171–180 of 301 posts
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> The effect will be to force the same sticker price everywhere, as intended for years now. So in the end the seller with the best service will win.
Or with more stores, longer hours, free shipping....
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The French vote those people who enact these laws into office because they approve them.
If people wanted it anyway why would they need a law to enforce it? I want to shop locally. I don’t vote for a law to require myself to shop locally. I just go ahead and shop locally. The only need for a law is to force someone who doesn’t want to shop locally to do so against their will!
If everyone thinks like this then the tragedy of the commons occurs. Everyone prefers local businesses to exist over the online monopoly, but nobody changes their purchasing behavior from what is cheap and convenient. By voting restrictions on online monopolies people avert the tragedy of the commons by coordinating (and compelling) what they want.
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I’m suspicious that Amazon sells fewer books than a good physical bookstore. In a bookstore, people find books they didn’t know they want, and I’ve never found anything interesting on Amazon. Similarly, Amazon does not produce the “whole I’m already here, I might as well buy something else” effect. I’ve long thought that the publishers have has their whole business model wrong in quite a few ways.
> I’ve never found anything interesting on Amazon Probably a lack of your own imagination. There’s a lifetime of interesting books on Amazon.
Personally I don't think I've ever become aware of an interesting book via Amazon, but I've also never used it for discovery. Certainly you have to troll through a lot of nonsense results even when you have a good idea of what you're looking for.
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The French vote those people who enact these laws into office because they approve them.
If people wanted it anyway why would they need a law to enforce it? I want to shop locally. I don’t vote for a law to require myself to shop locally. I just go ahead and shop locally. The only need for a law is to force someone who doesn’t want to shop locally to do so against their will!
I remember reading about an experiment at Google where they reduced snacking by simply putting an opaque cover on the snacks. When people see chocolate bars, there is a chance they'll turn and get one. They may consider they made the decision rationally but they didn't.
In moments of rationality, it seems reasonable to me to devise and legislate ways to protect yourself from future impulses. It's a paradox for sure, but our impulsive/rationale nature is the source of the paradox, and is unavoidable.
When you "ask" the market by offering food, people may rush to the high-calory fastfood offerings. In a moment of reason, you may want to regulate this (e.g. ban fast food ads around kids), so that you don't live in an obese-ridden society.
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> The effect will be to force the same sticker price everywhere, as intended for years now. So in the end the seller with the best service will win.
Or with more stores, longer hours, free shipping....
But one thing is for certain: if you buy from a retail store you will actually get the real book, not some cheap fake garbage.
A lot of comments don’t seem to get the context of this. Book prices are regulated in France [0] and you can’t just discount willy-nilly, in particular new book publications have selling prices set by the publisher. This proposition is coming on top of that: it will block sellers from artificially discounting books by subsidizing shipping cost. It is basically closing a loophole that still allowed Amazon to have lowe…
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this is actually protecting the small book stores, right? Big stores like the Fnac could offer the same shipping prices as Amazon (and maybe they're already doing it). Publishers don't care much who is selling the book as long as it's selling. Obviously this only applies to physical books. Ebooks only account for about 15% of books sold in France unlike the US where it's close to 5…
Looks like it's protecting everyone except the book buying consumer.
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Key Bank bought the naming rights and named it "Key Arena." Amazon bought the naming rights and called it "Climate Pledge Arena." The only sense in which one of those arbitrary names is "virtue signaling" and the other isn't it that some people just don't like it when anyone mentions climate change in public.
Amazon doing it doesn't make it any less virtue signalling. I'd be much more impressed if Amazon had used the money instead to buy some forest land and turned it into a nature conservancy. I wouldn't be critical of calling that "Climate Pledge Park".
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That struck me as well. Another option would have been to support local bookstores by subsidizing transportation, which would have allowed them to lower the price to the point of being competitive with Amazon. But I guess that using public money to help local businesses is not as good as getting the customers to pay and help Amazon at the same time, in the eyes of Macron.
> Another option would have been to support local bookstores by subsidizing transportation Doesn't media mail already do this (in the US)? If you're just sending books, the USPS will deliver them well below cost. I'm not sure what effect it has on local shops.
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Or with more stores, longer hours, free shipping....
Sure they can sell more books if open longer, have more resources, etc. But one thing is for certain: if you buy from a retail store you will actually get the real book, not some cheap fake garbage.