Money and Finance
- Amazon Said To Launch Pantry To Take On Costco, Sam's
Amazon.com is working on a new business called Pantry that will help it expand further into the giant consumer package goods market and take on warehouse club stores Costco and Wal-Mart's Sam's Club, according to three people familiar with the...
- Amazon's 1997 Public Offering...
After reading THIS post about a NY Times article on Apple and Oracle from 1997, I did a search on the NY Times site for some other articles around that time. I found the short article pasted below interesting. I may be going out on a limb, but I think...
- Jeff Bezos Pays $250 Million For The Washington Post
In an ironic twist for a tycoon whose company has always kept its distance from the press, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has agreed to pay $250 million cash for The Washington Post. The purchase takes the newspaper out of the hands of the Graham family,...
- Active In Cloud, Amazon Reshapes Computing
Within a few years, Amazon.com’s creative destruction of both traditional book publishing and retailing may be footnotes to the company’s larger and more secretive goal: giving anyone on the planet access to an almost unimaginable amount of computing...
- Competing With Amazon On Amazon
Thousands of small merchants depend on Amazon.com Inc. to reach customers who otherwise wouldn't know they exist. A few of them complain, though, that Amazon sometimes eats their lunch. According to some small retailers, the Seattle-based giant appears...
Money and Finance
I Want It Today
Amazon has long enjoyed an unbeatable price advantage over its physical rivals. When I buy a $1,000 laptop from Wal-Mart, the company is required to collect local sales tax from me, so I pay almost $1,100 at checkout. In most states, Amazon is exempt from that rule. According to a 1992 Supreme Court ruling, only firms with a physical presence in a state are required to collect taxes from residents. Technically, when I buy a $1,000 laptop from Amazon, I’m supposed to pay a $100 “use tax” when I file my annual return with my home state of California. But nobody does that. For most people, then, most items at Amazon are significantly cheaper than the same, identically priced items at other stores.
In response to pressure from local businesses, many states have passed laws that aim to force Amazon to collect sales taxes (the laws do so by broadening what it means for a company to have a physical presence in the state). Amazon hasn’t taken kindly to these efforts. It has filed numerous legal challenges, and fired all of its marketing affiliates in Colorado, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and California. It also launched a $5 million political campaign to get voters to turn back the California law. And when Texas’ comptroller presented Amazon with a $269 million sales tax bill last year, the company shut down its distribution center in Dallas.
But suddenly, Amazon has stopped fighting the sales-tax war. Last fall it dropped its repeal campaign in California and instead signed a deal with lawmakers to begin collecting sales taxes later this year. That was followed by several more tax deals—over the course of the next couple years, Amazon will begin collecting sales tax from residents of Nevada, New Jersey, Indiana, Tennessee, Virginia, and on July 1, it began collecting taxes from Texans. It also currently collects taxes from residents of Kansas, Kentucky, New York, North Dakota, and its home state of Washington. After all the tax deals go into effect, the company will be collecting taxes from the majority of its American customers.
Why would Amazon give up its precious tax advantage?
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Related link: The Future of Retailing
- Amazon Said To Launch Pantry To Take On Costco, Sam's
Amazon.com is working on a new business called Pantry that will help it expand further into the giant consumer package goods market and take on warehouse club stores Costco and Wal-Mart's Sam's Club, according to three people familiar with the...
- Amazon's 1997 Public Offering...
After reading THIS post about a NY Times article on Apple and Oracle from 1997, I did a search on the NY Times site for some other articles around that time. I found the short article pasted below interesting. I may be going out on a limb, but I think...
- Jeff Bezos Pays $250 Million For The Washington Post
In an ironic twist for a tycoon whose company has always kept its distance from the press, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has agreed to pay $250 million cash for The Washington Post. The purchase takes the newspaper out of the hands of the Graham family,...
- Active In Cloud, Amazon Reshapes Computing
Within a few years, Amazon.com’s creative destruction of both traditional book publishing and retailing may be footnotes to the company’s larger and more secretive goal: giving anyone on the planet access to an almost unimaginable amount of computing...
- Competing With Amazon On Amazon
Thousands of small merchants depend on Amazon.com Inc. to reach customers who otherwise wouldn't know they exist. A few of them complain, though, that Amazon sometimes eats their lunch. According to some small retailers, the Seattle-based giant appears...