Just got 6 months of free prime and I was really digging it. I guess it's about the local competition. Back to eBay and Newegg.
My prime membership expired today - what great timing! I'm cutting my ties to Amazon for some time to save money and monitor the price situation with sales tax before I go back
God damnit... Mainly the reason why I shop at Amazon... Me and the Family spends thousands a year on Amazon because of the 0% tax
Sucks so much. I buy tons of stuff on Amazon. Heck, I even bought water hoses through them. The amount of stuff they have is off the charts and it is so much easier to buy through them when you are looking for particular high quality brands.
Certainly - some will shift to local businesses, some will stay with Amazon, and some will go to other online retailers to avoid sales tax. But in general, the beauty of Amazon is how many things you can get from one place with great customer service, reliability, etc. I think the benefits to the other online retailers will be the smallest piece of the puzzle. People who care about price will likely do more local shopping (as you see in this thread with people talking about Best Buy, Fry's, etc). People who don't will just keep using Amazon (as people do in all the states that already are taxed) and the state will benefit. In the long run, all the online retailers are going to have to pay sales tax anyway - Amazon is on board with that and actually is lobbying for it, states need more revenues, and the small online retailres don't have the clout to fight them.
Not the kind of jobs we should want for our fellow Texans: http://www.motherjones.com/rights-stuff/2011/09/amazon-warehouse-heat-shipping And there's no way Amazon could ever give the same kind of pricing at a brick and mortar store that they do online. It just doesn't work that way.
Mails using parent's address out of state. File change of address with USPS. Successfully avoid taxes. :grin: Good for Texas, bad for consumers.
Take a look at the budget crises of your local school districts, look at how many programs have had to be cut, how many teachers have been let go, how large the classrooms are not, calculate the drop in the quality of the education of our children, extrapolate that out into a poorly-educated and uncompetitive adult workforce in another 10-15 years, and then keep crying about your wallet. I don't like paying more sales tax either, but maybe this will be the catalyst to wake people up and start holding the state's feet to the fire when it comes to covering constitutionally-mandated obligations, which the state egregiously fails to do when it comes to the inequities in paying the share of the schools' budgets they are SUPPOSED to be paying. Maybe this will get them to finally allow casinos - does anyone realize how much money we lose to Louisiana and Oklahoma because people are driving over state lines to play the slots and cards and junk like that? Let them stay in state, and ease the budgets woes of our schools and other necessary services.
then stop paying ridiculous pensions to state employees who never did a hard day's work in their lives
