Amazon goodies

The rotten Easter egg for Europe -- fee hikes.

Third party retailers in several European countries are crying foul because Amazon is raising fees right after Easter.

Dear Amazon Marketplace retailers:
Suck it up. Finding and retrieving old rocket engines in an ocean takes a lot of cash, which has to be earned. Especially since it's not just any ocean, but an ocean full of salt water. (*)

Shopping online is kind of cool in a country where the 24 hour brick and mortar store does not exist.

Germans are still finding their way around the boundless world of spending money, especially the American kind of money, money they don't have. Let them have some fun.

There seems to be another, darker side to Amazon. According to a course email from an economics professor, Amazon does something you won't find in bookstores:
When demand for a textbook goes up, they charge the customer more. 

The publisher does not get more, thanks for asking. The publisher gets the same price no matter what the demand.
We have not verified this independently, but it sounds like something that would flourish in the corporate world.

A recently publicized tax trick is that Amazon pockets a huge part of the sales tax on books due to a legal provision on sales tax in Europe. Amazon Europe books all sales in Luxembourg at the bargain basement sales tax rate of 3%, but customers in the country where the customer lives get charged the local rate of, say 20%. The 17% go into Amazons coffers.

(*) Sorry about the seemingly redundant statement that the ocean is full of salt water. We are merely trying to keep this post understandable for future post global warming readers who may call an ocean a "vast expanse of weak acid".