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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."
don't all those companies that Amazon competes against elso provides jobs to workers who "in turn pay income taxes and sales taxes (when they purchase goods and services) which pay for the roads and infrastructure"?
Je ne parle pas francais.
Neither Best Buy nor Amazon include sales tax in their advertised prices. Yet Amazon's (and Neweggs, and etc.) prices are typically discounted 20% or more compared to the brick and mortar stores. Even after accounting for shipping. I don't think lack of sales tax is why people pick Amazon and Newegg.
Honestly, the whole practice of even calling it "online" sales is a misnomer that confuses the argument. "Online" sales have existed long before "Online" existed. "Online" sales ARE mail-order sales. Arguing about Amazon mail-order is no different then arguing about people buying mail-order in 1900. Just as with everything else, "On a computer" does not make mail-order some completely new thing that is somehow magically different from what has been going on for the last 100 years.
Do you believe that shipping 100 widgets on a single truck to a single store costs anywhere close to shipping 100 widgets individually to 100 people's doorsteps?