Should San Franciscans Support a Company that Won’t Support California?

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There were plenty of holiday deals to be found this weekend for San Franciscans shopping for a 4th of July bargain. Those who shopped online for deals probably found something else new to go along with their sale item: sales tax – unless they were shopping on Amazon.com.

On Friday, Governor Brown signed an important online sales tax bill into law that makes companies conducting online sales in California pay state sales taxes. While no one likes the idea of more taxes, those of us who care about more revenue for our struggling state coffers should support this new law and demand that corporations that want our money support it as well.

But Amazon.com, a long-time force in the online sales market, announced they don’t plan to play by the new rules.

Andrew Ross wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday that if you bought an item on Amazon.com in California this weekend, you still were not charged California state sales tax. While that could mean some small savings for shoppers, it means significant losses for the state of California when you take into consideration the hundreds of thousands of sales transactions on Amazon.com every year in our state.

As Phil Ting has said, “We all love shopping online, but in these hard economic times everyone needs to pay their fare share, especially since Sacramento has drastically cut state spending in order to close a $26 billion budget gap.”

At Reset San Francisco, we say no. If Amazon.com doesn’t want to help out California, Californians shouldn’t want to help out Amazon.com.

This common sense tax could be a huge help to Californians and we should hold Amazon.com accountable for its actions by boycotting online sales with the company until it starts paying its fair share to California.

Join us in telling Amazon.com that if they don’t want to help California, California doesn’t want to help them.

Sign our petition and tell Amazon.com it is Amazon.wrong!

 

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