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Why Amazon Wants To Pay Sales Tax
Maximum Prophet writes "A while ago, Amazon caved on paying individual states sales taxes. Now we know why. Amazon is setting up same-day delivery warehouses everywhere. They will put most normal retailers out of business." If that's a bet, I'll take it.
Driving to brick-and-mortar stores is an expensive time-waster. The more online choices I have the better.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Local retailers (and apparently Walmart, too) were the leading forces in pushing such legislature through in many states. They obviously (and rightfully) fear that Amazon could completely destroy them. This legislation, they thought, would force Amazon to compete with them on an even playing field. Except the playing field was never even to begin with. Even if you force them to abide by the x% sales tax rule, they still completely dominate you in terms of convenience, selection, sheer operations efficiency and economies of scale. Only Walmart could really hold a candle to them. This is going to blow up in the brick-and-mortar retailers' faces and they'll have nobody to blame but themselves for their downfall.
First manufacturing was destroyed, and the economy is still barely adjusting. Now retail is being threatened. Whats left for 300 million people to do? Interesting times indeed.
You could. Walmart has free shipping. Even to Alaska.
That's completely insane - they are undercutting local businesses by 20 - 40%. Don't know how long they're going to keep this up but watching it is entertaining.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Yeah, let's let Amazon get a monopoly so they can jack up prices. Or do you morons actually think they'll keep their prices so low after running out of business the alternatives?
You seem to think that once a business gets to the top of their space and starts acting stupid no one knocks them off. You seem oblivious that Sears used to be the retail giant with stores everywhere that couldn't be topped.
As long as Amazon is doing it better then I am all for them expanding.
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Robotic warehouses are not the nirvana that so many claim they are. The problem comes when demand falls off (all demand is cyclical) and your competition lets people go while your left with the same fixed costs. This is happening right now in the industry I work in, where the former leader is plunging out of control from large infrastructure costs, particularly their very sophisticated warehouses, that their competition doesn't have.
The strategy also seems to overlook that thing where, you know, people don't wanna' pay sales tax. Here in California that amounts to an almost 10% savings for those consumers who violate state sales and use tax laws (of course, I don't).
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
If there is a king of efficiency and lost cost in distribution and retail sales, it is Wal-Mart. You don't think they are just going to sit there and do nothing while Amazon moves in, do you?
Necron69
Perhaps what we need is for people to get back in the business of producing. Our family business maximizes vertical integration and just-in-time manufacturing to make it so we control our process, product and profits. We do work with retailers and they take about a 50% cut. To make it we have to make sure that we keep as much as possible of that other 50%. Unlike many businesses, our family actually does the work. We farm. We turn sunlight into food.
it is worth pointing out that Amazon will start COLLECTING sales tax not PAYING sales tax. The consumer is the one who will PAY the tax.
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
I love how the Americans always blame their government rather than the obvious flaws in their economic system
What a blind fool you are.
This process has been going on for generations. Just go upstairs out of your basement and ask your mom.
She remembers the little grocery stores on the corner edged out by the big chains. She remembers one shoe store in town, now long shuttered by the 3 or 4 stores in town.
And the product variety and quality has improved dramatically every step of the way. That corner store usually and no more than 4 round steaks to choose from. Not an entire meat counter full of various sizes. They had poor quality fruit, when it was in season. Not a fruit section with fruit from all over the world all year around.
Oh, and hey, they had flys.
That kind of variety and quality doesn't come from mom and pop stores. It comes from big corporations.
But hey its a free country. You want those filthy little corner stores with limited selection, just drive 100 miles across the Mexican border. They still have them there. And the Flys too. No selection, very few products to sell. Go further down in central America, South America, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina and it gets worse still.
The one thing you notice when you return to the US/Canada after traveling overseas is the Grocery Stores. My god the quality, the prices, the variety, the freshness, the helpful staff.
Don't talk to me about self harming cheerleaders. You don't have the first clue how good you have it.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I'll explain our current situation. After y2k and 9/11 those in power were scared we were going into recession. They were right we were. It is to be expected when you are facing an unknown threat. The correct course would have been for people to reduce debt and start saving to prepare for the worse. This naturally shifts production from long term capital goods to near term consumer goods. But the Federal Reserve wouldn't allow it. They pumped out the money like no tomorrow. This sends a false signal that people are thinking long term and it's time to build capacity. When businesses calculate if a long term project it worthwhile a major factor is what is the interest rate and expected inflation. At first both rates are low. Hence the housing boom and outsourcing to ramp up capacity. Now eventually prices rise due to all of this new money floating around chasing the same amount of resources Oil, Gold, Housing, ect. As prices rise all of those inflation numbers that people used in their calculations eat away the justification for increasing capacity. Then you get the crash as all of this projects are abandoned and the misallocation of resources and labor are exposed. The only solution is to let it work itself out. The market had a signal for a long time that more houses were needed because people were paying record amounts for them. If the easy credit wasn't there it would have been a good signal. But as it turns out all of the labor and material put into housing was a waste. Now you have to let the price of houses crash to where the market will support. All of those people that were employed by housing construction have to find new productive lines of work.
Let me know if this is making sense and I'll keep writing.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
It's not for my lack of understanding why it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense because your argument is based on a very subjective and factually inaccurate view of recent history. One of the tenets of Keynesian economics that is sound is not to adopt austerity measures in the face of recession or depression. The time for austerity is when the economy is strong, and there are the tax receipts and free-flow of capital to pay down the debt assumed to spend your way out of a recession (and that's the only way out of a recession; it's what Clinton did to get us out of the recession of 1990-94, and then used the late 90's boom to pay down debt and balance the budget). The reason we've gone into double-dip now is because of this misplaced (and frankly mind-boggling) belief that after a decade of deficit spending while consistently reducing income, we can some how entice those who hold a record amount of capital back into spending by not priming the pump through government incentives. When the private sector is not spending, and people are out of work and not spending, who else is going to spend? The economy we've built is dependent upon consistent expansion and growth. When you have neither, you have nothing. This is not complicated math here. The fact there there seems to be a large segment of the population willingly suspending disbelief about conservative economic initiatives and principles is clear indication why we're going down in flames. If you're a student of history, you can why we are where we are now because a Republican-controlled congress made the same kind of demands on FDR, and if it weren't for the eventual wartime debt and spending, would have plunged us into a second great depression. Yet when you have a propaganda machine pumping out misinformation about what is really happening in the market place, it's going to remain this way until it either collapses or people finally question why we've built a corporate welfare state that pays to ensure it's participants can continue to game the system.
Explain to me using your logical model of economics why it made good economic sense for Barclays to manipulate LIBOR?
Historically monopolies have formed and thrived when governments did not stop them. The free market forces do not prevent monopolies from forming.
So why doesn't he buy his hooks at Walmart?
Think about an isolated hunter gatherer society. They spend all of their time trying to survive.
Huh? Modern (e.g. 1950s) hunter-gatherers, living in lands unsuitable for agriculture, spent around 20 hours per week gathering food. How else would they have had time to develop art, culture & language while colonizing the globe? Agriculture was a huge step down, requiring ~100 hours a week until very recently. Quality of life suffered dramatically, but farming supports far greater populations, so it became dominate through military might (and drunkenness). Here, and here are some interesting articles on the topic.
From the Wikipedia article you linked to:
"The Luddites were a social movement of 19th-century English textile artisans who protested ... replaced ... with less-skilled, low-wage labour, leaving them without work and changing their way of life (See "Dickens, Charles" for what life without work was like in 19th Century England)
Battles between Luddites and the military occurred at Burton's Mill in Middleton, and at Westhoughton Mill, both in Lancashire. It was rumoured at the time that agents provocateurs employed by the magistrates were involved in provoking the attacks. (Sound familiar?) ...and the present action had to be seen in the context of the hardships suffered by the working class during the Napoleonic Wars.
"Machine breaking" (industrial sabotage) was subsequently made a capital crime (Breaking a loom meriting a death sentence?!) by the Frame Breaking Act, 52 Geo. 3, c. 16[9] and the Malicious Damage Act of 1812, 52 Geo. 3, c. 130[10] – legislation which was opposed by Lord Byron, one of the few prominent defenders of the Luddites – and 17 men were executed after an 1813 trial in York. Many others were transported as prisoners to Australia. At one time, there were more British soldiers fighting the Luddites than Napoleon I on the Iberian Peninsula.
Hmm, a social movement protesting societal changes which left many to starve in the streets. This movement was met with ridiculously Draconian responses including executions and exile to Australia, and repressed with the use of more military troops against their own civilian population than were devoted to stopping Napoleon. The Draconian legal responses seem to have been specifically drafted to please wealthy company owners.
You know, I think you've got it exactly right. I think the Luddites have a lot to teach us about the times we live in.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I think rather than GM or any of the other ghosts you are trying to conjure about modern food production, let us consider the tomato. That round, red, delicious looking, but tasteless, monument to food. It turns out that many years ago, through much cross-breeding (yep, good old cross-breeding), it was found a particular trait could be had with a high frequency. The trait: uniform red color even near the stem. Unfortunately, the genetics were such that it also hosed the taste. The reason was chlorophyll in the tomato. The genetics that got bred out made for lots of the stuff which turned into tasty sugars or caused them to be produced (memory fails a bit here) in the tomato. The tomato when not ripe should be nice deep green, now it is a sickly light green due to the lack of chlorophyll.
This was only recently discovered. And let's observe precisely why this inferior blob of an excuse for a tomato sold better than the one not bred for such uniform red color: the consumer. Turns out the consumer would always buy the blob rather than the real tomato even though he/she could easily taste the difference.
The lesson we observe here: GM and plain pumping for growth are not always the problem, and I very much doubt the former is at all given the studies. And the consumer is about as smart as a sack of wet mice (thank you, Foghorn Leghorn) when it comes to choosing food.