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Amazon Named the "Most Reputable Company"
An anonymous reader writes "Amazon has been named the most reputable company in the US this year (up from 21st place last year), according to the sixth annual list of the 150 Most Reputable Companies from advisory firm Reputation Institute (RI), in partnership with Forbes Media. The list is based on RI's US RepTrak Pulse Study, which measures trust, esteem, admiration, and good feelings consumers have towards the largest 150 companies based on revenue in the US. The ratings are analyzed from nearly 33,000 online consumer responses taken in January and February."
...to make me regret closing my account in protest at the treatment of Wikileaks.
Fuck Amazon.
you had me at #!
I'd mod this one "+5 Funny".
Amazon really is a great company to buy from. I have been purchasing from them more than any other etaler now it seems. I have even replaced some items that we would buy at Target or Costco and purchase them from now. I have had to deal with customer service a few times and it has been a pleasurable experience. I also stand with amazon as far as sales taxes go. I also run a small business online and I cant collect taxes from hundreds of counties across the US. I could be for a flat national sales tax maybe though.
Being "reputable" means not always placing your profit interests first and foremost. Besides, if they actively negotiate with these states they may find a solution acceptable to those states, that actually does not sting as bad as expected. And, anyways, many other e-tailers collect those taxes and still manage to prosper.
There's not really any negotiation to be done with the states. The states believe that Amazon should collect and forward sales taxes for them, despite receiving no services from those states. Amazon thinks that lacking a physical presence in a state exempts them from that. There's not really a compromise position where they collect half the tax, or something. And as long as Amazon keeps its presence out of those states, they'll keep winning - there's no way to enforce a judgement against them, even in a court ruled that the state had standing to sue them.
In this case, the tax avoiders are the citizens who order things off the internet without paying their proper use tax. Not Amazon - at most, their duty is to collect the tax, not to pay it.
Incidentally, to the extent that the Internet is something "the government made for them", it's a product of the federal government - which does not collect sales tax.
I remember when the incident you're talking about with Texas came up. Wasn't it the case that Texas basically invited them to come to TX in the first place with the promise of no sales tax, and then turned around a couple of years later and reversed course?
Even if not, the problem is the fundamental structure of Sales tax - not Amazon's unwillingness to pay it. No company that does business online wants to collect sales tax, and I'll tell you why, as a small business, I am interested in Amazon's case: because if Amazon has to collect tax for not just all 50 states but every county in every state where sales tax is variable (and sometimes even on the local level), you've just driven up the cost of business to the point where it is no longer feasible to start an online business in your garage/bedroom/basement because you need very sophisticated software to handle the collection side and an accounting team to handle the payment side: small business owners like me already have to learn a lot about accounting (which is fine, and even perversely fun sometimes) but if we had to file returns with every state with which we did business? omgwtfbbq.
If you left it up to me, I'd replace sales tax entirely with a Federal sales tax that had a state reimbursement system. I don't mind collecting tax and passing it on to the government for you. I mind having to spend twice my annual gross income calculating and then delivering that tax to every state in the union.