Crowcery
A Dollarama receipt is unusually plain: a name, a full barcode, a price, and
sometimes a single H. There are no department headers, no loyalty block and no
discount lines. The two questions it does raise are why so much of the basket is taxed, and what
INCL. ECO is doing on one of the lines.
H means HST was charged on that item. No letter at all means it was not taxed. There is no third code. The absence of a letter is the signal, which is easy to miss when you are skimming a long column of prices.
Because most of what Dollarama sells is general merchandise, not food. Sales tax rules exempt basic groceries, and a planter, a roll of masking tape and a pack of sponges are not groceries by any reading. In a supermarket most of the basket is zero-rated and a few items are taxed; at Dollarama that ratio is usually reversed.
The food Dollarama does sell follows the same national rules as everywhere else, so a jar of salsa is untaxed while a bag of chips is taxed. Which groceries are taxed in Canada, and why covers where that line falls.
The product's full barcode, printed in full. This is genuinely unusual. Most chains print a shortened internal code, an abbreviated one, or nothing at all, and Walmart strips a digit off the end. Dollarama prints the whole thing, which makes its receipts the easiest in the country to match against a product database.
When a name is too long for the line, it wraps, and the barcode lands on the second line by itself. That is one item across two printed rows, not two items.
That the price already includes an environmental handling fee. Electronics, batteries and similar goods carry a provincial recycling levy, and Dollarama folds it into the shelf price rather than adding it as a separate line the way a bottle deposit appears at a supermarket.
The footer says the same thing in general terms: prices may include eco fees, CRF and deposit where applicable. So the number you see is the number you pay, with the levy already inside it. How deposits and eco fees work by province.
Eleven items, one of them untaxed, one of them carrying an eco fee, and one name that wraps:
The taxable base. Add every line carrying an H: 4.75 + 4.50 + 1.50 + 1.75 + 1.50 + 4.35 + 3.50 + 3.75 + 5.00 + 5.00 = $35.60. The salsa at $4.25 is the only untaxed item, and 35.60 + 4.25 = $39.85, the printed subtotal.
The tax. 35.60 × 14% = 4.984, printing as $4.98. Note it is calculated on $35.60 and not on the $39.85 subtotal, which would have given $5.58. Whenever a receipt's tax looks lower than you expect, this is usually why.
The total. 39.85 + 4.98 = $44.83.
Because Dollarama runs neither. There is no points programme, no member price, and no promotion lines, so a Dollarama receipt has none of the sub-lines that make a supermarket receipt hard to add up. What you see is what you were charged. The footer also states a no exchange, no return policy.
How confident are we here? This page comes from 8 Dollarama receipts, all of them from Nova Scotia, across four stores. The layout should not vary much by province, but the rate certainly does, and we have not checked a Dollarama receipt from anywhere else. The worked example is one real receipt and reconciles to the cent. If your Dollarama receipt from another province looks different, we would like to see it: support@crowcery.com.
Available in Canada; English-language receipts; not offered in Quebec. Or try the read-only demo first, no signup needed.
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Receipt tax code letters, every chain (GP, MRJ, J, C, T)
Which groceries are taxed in Canada, and why
How to read a Sobeys receipt
How to read a Superstore or Loblaws receipt
Bottle deposits and eco fees by province