Why Amazon Wants To Pay Sales Tax 647
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.
Get a CSA (Score:4, Informative)
Seattle has great farmers' markets, so he has no excuse. If you want fresh produce to be delivered, get a CSA. Many places (like Seattle) can have fresh produce delivered to your door weekly. The money also goes more directly to the farmers producing it.
Re:would i rather (Score:3, Informative)
In fact, eliminating jobs while providing the same or better service is considered to be a top priority of economics in general. The less labor it takes to provide service X means the less cost it takes, as long as there's competition it means lower prices for consumers.
So Economic Theory 1, Actual Economy 0. Awesome.
Without jobs, who cares how low consumer prices drop for whatever reason, and who cares whether it's Amazon, Walmart, or the corner mini-mart owning online markets? No jobs mean no demand, which means no growth, which means no jobs, which means no demand. Rinse, lather repeat.
Note to Randroids: We got into this mess by lack of government regulation, not because of it. Don't believe me? Go ask Phil Gramm [wikipedia.org], or better yet, Phil Gramm's wife [wikipedia.org].
Re:would i rather (Score:5, Informative)
Your post has some serious problems.
For banking, for instance, tellers haven't gone away, and there's no charge to see them. If your bank does charge you, you need to find another bank; there's tons of smaller banks and credit unions that haven't instituted the ridiculous fees the big banks have.
As for cashiers, we only need so many minimum-wage jobs. In many places, before the economy turned to total shit, it was really hard to fill those jobs because there just weren't many people who wanted to work for so little.
For grocery stores, if you think shopping online is going to replace the local supermarket, you're insane and need psychiatric intervention. How are you going to buy ice cream online? Unless they do some really fast delivery, it'll be melted. How are you going to buy produce online? Just hope they pick something that isn't squashed? What do you do when they give you apples with giant bruises on them? Send them back? Finally, I don't know about you, but buying things online can be a bit of a chore, between slow websites and poorly-written websites. If I know exactly what I'm looking for, buying online is great. It's especially good when you're buying a manufactured product that's exactly the same, no matter where you buy it (the LG flat-screen TV model ABCDE is exactly the same whether I buy it from Amazon or Best Buy). This doesn't work with food; it varies a lot, especially produce. Seeing a stock photo on a website is no substitute for seeing it first-hand, knocking on it (for melons), etc. It's not uncommon to walk into a supermarket intending to buy some fruit, and while they have them in stock, they're all crap (usually picked too early and shipped from far away). How are you going to see that online? You're not. And what if you want to browse an aisle full of some type of food? I can browse much faster by walking and looking at shelves than by messing around with some website.
Grocery shopping online isn't a new concept. Netgrocer tried it ten years or more ago, and it never took off, unlike Amazon and Newegg.
Online shopping definitely has its advantages, and works extremely well for certain goods. Electronics are a prime example here; you get the exact same thing as at the local store, and you get better information online, since the local pimply-faced teenager doesn't know anything about what he's selling. Groceries are at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Finally, one thing people will never do online is go to restaurants. There's plenty of low-wage jobs there for all the cashiers that lost their jobs.
Re:would i rather (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I don't care about waiting, I care about sales tax (Score:4, Informative)
Once they start charging sales tax, bye bye amazon for me.
Re:would i rather (Score:4, Informative)
The often cited buggy whip people went out of business as a result of innovation in products. Wal-mart hasn't produced any new products. That's my point. Wal-mart's success stems from innovations in labour management, negotiating with suppliers and contractors, leveraging off shore manufacturing and artificially depressed currencies.
They create innovations like this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/06/walmart-outsourcing-depresses-wages_n_1573885.html [huffingtonpost.com]
Yes, it is innovative to find a way to lower your distribution center hourly wage from $8/hour to $5/hour but not something I would compare to the invention of the Model T.
Re:would i rather (Score:5, Informative)
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 [independent.co.uk]). Here [mnforsustain.org], and here [eco-action.org] are some interesting articles on the topic.
Re:would i rather (Score:5, Informative)
For grocery stores, if you think shopping online is going to replace the local supermarket, you're insane and need psychiatric intervention. How are you going to buy ice cream online? Unless they do some really fast delivery, it'll be melted.
I don't know about where you live, but all of the major supermarkets in the UK provide local delivery, including Asda (Walmart). And, yes, you can order icecream and it works fine. They ship everything in vans that have a freezer compartment and the frozen items arrive significantly colder than if you'd taken them home in a car. I've done pretty much all of my supermarket shopping online for the last 5 years or so, and I know a lot of other people who do as well. The delivery charges are as low as £3, which may be slightly more expensive than driving to the shop and back, but it isn't if you value your time: you can do the entire shop online in less time than it takes most people to get to the supermarket.
Re:would i rather (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:would i rather (Score:4, Informative)
Sure, you can refrigerate shipments. However, the cost of this is pretty high.
You can ship ice across the Atlantic on a freighter (believe it or not that used to be how it was done, granted in the era of wooden ships). If you do it with an ice cube, you end up with a puddle before you're done hauling anchor. If you do it with a full hold you have fairly minimal losses (maybe 10%).
When shipping cold stuff the surface area to volume matters A LOT, as does relative amount of heat transfer. A cubic inch of styrofoam allows so many calories per hour to go through - whether there is a pint or a ton of ice cream inside. As you scale up the volume goes up faster than surface area. Then factor in other economies of scale.
The bottom line is that if you want to buy a ton of ice cream the shipping cost is pretty minimal compared to manufacturing costs. If you want to ship a pint of ice cream the shipping cost probably exceeds manufacturing cost.
Re:Amazon isn't going to PAY sales tax (Score:2, Informative)