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Show Utah Merchants Warned Against Chain Store Tax Grocery leader says chain tax drove his independent store group out of Georgia, urges Utah independents inde-pendents to defeat No. 2, in interests in-terests of selves and consuming public. Independent Utah merchants affiliated af-filiated with contract or voluntary chains, such as IGA and Red & White, were warned today by the president of a national group of independent grocers that they may be taxed along with corporate chains if the proposed death tax on chain stores becomes law. This happened in Georgia where a chain store tax, much less drastic dras-tic than the $5,000 per store tax proposed in Utah, drove his organization organ-ization of independent grocers out of that state, Lewis C. Shave, of Brockton, Mass., President of the Nation-Wide Stores Company, reported re-ported in a letter to the Citizens' State Committee Against No. 2. Confirming the opinion of many leading Utah merchants who have refused to join in the campaign to tax chain stores out of Utah, Mr. Shave writes. " The Georgia enforcement officers of-ficers held that voluntaries and cooperative, co-operative, similar to your Utah IGA and Red & White stores, and other independent grocery groups, were also subject to payment of the tax. The result was that our wholesalers who supplied these stores would not pay the tax and, of course, the retailers would not pay it, so our organization was forced to close up entirely in Georgia Geor-gia and we have never been able to come back. " If voluntaries should be held by the courts to be included under the Utah Act, they would undoubtedly undoubt-edly have to close as they did in Georgia," he said. "It is my honest conviction that these laws are neither in the public's interest nor in the best interest of the retailer, re-tailer, despite the convincing arguments argu-ments of the sponsors. "I hope that the independently-owned independently-owned stores of the several groups of voluntaries and cooperatives operating in Utah can see the danger ahead, both for themselves and the consuming public, and that they will do whatever they can to defeat No. 2." |