Table 1 .

Themes and quotes extracted from interviews with Philadelphia retailers about their experiences with Philadelphia’s Beverage Tax

Theme	Retailers’ quotes
Concerns about the tax purpose, amount, and use of revenue	I hope the city will figure out something else to help with what they want to achieve. If they want to do the pre-k, we are for it, but not on our bread and butter, or our employees’.
Concerns about the tax’s impact on finances and business operations	Do you think they just want a sandwich? No. They have to drink. Do you think they’re going to just drink water? No. They’re not going to make two stops; get a sandwich here and then go over there to buy a beverage…We’re going to totally lose the business for that. Honestly before the cigarette tax, this was all cigarettes [pointing overhead to the vacant space above the counter]. […] Because customers they come in, they buy one pack of cigarettes and they also buy other things… If you go to the gas station over there, one block up you see this all the cigarettes. So we lost business over here and sent it over there. It’s going to be the same thing with the beverages. All we have changed is where they buy the beverages from. We have not changed their consumption, not to any great degree. If you want to generate money, bring more jobs to the city. You’re just cutting people’s feet from under them. The soda company tells me the same thing. They’re going to have to cut jobs […] I cannot see the greater good of this tax. So you are going to have a pre-K system and no jobs. Honestly, I really have not had a good night’s sleep since I’ve been thinking about this coming closer. I mean we have over 100 employees here […] If my business is slow, the people are going to get laid off. They’re buying less when they’re here. I don’t know if they’re going outside the city or what they’re doing but I could just see that my soda sales are down significantly.
Business strategies implemented to lessen financial burden of the tax	Oh we’re going to raise our prices, sure. I cannot sell large packages of any kind […]We’re going to discontinue much of the two liters. And of the 3000 [taxable] items we have, I think you would see about half of them disappear completely. Because we just don’t sell them. We just don’t. We expanded food service. We’ve experimented with numerous aggressive, creative marketing strategies to try to mitigate the volume loss and spent quite a bit of money doing it. And all those things got us to 12–13% down. Because we started the year at 15% down, besides the inflation, the little improvement we made was based on beer, wine. Instead of buying from beverage companies we buy more from JETRO. […] We can just buy one or two cases. If you were to get it from the wholesaler, they tax the distributor first and the distributor include[s] the tax in the price, but they show you it’s SBT, sugary beverage tax. So then you know and then what we do, we add it on to our tax as a total and go from there. We’ve had to reduce variety because it will expire before it sells.
Perceptions of customer response to the tax based on income	Why charge all of these taxes and yet the minimum wage is $7.25? Why? If you’re going to raise prices and charge for taxes, you might as well raise the minimum wage. We are selling cans more than bottles because people don’t want to spend more money. At the end of the month, we’ve always had a phenomenon that they buy what they need and can’t pay for it. They put back half the stuff. That’s always happened in these food desert stores. Now we’re starting to see that happen the third week of the month. And we know because we have to schedule people to return all the items. We’ve had to put on overnight staff to return the items because it’s that significant.
Confusion around tax implementation	I don’t think that we were ready for the tax. We didn’t have as much information that we needed right away to inform the customers. And everybody, when we charge the tax, they’re just going to blame us. Because we’re the ones who collect the money and hand to the city. The thing is a lot of people did not actually know what the beverage tax is. They did not know that almond milk would be taxed, that vanilla soy milk would be taxed, that chocolate almond milk is taxed. Orange juice - 50% orange juice – is taxed. I wasn’t here. But maybe they tried to communicate with us. But because of the boundary of the language there is no way. There is no understanding about the soda tax.