There's still time for those wanting to take advantage of Arkansas' sales tax holiday.
It began at 12:01 a.m. Saturday morning and closes at 11:59 p.m. tonight.
The hours may seem strange but make more sense when you remember the 24-hour stores and another, lesser-known fact: Online sales of tax-exempt items are eligible, too, right up to the deadline.
This is the third time around for the Arkansas tax holiday, which was designed by state lawmakers to keep customers doing their back-to-school shopping in Arkansas.
The holiday has its fans and its critics, but the Legislature deemed it a necessity for the state, largely because businesses in other states were thought to have a competitive advantage over those here.
Neighboring states (or the retailers in them) advertised the holiday, coaxing at least some Arkansas shoppers across the state line for years before Arkansas created its own holiday.
Both Oklahoma and Missouri, Northwest Arkansas' nearest neighbors, are holding tax holidays this weekend, too. Theirs began on Friday and end today.
Exemption details vary from state to state, but all of Arkansas' neighbors have had some kind of tax holiday since at least 2009.
Texas staged its first sales tax holiday as long ago as 1999. Missouri started one in 2004, Tennessee in 2006, Louisiana and Oklahoma in 2007 and Mississippi in 2009.
By the time Arkansas got around to it in 2011, some families had begun migrating to bordering states to buy back-to-school and other allowable items free of state sales taxes, if not necessarily local levies.
The savings in many states are comparable on basic items, like clothing and shoes that cost $100 or less per item, or school supplies. But there are differences that might be worth discovering.
There is still a tax advantage to buying some items out of state.
Missouri, for example, exempts personal computers (not exceeding $3,500) from sales tax during its holiday. Arkansas does not.
Buy that computer in Missouri during the tax holiday and pay no state sales tax. Buy it in Arkansas and pay the state's 6.5 percent levy plus any local sales taxes that apply.
For the record, local taxing entities get to opt in or out of the sales tax holiday in Missouri. So a buyer might still pay city and/or county sales taxes on a computer in Missouri, just not the state levy.
In Arkansas, a qualifying item is exempt from both state and local taxes during the sales tax holiday.
That's one factor to keep in mind when searching for bargains during this holiday. And it is a good reason to shop at home, just as state lawmakers intended.
None of this takes into account the comparable pricing on back-to-school or other allowable purchases. They vary, too, but seasoned bargain-hunters will find them. Retailers are competing for the tax holiday-inspired customers.
They not only want Arkansas consumers to shop in Arkansas, they want them in their stores and are advertising incentives to get them there. Plenty of those incentives should be in today's paper.
Critics of these holidays, which are being held in 16 states this year, suggest some retailers may actually raise prices during the holiday.
The Tax Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, recently released a report with that observation among its key findings.
Another is the assertion that the holidays do not promote economic growth or significantly increase consumer purchases. Instead, consumers simply shift the timing of purchases they would have made anyway.
The report calls these holidays "political gimmicks" that distract policymakers and taxpayers from genuine, permanent tax relief.
Whatever they are, the holidays do turn out shoppers, looking to save anything they can on the purchases necessary to get kids ready for school.
The back-to-school shoppers aren't the only ones who get a little sales tax relief during the holiday, but they're the ones for whom the event was created.
With the start of school coming soon, plenty of them were out there Saturday and will be today, shoving shopping carts through crowds and standing in checkout lines with arms loaded.
If that sounds a lot like Black Friday and the pre-Christmas buying rush, it is. And that is another reason some consumers have decided tax-holiday shopping is not for them. The savings just aren't worth the effort.
Other shoppers will take their tax relief where they can get it, whatever the difficulty, with or without really knowing what they've "saved."
For them, time's a wastin'. The holiday ends tonight.
BRENDA BLAGG IS A FREELANCE COLUMNIST AND LONGTIME JOURNALIST IN NORTHWEST ARKANSAS.
Commentary on 08/03/2014