Trump criticizes impact Amazon has on rivals

The Seattle Times

Amazon.com’s prowess as a hiring machine isn’t impressing President Donald Trump, who in an early Wednesday tweet called the company a destroyer of retail jobs.

“Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt — many jobs being lost!” the president wrote on Twitter.

It’s not the first time Trump has said something critical of Amazon. The company is led by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, a newspaper that has aggressively covered the campaign and the Trump presidency.

But it’s the first time Trump has talked about Amazon’s alleged negative impact on Main Street jobs.

That’s an idea that the company has sought to dispel by highlighting how many jobs are created by online merchants operating on its platform, and by trumpeting the massive amount of blue collar hiring it does at its warehouse network. This month Amazon held a nationwide job fair at various fulfillment centers intended to fill 50,000 open positions.

Trump has in the past tweeted that Amazon was not paying “Internet taxes.” But it’s unclear what he meant by that. Amazon collects state sales taxes in all 45 states with a sales tax and the District of Columbia, according to its website. State governments have sought to capture sales taxes lost to internet retailers, though they have struggled with a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that retailers must have a physical presence in a state before officials can make them collect sales tax.

The issue arose recently in South Carolina, which has pursued legal action to recoup tax revenue it says it’s owed. This summer, the state Department of Revenue filed a case with the Administrative Law Court, alleging that Amazon had failed to collect taxes on third-party merchant sales. The state’s case is in the early stages, and a court date has not been set.

Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.