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Every Day's a Tax Holiday At Amazon
theodp writes "With Black Friday here, Slate's Farhad Manjoo reminds readers of how Amazon.com undersells Best Buy, the Apple store, and almost everybody else. Read his lips: no sales taxes. Unless you live in KS, KY, NY, ND, or WA, you'll pay no sales tax on many purchases from Amazon, giving Amazon a huge — and largely hidden — price advantage over most other national retailers. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is certainly no fan of taxes — he explored founding Amazon on an Indian reservation, and recently ponied up $100,000 to defeat a proposed WA state income tax, a good investment for someone who's cashed in close to $800,000,000 in Amazon stock this year alone. So, is Amazon's tax-free status unfair? Of course it is, says Manjoo. Amazon has physical operations in 17 states in which the company and its employees enjoy the fruits of local taxes — police and fire protection, roads, hospitals, and other infrastructure that make its operations possible. Yet Amazon skirts tax collection in most of these places through clever legal tricks."
I was looking for a Firewire 400 to Firewire 800 cable. The salesman went into the back office to look up a product code, came back, and guided me to a rack with 4 pin to 6 pin Firewire 400 cables.
So I left, went to a a computer, fired up the web browser, pointed it at Amazon, and found the cable I needed in about sixty seconds.
When I'm shopping for books, I tend to have a similar experience. I'm always surprised when local shops have the titles that I want. But what is neat, though, is that with the Amazon Marketplace, nine times out of ten, I'm buying from a small bricks and mortar shop even though I'm purchasing from the 800 pound gorilla of e-merchants. Turns out that Amazon doesn't want to stock hardbound copies of Epictetus' Handbook or Farabi's Epistle on the Intellect. But their associates, small booksellers across the county that specialize in this or that, can do so and partner with Amazon to get national exposure.
Which is to say, Amazon's "unfair" advantage with regard to sales tax is a red herring.