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Comment by LekkoscPiwa | Hacker News Reader

No they don't prefer that. They vote with their money for Amazon. They vote with their money for Starbucks. Not for the local stores. The solution would be to let the free market forces work and force lazy buffons at local bookstores get their asses to work and be more competitive. Offer more than Amazon or Starbucks. But we can't do this, right? We cna't force local french people to work! That would be horrible! So we will subsidize them with that stupid law. At the end everyone wins here except for the reader who won't get what they want.

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it's the great fracture in French society, we see how toxic American life is, we don't want to go there, but we are lured there by the short term economic forces and Hollywood culture. Because on the short term economies of scale reduce the price, but on the long term they destroy standards of living, the fabric of the society (through individualism) and the economic resilience (economic inefficiencies are also local buffers against mishaps, think of local stocks, semi-finished products standing on a shelf).

well, if that's all true - sounds like socialist politician speech propaganda to me - then why regular French person on a street would rather go to Starbucks or buy at Amazon?

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.

because it's the easy thing to do it's the path of least resistance. It's the cheapest.

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.

You've got to be shitting me: 'voting with their money' is not at all a valid point, nor would it ever trump that of an elected representative.

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.

Starbucks is expensive. Probably more than a regular coffee at a regular French cafe. If french from all nations prefer to have more expensive coffee at starbucks than at their local vendor this just shows how badly the local vendors need to start to get back to work. Not that a regulation is needed to protect them from better competition. This might work in the short run, but it long term lack of exposure to competition will just make them weaker than they already are.

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.

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