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Amazon Forbids Crossing State Lines With Rented Textbooks
New submitter Galaga88 writes "In what is probably another attempt to evade charging sales tax, Amazon's terms of use through Warehouse Deals forbids crossing state lines with certain rented textbooks. The penalty for doing so? Retroactive forced purchase of the book. At least it's yours to keep afterwards. 'Some experts believe the policy is another reflection of the extreme lengths to which the company continues to go in order to avoid collecting state sales taxes. But could Amazon’s use restriction and other complicated rental conditions cause problems for students or lead potential textbook renters to take their business elsewhere? It seems like a policy that would be nearly impossible to enforce. But Richard Hershman, vice president of government relations at the National Association of College Stores, points out that if a student has textbooks sent to her home state and ships them back from a different state where she attends college, Amazon could easily note the new shipping location.'"
I'm sure I'm not alone in being fed the fuck up with corporations taking control of different aspects of our lives via unilateral contracts. I think it's high time we demand such obligations be banned, thus empowering consumers to at least have a little say in how a contract is worded and executed.
Unilateral contract == legalized rape entirely too often.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
no, what they are doing is purposely being difficult in order to avoid dealing with ridiculous lawmaking from our government. they are making a statement saying "see, we can be ridiculous too". and the best thing is? it is legal for them to do so. the issue at hand is that for years, the federal law stated that you only pay sales tax if there is a brick and mortar store(or warehouse) in that state. the government has recently been changing it so that the states can charge sales tax even if there isnt a brick and mortar store. this is bad for amazon, and im sure it is worse for amazon than the profit loss from ppl not wanting to rent books from them. the reason they can offer such a cheap price all the time is that they dont have to have sales tax. with taxes, they will lose a huge portion of their profit.
So, what then for cases like Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington? They both are reasonably sized cities which border each other on a state line, effectively creating a single metropolitan area. Many sleep in Vancouver, yet live their lives in Portland; and, of course, vice versa.
Believe it or not, there aren't people with computers or databased that track this information. Sales tax regions are geographical constructs don't correspond to particular zip codes or streets or anything useful like that - you can have two houses that are in the same street and zip code but have different sales tax rates. Hell, two halves of the same house can be in different regions with different sales tax rates - try handling that in a sensible way. There's no automated way of mapping from an address to a sales tax region and there's never going to be.