I don't see what the big deal is. Low price guarantees have been causing similar customer behavior for a long time. And the discount is small enough to make it less than with a trip to the store (at least for me). By and large, Amazon is a good thing for consumers and a bad thing for otherretailers who want their money.
Maybe telling customers to occupy retail space of stores for the sake of doing price checking for Amazon is in bad taste, but I see nothing wrong with having customers research for the best price.
That being said, isn't TechCrunch "stealing jobs" from the paper press as well? That's just the nature of online business.
Why the Amazon hate? Wasn't something like this inevitable?