Midpack
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
I'm about to make a $700 purchase and I think I will go for the local shop instead of a big box store or online merchant. There's a place for online merchants, big box stores and local merchants, but it seems only fair that online merchants compete with brick-n-mortar stores on an equal footing which includes state taxes and shipping. I'm surprised that it's taken this long to even begin to address the issues with most states facing deficits, many with troublesome future pension liabilities. YMMV
Amazon Sales Take a Hit in States With Online Tax - Bloomberg
Amazon Sales Take a Hit in States With Online Tax - Bloomberg
In one of the first efforts to quantify the impact of states accruing more tax revenue from Web purchases, researchers at Ohio State University published a paper this month that found sales dropped for Amazon when the online charge was introduced. In states that have the tax, households reduced their spending on Amazon by about 10 percent compared to those in states that don’t have the levy. For online purchases of more than $300, sales fell by 24 percent, according to the report titled “The Amazon Tax.”
“There is no ambiguity,” Brian Baugh, one of the report’s authors from Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business, said in an interview yesterday. “It has been their competitive advantage.”
Amazon supports federal legislation that would explicitly let states require tax collections by all online retailers above a certain size.
In addition to quantifying the sales impact, the researchers also concluded that brick-and-mortar stores didn’t hugely benefit from households reducing their spending on Amazon. That’s because many shoppers simply turned to online alternatives.
In total, brick-and-mortar retailers enjoyed a 2 percent bump in purchases in states that introduced an online sales tax, while competing online retailers got a 20 percent increase, the study found.
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