Customers buying certain items have apparently been being overcharged ever since the museum opened, partial refunds now being offered.

The biggest draws of the Nintendo Museum in Kyoto are massive displays of games, hardware, and toys chronicling the company’s history and the gigantically upsized controllers on which you play through classic Nintendo games as a team with a friend. But no visit to the museum is complete without stopping by its gift shop, appropriately named Bonus Stage.

Bonus Stage has all sorts of memorabilia, from T-shirts and controller-shaped cushions to glassware and gatcha trinkets. But if you paid a visit to the Nintendo Museum and paid Bonus Stage for any of three specific items, it turns out they actually need to pay you back.

On February 6, the Nintendo Museum posted a partial refund announcement on its official website for customers who purchased either the Nintendo Museum Cookie set, the Hikkonuki (“pull ‘em out”) Pikmin Cookie set, or the Animal Crossing: New Horizons Polvorón cookie set as a result of shoppers being unintentionally overcharged at the Bonus Stage register. No photos were included in the announcement, but the products seem to be the three pictured below.

▼ The Animal Crossing: New Horizons Polvorón set, with its octagonal container, is shown at the bottom left.

The announcement makes no mention of specific purchase dates as far as refund eligibility goes, implying that the overcharging has been going on ever since the Nintendo Museum opened all the way back on October 2.

If you’re wondering how something like this goes on for four months-plus before anyone notices it, it’s because the overcharges aren’t individually large (30 yen [US$0.20] or less per item), and also because of a quirk in how Japanese sales tax works. For almost all consumer products in Japan, there’s a sales tax of 10 percent. However, up until only a few years ago sales tax was only 5 percent, and doubling the tax was, predictably, not a popular move amongst the general Japanese public. So politicians decided to throw them a bone and said “OK, sales tax is going to be 10 percent, but it’ll only be 8 percent when buying food, since that’s an essential purchase.” Not all food and beverages qualify for this 2-percent tax break. Alcoholic beverages were deemed non-essential enough that they always carry a 10-percent tax, and restaurant dining was also judged enough of a luxury that it’s associated food and drinks are 10 percent too. Groceries, though, get the lower 8-percent tax, and so do takeout orders (which is why convenience store clerks in Japan with an eat-in corner will ask you if you plan to use it while they’re ringing up your purchases).

With that in mind, it’s pretty easy to see what went wrong at the Nintendo Museum. Shoppers who bought the Nintendo Museum Cookie set were charged 1,650 yen but according to the museum’s statement, should have only been asked to pay 1,620. For the Hikkonuki Pikmin Cookies shoppers were charged 1,100 yen when the correct amount was 1,080, and for the Animal Crossing: New Horizons Polvorón set, purchasers paid 1,485 yen, but should have only paid 1,458.

Crunching the numbers, all of those figures align with Bonus Stage sticking a 10-percent sales tax on top of the items’ base prices when they really should have only charged 8 percent. It’s an understandable mistake, seeing as how, in the case of the Nintendo Museum and Animal Crossing cookie sets, odds are people were buying them as much for their decorative, reusable tins as they were the cookies inside, and the box the Pikmin cookies come in is pretty slick-looking too. However, the three products are all still legally classified as food, and so they should only be taxed at 8 percent, not the 10 percent that they would be if you were buying the tins/boxes by themselves, or if you were buying the cookies to eat on-site.

Again, at 30 yen or less per item, it’s not like any shoppers were put into financial hardship by the mistake. Still, if someone bought a large quantity, possibly to give to friends as souvenirs, it becomes a more considerable chunk of change. Just as important is the macro-scale implication that Bonus Stage, as a result of the many, many customers that have come through since the museum’s opening, has collected a large in-total amount of money of money that it shouldn’t have. So while there will probably be some travelers who bought just one tin of cookies and say “Eh, for 20 or 30 yen I’m not gonna bother,” Nintendo and Nomura Medias, the tenant company that manages Bonus Stage, have apologized and recognize their responsibility to properly settle the accounts, and those applying for refunds can do so using the bilingual English/Japanese form on the Nintendo Museum website here.

Source: Nintendo Museum via Oricon News
Top image: Nintendo Museum
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