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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged retail

1. March 5, 2012 05:41 PM

   WSJ on the Return of the Online Pet Food Store

   By Ryan Chittum

   I like this smart Wall Street Journal piece on the new economics of the Web as told through the effort to build a "Pets.com 2.0." Pets.com, of course, came to symbolize the mania of the Tech Wreck with a we'll-make-money-later business model based, implausibly, on spending millions on sock puppet ads so the company could lose money shipping forty-pound bags...

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2. November 27, 2012 06:50 AM

   Amazon sharecroppers

   The Seattle Times on the hometown giant's uneasy relationship with its merchants

   By Ryan Chittum

   The Seattle Times has another good story on Amazon, this time reporting on the hometown giant's lopsided relationship with its third-party retailers. Amazon's Marketplace is a digital consignment store that allows merchants to sell their stuff on Amazon.com in exchange for a 6 percent to 25 percent cut off the top. Sellers take the deal to get access to the...

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3. September 6, 2011 02:37 PM

   Amazon’s California Tax Battle

   Fighting to delay the end of its unfair advantage

   By Ryan Chittum

   While billionaire Jeff Bezos is off crashing spaceships (or wannabe spaceships, anyway) in the West Texas desert, his company's unfair tax advantage is disintegrating too. In July, a new California law forced online retailers like Amazon to collect sales taxes if they have a physical presence in the state, but the Los Angeles Times reports that Amazon is still refusing...

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4. June 5, 2012 03:08 PM

   David Cay Johnston’s excellent corporate-welfare column

   What a proposed mall project illustrates about subsidizing developers

   By Ryan Chittum

   Reuters's David Cay Johnston has a great column on corporate welfare that mixes reporting and analysis to show why subsidies for development are so problematic. Johnston looks at a proposal by mall heir Scott Congel to get New York taxpayers to subsidize the redevelopment of the Medley Centre mall outside Rochester. That dead mall has already gotten several million dollars...

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