Not paying sales tax on mail order was the norm. The time period you're talking about, Amazon, and the internet in general, hadn't penetrated to the general public. 1995-96 was just when a small minority of people were waking up to the idea they needed to be on the internet and getting their first direct PPP dialup account. People still went to physical book stores because, for one thing, you couldn't preview a book online.
It wasn't at all obvious that Amazon would take over the world well into the 2000s. They looked like every other dotcom, particularly because they didn't consistently make GAAP profits and so people were just waiting for them to die. AWS, Kindle, Prime, Fresh, lots of stuff are recent developments.
Absolutely nothing about the original concept could have told you what it would become or was in any way exclusive.
> Not paying sales tax on mail order was the norm.
You're forgetting that mail order wasn't the norm--even if you ordered from a catalog you picked it up in person at the store. So, not collecting tax on mail order wasn't a big deal until Amazon flattened bookstores with it.
Huh? That’s not how I remember it at all. You ordered from the catalog and then waited three weeks. If you were going to pick up in the store, why not just go to the store instead of calling an 800 number and reading off your credit card info? There was a whole Seinfeld episode about how the only mail anyone got anymore was catalogs.
Per FRED[1], monthly mail order sales doubled from 1992 to the end of 96.
Obviously it was nothing like today, but mail order was, like, a thing.
*Also, I learned in my google rabbit hole about this that it’s a 1992 Supreme Court decision that confirmed that mail order retailers didn’t have to collect state tax unless they had a physical presence in the state.
You picked up in store because there was free shipping to the sears store in town. You didn't go to the sears store in town because it didn't have very much inventory.
Note that we are talking about small rural towns in the middle of nowhere. When sears started most of the population was either a farmer, or lived in a small town in farm country. If you lived in a large city you could go to a department store downtown and it would have everything. If you lived in a small town the department store had only the very popular items and you were expected to order from them.
By the 1980s the population had shifted to bigger cities, and UPS offered affordable shipping to your door, so those small town stores had little reason to exist and started closing.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and the claim simply isn't true. My family mail-ordered all the time, and it was nearly always delivered to the house.
I get that it feels neat and tidy to say that Amazon and Uber had the same growth model of skirting regulations, but the facts don't match that.
This doesn't mean that Amazon is good--I think that what the effect of what they've done to retail is awful. But using Uber as the key piece of a kind of Godwin's Law doesn't really help matters.
It wasn't at all obvious that Amazon would take over the world well into the 2000s. They looked like every other dotcom, particularly because they didn't consistently make GAAP profits and so people were just waiting for them to die. AWS, Kindle, Prime, Fresh, lots of stuff are recent developments.
Absolutely nothing about the original concept could have told you what it would become or was in any way exclusive.