http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/198329-snowe-rips-amazon-for-incentivizing-consumers-to-spy-on-local-shops-
Shortly after getting my iPhone a bit over 2 years ago, I blogged about the potential for conflict with price comparison apps. With the iPhone and an app that reads barcodes, you can easily find out if the price a store has on a product is reasonable or not. It might not mean you rush over to the other store, but if a store has a “We’ll meet any competitor’s price” guarantee, your job got simpler to negotiate a lower price.
Well, Amazon – which has been getting heat from States – both for not collecting sales tax, and pressure from “brick and mortar” book stores for Congress to “do something!” – is upping the ante. Starting today, if you use their app and report the prices on a book you find at your local bookstore, they’ll give you 5% off another item if you buy the book from Amazon.
Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, who says she is a Republican, is outraged that the Amazon is using the “little people” to “spy” on her business owners who give her campaign money. She is the ranking member on the Senate’s Committee on Small 
Business and Entrepreneurship.
When Amazon ships a book to a customer, it is using none of the infrastructure of a city or state, other than the roads – which UPS is paying gasoline taxes to use. Rather than thinking the state has a right to tax companies in another state who use none of the services of the state, maybe states should find a way to get rid of their sales taxes and cut back spending or find other sources of revenue like getting Boeing to build a plant in your state by making your state a Right to Work state.
So how does this play out? How could Congress or retailers fight against Amazon having its customers report the prices of books using a cell phone? I’ll start a list, feel free to add to it. Since book stores closing costs jobs, I’m sure President Obama will support any of our ideas how to keep people at work selling hardback books in book stores – in the era of Kindle and Nook and the iPad and those other job destroyers.
– make it a federal crime to use the Amazon app
– block cell phones so they don’t work inside your store
– ban people from your store if you see them using their cell phone
– people still buy hardcover books?
– impose a federal tariff on goods sent interstate by UPS
– Bring antitrust action against Amazon and break them up
– offer a coupon for free cup of coffee with a book purchase
– start selling porn in the book stores
Senator Snowe was named for the state of permanent brain freeze she exhibits. She’s an ice maiden in more ways than one, it seems. And we can’t have all that damned capitalism and competin’ goin’ on out there. Come on!
It’s a pretty sound principle that when a business says “There is too much regulation”, what they really mean is “my competition has too little regulation”