So what's been happening is that chain stores have been eating independent book stores alive well before online shopping was widespread.
Why? Price, poor products and service and "blame it on the customer" culture.
Local businesses have been hanging themselves for years on these fronts.
Amazon sorts the above perfectly and you don't have to leave your house.
The entire time in the back of my mind I'm thinking I could have bought the damn thing on Amazon for cheaper and would not have to put up with this bullshit. As an American in Europe I'm sympathetic to some of these stores, but a lot of them are going out of business through their own incompetence.
Now I have a 50euro credit to a chain of stores that is bankrupt.
If the social-minded person wasn't the majority, they wouldn't have elected a government that would pass such a law.
It's a co-ordination problem: if one person does X, nothing much happens, but if everyone does X, it makes a difference. So each person, thinking as an individual, can rationally say, "It doesn't make sense for me to do X", but the same person can also rationally say "it does make sense for everyone to do X".
What you clearly don't understand is that if you prevent laws like this from occurring, then French cafe owners or bookstore owners would be forced by the market force - competition - to innovate. Create better service or product for their customers. If a cafe owner would succeed - and not be penalized with 75% tax - then he could open more and more cafes, having a franchise, succesfully competing with Starbucks. And if his innovative ideas were good enough, he could even start threating Starbucks position in the US. But that will never happen. Why? Because with Government protection on his side there will be no market force (i.e. customers who prefer competition) to force him to innovate. He will just sit there 8-5 like rest of the French society thinking that a GOvernment edict can somehow change the world in which he's living. It can't. Because people already voted with their money clearly showing winners and losers. And unless losers get to work, they'll be just that. Loosers.
Thinking that innovation is enough is a little bit naïve, you need more than innovation to get market space, ask Archos for details about that. Quick got a place in the sun with the very innovative position of selling hamburgers cheaply, end result: Burger King left the country crushed in the war between Mc Donald's and Quick, but innovation is zero on the hamburger front.
Notice that Starbucks and Amazon are american lifestyle companies, of course there is going to be an appeal to the lower income class for services that are immediate and cheap. Since they are paid a poverty wage, they are too busy working to have the time to do things like go out for lunch or cook a meal.
A woah, guess what? Those business models perpetuate the same conditions that lower work environment standards, wages, employee health and morale. It's a positive feedback system that needs to be nipped in the bud before it completely devours the French economy.
And there is another, moral hazard kind of a point: Why would you like to force people to buy something they perceive as worse? You are right they worked hard to get this money and this is not your or Government business how they spend it.