The Times covers how indie shops in Austin helped develop SoCo and now are being edged out by Hermès and Lululemon.
Excerpt:
“The story is always the same,” said Mr. Hodge, who owns the Big Top Candy Shop and Monkey See Monkey Do novelty shop. “The scrappy locals go into a run-down area, they take it over, they rebuild it into a destination area that’s attractive.”
But the quirky ambience on the grand avenue doesn’t last long, he ...
Read More
Thieves have increased their activities since the pandemic started. In 2021, retail theft was up 40% shared The Wall St. Journal. Many stolen goods wind up on for sale on Amazon and Ebay. To combat this, two Congress people have proposed requiring sellers of more than $5,000 in goods or 200 transactions to reveal more information about themselves.
If passed, the law would bar huge online platforms such as Amazon’s e-marketplace, Apple’s app store, and Google’s search engine from giving preferential treatment to the company’s own products and services, such as steering consumers to in-house products instead of competitors’ offerings in a way that harms competition.
An East Village Artist’s Death Prompts a Reflection on the State of Indie Retailers Today
…….
While thumbing through the Times, I noticed a smiling young woman’s picture in the obituaries. In the black and white photograph, she's standing on a fire escape with a historic building and a bridge in the distance. I was initially attracted to Ronni Solbert’s 1959 picture, yet I was even more drawn in by what I noticed next to her photo: a children&...
Read More
Amazon issued a press release stating that it is fighting with 10,000 Facebook groups that sell fake Amazon reviews. It’s ironic, since Amazon has been a chief promoter of the avenue allowing this behavior: Section 230. Section 230 allows tech platforms to host and indirectly promote just about any type of bad behavior, including illegal behavior (fake review services and yes, human trafficking, murder-for-hire, etc.) and then say it’s just a community space and belatedly remove the ...
Read More
Last February e-commerce company Shopify Inc. replaced the “Ottawa, Canada” dateline that began its press releases and earnings reports with a strange new one: “Internet, Everywhere.” The geographical shift came at the insistence of Shopify’s founder and chief executive officer, Tobi Lütke, who tends to view such matters through the prism of cold, hard logic. In May 2020, only a few months into the pandemic, he’d made the early, seemingly rash decision to...
Read More
Two congresspeople are sponsoring a bill to help indie business fight abusive ADA lawsuits, shares Anne Flynn Wear, a writer for Furniture Today.
I know businesses that have been targeted by lawyers seeking to cash in on the ADA law. The defendants, even after they 'fix' their website, often have to settle for thousands of dollars.
The ADA was not written with websites in mind (the law was created in 1990--well before the Internet), and the law doesn't allow businesses a grace period to ...
Read More
Why don't you have to charge tax on out-of-state purchases? Are out of state internet retailers hurting your business? Both answers lie in 1992 Supreme Court ruling. Today's WSJ reports on the debate.
Today's WSJ reports on Congress' progress on taxing sales made online. Currently, people are supposed to self-report taxes for purchases made online when taxes are not paid at the time of purchase. The problem is that no one is self reporting taxes.
The new legislation proposes that businesses with at least $1 million in annual out-of-state sales or 50 or more employees collect tax.
Source: Vanity Fair
by John Clarke Jr. October 27, 2009, 11:49 AM
Earlier this year, when Anna Weatherley delivered her magnolia-patterned china set to the White House, the accompanying spate of profiles covered every aspect of her career--except one: gun runner. Was it true, as the whispers around Washington had it, that she had a secret history as a gun-runner in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan? Not quite, although the truth is just as curious.
Weatherley was no Soldier-of-Fortune radical ...
Read More