax holiday waiver.  So, today I called the order status department and got bounced around until I reached India where someone accepted responsibility for the question. 

I asked for something in writing from Dell that would acknowledge that I would not be charged sales tax if I was eligible for a tax holiday waiver.  The representative went to check on this and said that I was in fact eligible for the sales tax waiver and that it would be refunded within 30 days of shipment.   I told him that is not what the order form said and that I wanted Dell to acknowledge in writing that I would not be billed for the sales tax, rather than his version which is first I'm billed and then I wait 30 days for a refund. He said that he could not provide anything in writing. After hanging on for about 10 minutes through more 'research' breaks while he checked on something I told him that I wanted to talk to his supervisor who presumably has the authority to to issue an e-mail with Dell's order form wording..  He disappeared again and then said that his supervisor would call within 4 hours. 

After hanging up with India I searched and searched through the Dell website for something that indicated the same conditions under which the order was placed.  I went around in circles from link to link.  Finally, I used Google to find what I wanted which might also satisfy your needs as well - a Dell webpage that spelled out the policy, including:

"If your purchases qualify for a state sales tax holiday, your invoice will not reflect tax."   BINGO

The URL for this page is:

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/dsn/document?c=us&l=en&s=gen&docid=176241ABE9E4DFA6E0401E0A55176988

The incompetence of the people on the phone is remarkable and makes life infinitely more difficult than it has to be.  Instead of giving me a song and dance they should have been able to point me to the proper webpage thereby satisfying my request for confirmation that the invoice will not include sales tax which should have been part of the automatic response from Dell.  This is just third world banana republic stuff.