Eye On Illinois: Have you felt relief from grocery tax suspension?

Tennessee was great, thanks for asking. A little rainy, but we played eight baseball games in five days, lost a silver championship game by one run and I’m not the dad who lost his minivan key fob on the Wild Eagle at Dollywood (although I did give him a ride home from the park and back the following night when it miraculously resurfaced).

I stocked up before the trip at the nearby warehouse club, where I ran up a bill of $277.82 and paid all of $6.70 in sales tax (on diet cola, bird seed and some clothes). If my next restocking run doesn’t happen this week, the total cost for the same items would increase as the yearlong suspension of Illinois’ 1% grocery sales tax expires at midnight Friday.

Our Sunday night visit to the Kroger in Pigeon Forge cost us $165.29 and $12.21 in sales taxes. We mostly purchased groceries (coded B on the receipt) but a few toiletry items (coded T) and altogether the tax was about 7.4% on top of the cost of goods. We were too early for Tennessee’s three-month suspension of the 4% sales tax as applied to groceries, which starts Aug. 1.

A midweek stop at Food City (my kids eat a lot of food) had some different receipt codes: $57.67 of groceries and $3.89 in tax, $33.04 of general merchandise (food storage containers, dishwasher detergent) with a tax of $3.22 and then a dime tax on the $9.99 take-and-bake pizza that was almost too big to bake in the rental unit’s oven.

We fueled the car and bodies in Indiana to and from Illinois. We encountered the 7% statewide sales tax at a Portillo’s in Merrillville and a 9% bump on coffee and milkshakes in Lebanon, where both the city and Boone County get 1% on each transaction. Hoosier gas receipts, like those in Illinois and Tennessee, don’t provide any tax breakdowns.

The biggest individual hit was a 10.75% tax on a $61.94 bill for dinner for four at the Sunliner Diner in Pigeon Forge. That’s a pretty good haul, especially considering the other 38 people in our traveling party who settled their own checks.

When Illinois enacted the yearlong grocery tax suspension, leaders estimated savings of $400 million. Just looking through a week of vacation receipts is making my brain hurt, so I can’t imagine trying to calculate the effect on my family budget. It’s clearly more than the $10 we saved when lawmakers deferred a gas tax hike for six months last year, but taking the state’s guess divided by its population we’re still saving only about $32 per person, about 62 cents each week.

Have you felt the relief?

• Scott T. Holland writes about state government issues for Shaw Media. Follow him on Twitter @sth749. He can be reached at sholland@shawmedia.com.