Amazon Delivering Groceries? It's Coming, Thanks To Sales-Tax Politics

curtwoodward writes "Amazon has been delivering groceries to people in its hometown of Seattle for a half-dozen years, but the experiment has never spread any further. But this year, rumors about Amazon Fresh expanding to new cities are coming out every month — Reuters just reported that Amazon could start the service in L.A. within a week, and in San Francisco in the coming months. What gives? Why expand now? Look no further than Amazon's long-running battle with state and federal governments over sales tax policy. After more than a decade of resistance, Amazon has spent the last two years cutting deals to collect sales taxes in states all over the country. And it's pushing for a national online sales-tax system, which appears to be within reach. That's the last obstacle to Amazon getting into the grocery-delivery game — a step that should worry not only grocers, but UPS and FedEx, too."

Re:More regulation = less choices

[Darkness404]

Its easy to implement for Amazon because Amazon is a large company with a team of lawyers and helped design it. In 2012 Amazon had revenue of about 60 billion or so, spending a couple hundred thousand (or more) on compliance with this proposal is a very small dent. However, the cost of compliance will be felt much more for smaller companies or individuals who sell online and may very well put them out of business. After all if you're selling something as a hobby, its not going to be much fun or profitable if you have to spend hundreds of dollars on either talking to a tax attorney or several man-hours trying to figure out the taxes on your own. Amazon can afford that, they've got the personnel and the spare cash, your "mom and pop" style internet store may not.

Re:Good-Bye "No Sales Tax"

[EvanED]

wonder what part of "national sales tax" you missed. Everyone gets to pay sales tax on internet purchases going forward.

The part where that didn't happen.

As I just said in another post [slashdot.org], there's no "internet sales tax", just the ability for states to require internet retailers to collect sales tax on sales to residents. If a state has no sales tax, there will continue to be no sales tax.

(I make no statement on whether the federal bill/law is good or bad, just that the name "internet sales tax" is apparently incredibly misleading.)

Fed Ex is non union and most drivers are not even

[Joe_Dragon]

Fed Ex is non union and most drivers are not even employees.

TaxCloud.net

[fyngyrz]

Integrating TaxCloud.net into a cart is supposed to be no more painful than integrating a payment processor or a shipping rate service.

When someone else assures you across the board that integrating something of theirs is [some level of difficult], into something of yours, where they know exactly nothing about your situation, work load, code, or available resources, you can be absolutely certain they have no idea whatsoever what they're talking about.

Further, for systems that implement home-grown shipping and payment, even the context is meaningless. "no more difficult" could be extremely difficult.

There are systems out there for whom the developers aren't even available any longer.

Whenever the government decides they're going to make every business, everywhere, do something, the load will neither be equal nor fair, and further, it may be fatal to the business for any number of reasons.