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Comment by Caerus | Hacker News Reader

> Amazon has long enjoyed an unbeatable price advantage over its physical rivals. When I buy a $1,000 laptop from Wal-Mart, the company is required to collect local sales tax from me, so I pay almost $1,100 at checkout.

This is such an over blown argument. Sure, Amazon is ~7% (where I live) cheaper than traditional stores due to sales tax. But that $1000 Wal-Mart laptop has a $900 sticker price on Amazon, and most non electronic items are 20-40% cheaper than in stores.

If laws change and I have to start paying sales tax on Amazon, it won't change a thing about my buying habits.

Edit: They also have an inventory many times larger than any brick and mortar store. Whenever I go shopping, I have to choose between the least crappy option Wal-Mart decides to stock. On Amazon, I get exactly the one I want.

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Indeed, when you look at surveys that ask people why they prefer shopping online, things like "24/7 convenience", "saves time", and "better selection" usually end up ahead of "costs less money, even after shipping" and taxes are usually a small part of that.

The lack of sales tax hurts local tax entities far worse than it hurts Amazon's competitors.

not having to drive to the store is huge

on Amazon you just search, compare, read reviews and click buy.

with brick and mortar stores, you have to drive to the store, park, then roam the store to find what you are looking for, then hope that they have it in stock before you buy, then drive back home. Even a small purchase ends up costing you an hour of your time.

and for large purchases almost always you have to wait 20-30 for the store associate to bring out what you want to buy...and you have to deal with a sales pitch for an extended warranty

Maybe for electronics but for clothes I don't mind driving to the store. Trying stuff on till I find what works. Asking knowledgeable staff for suggestions/opinions.

I think I've had one positive result from buying clothes online.

I have an idea for a side project/startup tackling that problem.

What's your main problem? Finding out how it would look on you? How it feels/quality? What are the suggestions and opinions you look for?

Thanks :)

All of the above are problems.

Huge problem is fit. Especially pants. So many things can go wrong. Too tight in the thighs, pants run short, pants are tighter than usual in the hips, weird fit in the butt, etc. . .

Feel/quality is a big one for me personally because I have some hangups with textures. If something has a certain feel it makes my skin crawl.

As for suggestions and opinions, I'm usually looking for advice, make sure I'm not committing any faux pas with my choices. For example, when buying some leather shoes I may want something that can be worn with jeans or with slacks if needed. If the sales associate is knowledgeable I will probably go with something I initially was tentative about or didn't consider.

Hope that helps.

It does :) . Thank you ! As soon as I have an MVP I'll post it here on Hacker News :) .

Send out measuring tapes for free to customers (like Square's credit card readers). The tapes will be branded with your logo/URL. You let users store their exact measurements on their profile, and your company takes care of the rest (building an online catalog of well-photographed stock, all of which your team has gathered samples of and tested for exact measurements.

I ordered some jeans online, taking measurements from another pair of jeans. In fact I aggregated together measurements of my body, measurements of my existing pairs of jeans, and sizes from the labels of my existing pairs of jeans.

The first pair that came were too short, and a bit big at the waist; the company agreed to swap them for a shorter pair (but I had to pay to ship the old pair back to them). I couldn't tell if going to a two-inch-smaller waist would mean an uncomfortably tight waist, so I didn't ask them to send me a pair with a smaller waist. The fit is now at best acceptable.

I could have been more stubborn about it and done more exchanges until I was happier with the fit, but that would have meant more inconvenience - and the expense of shipping them back again. Had I been buying at a shop I could have tried on a whole bunch of pairs of jeans, and I think I'd be happier with the overall fit.

For comparison, I have successfully brought sneakers, t-shirts and sweaters online so I'm no stranger to shopping for clothes online.

>The lack of sales tax hurts local tax entities far worse than it hurts Amazon's competitors.

Except that proposals to collect online sales tax would hurt local retailers even worse if they followed the law.

Not because Amazon would be paying local sales tax, because their new business plans with 1 day shipping might(!!) bring them into more competition with local retailers. States putting pressure on Amazon to collect sales tax may have encouraged Amazon into this plan but based on their past opposition I think it has more to do with their guesses about the market.

The problem though is that a big company like Amazon can afford to worry about paying sales taxes properly. I worry about the electronic store that delivers though, being forced out of business due to increasingly complex sales tax reporting requirements. It seems to me it gives the online retailers way too much power over local competition when a department of revenue audit could be used to sink the B&M retailers.

I live in the same county as Amazon's HQ, I pay full sales tax on everything there, it hasn't changed my shopping habits one bit, amazon is just such a better deal most of the time.

so, this means we are heading to a walmart vs amazon war? shit just got real.

False dichotomy. In the big box race to the bottom of prices, perhaps, but that's not the whole market (for amazon or for retail).

How is it a false dichotomy? Look at the retail marketplace and it's a wasteland. You have Walmart at the low end, aggressively disrupting entire manufacturing industries in their quest for low priced goods. At the "high" end you have Amazon squeezing out B&M bookstores, electronic stores, etc. Amazon has demonstrated a willingness to tolerate extremely low margins (1-2% if not negative) to achieve marketshare. How can a small business compete?

The only outlier I see in retail is Apple, generating huge amounts of revenue from their physical stores.

This deserves a much longer response than I have time for at the moment. Ultimately the core answer is this: the long tail. That's why we shouldn't fear amazon overly much as if it were just an online walmart. The book and music selection at amazon is better than at any physical store and that's true for almost all variety of goods there as well.

However, there's more. Retail isn't solely defined by low margin businesses like buying canned food and imported low-grade durable consumer goods (e.g. the walmart/target scenario). In many parts of the country there is a trend toward high-end "boutique" shops of various sorts. In my town, Seattle, there has been an explosion of neighborhood butchers offering organic, grass-fed beef et al. But the same sort of principles apply to lots of different businesses.

If your core business is about getting interchangeable mass produced goods into people's hands you are going to lose out to the big boxes and to the amazons. If your core business involves a lot of customer interaction or requires special skillsets or can be decommoditized in some way then perhaps you'll do ok, both online and off.

Trying to compete on amazon's playing field is a non-starter, so the trick is playing on a different field.

Yes, but the market for bespoke goods and organic foods is limited. The amount of disposable cash available to chase these goods is limited, especially during a recession like the current one. And even during "good times" the small boutique businesses don't have the market reach to do much more than eke out a living. And market economics will force out smaller companies that can't fit into either stratum.

I think we forget how many people are employed in retail jobs across the US. In 2010, 14 million people were involved in the retail industry. As retail efficiency improves via WalMart/Amazon/Target, this employment will drop. And as a society, we aren't very good at forecasting where jobs will migrate.

Competition/efficiency helps consumers by lowering prices, but the job loss should be troubling.

Sure seems that way :/

I think the big advantage of amazon's tax-exemption isn't necessarily competition from physical retailer's, but rather from the online presence of those same physical retailer's. For example, I was checking out target's website the other day. They were offering some online only prices on things, I loaded an item into the cart, but at checkout, when the tax and shipping was added, I backed off because it was too expensive. On amazon, due to the no-tax and (usually) no shipping charges, I probably would have made that impulse buy.

Exactly. I live in Oregon where there's no sales tax no matter where I buy something. I still get most non-grocery items on Amazon. More selection, cheaper, and I love the reviews. I don't think I've ever been disappointed by a highly reviewed Amazon item.

In retail, 7% is usually higher than gross margins.

But you're picking a fairly non-representative product for this issue. I doubt any of us are going to be buy a laptop from Walmart, looking at their stock, I don't think many other people are either. They have a couple but this is not their bread and butter (which actually is their bread and butter).

I only picked that because it was the example in the article. Looking at my recent Amazon purchases:

Amazon: Oxo Coasters $9.99 for 8 Walmart: Comparable set, Silicon Coasters $30 for 6

Amazon: DVD Rack $29.99 Walmart: Comparable model from same company, $39.00

Amazon: American Crew Pomade, $21.49 for 2 Walmart: $16.98 for 1

Amazon: 13 Watt CFL, $15.98 for 8 Walmart: Same model, $16.88 for 4

Those were the first 4 items I tried to compare.

In almost no category that I've sampled has Walmart ever been the absolute rock-bottom cheapest compared to several places (Big Lots, Dollar General, local grocery chains, Amazon... even Target, believe it or not). People, however, can't go to Amazon to get infant formula, a car battery, ammunition, and a jar of pickles at 1AM and have it in hand immediately.

Walmart used to be about "made in the USA", then it was "always low prices", now it's about "live better". It's Walmart's ubiquity, convenience, and momentum that keeps them dominant (and their ability to loss-leader competitors out of business).

True, there will always be a need for immediacy in shopping. However, on three of the four you listed (Not sure if I want to know why you need ammunition at 1 am...) Amazon carries them, and at a reasonable to very low price. Most of the time I know I'll need something a couple days before. Instead of "I'm out of coffee, better go to the store" it's "I'm running low on coffee, better order some and it will be here in two days". Personally, I find that to be more convenient most of the time.

> Not sure if I want to know why you need ammunition at 1 am...

Zombies. That's the real mistake we're making with shifting all our purchases to Amazon and their just-in-time delivery. There will be nothing to loot when the zombie outbreak happens.

Unless you know where the warehouses are... But surviving the zombie apocalypse in a wal-mart store or a huge mall has much more style then doing in a damp worehouse in the middle of nowhere. That is unless amazon is changing that bit about zombie outbreaks, too!

The whole point of the original article is you'll soon be able to order all of those (except the ammunition) from Amazon in the morning and have them on your doorstep when you get home from work.

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