$1,500 per day
Looks like Amazon.com refuses to roll over for the French courts over some inane and insane anti-consumer law governing book prices and discounts:
PARIS: The online retailer Amazon.com said Monday that it would pay €1,000 a day in fines, rather than comply with a court ruling upholding French limits on price discounts for books.
The company decided to pay the daily fine worth $1,500 rather than eliminate its offer of free shipping on book purchases, said Xavier Garambois, director of Amazon’s French subsidiary.
…Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of the company, based in Seattle, was equally defiant in a weekend e-mail message to French customers. “As unbelievable as it appears, the free delivery of Amazon.fr is threatened,” he wrote in the French-language note.
“France would be the only country in the world where the free delivery practiced by Amazon would be declared illegal,” the Bezos e-mail concluded, inviting consumers to sign an online petition. By Monday evening, more than 120,000 people had clicked in favor of maintaining free delivery.
Ah, yes. The most evil of all evil capitalistic devices, the dreaded free shipping dicount.
The 1981 Lang law was passed at a time when booksellers were losing sales to supermarkets and other new competitors. It was meant to assure that the French public had equal access to a wide variety of books, both high-brow and low-brow, not just heavily marked-down publications.
The law has twice come before the European Court of Justice and both times it has been affirmed. The law is not considered anticompetitive because all book retailers are held to the same standard, Manara said.
Don’t believe any of the above. The law is anti-competitive b/c it clearly limits competition — who loses? The stupid French consumer. Apparently, it also attempts to do a little clumsy social engineering.
In the Amazon case, a union of French bookstores won its lawsuit against the company last month over the free-shipping offer, which applies only to deliveries within France on book orders of more than €20.
The Tribunal de Grande Instance in Versailles awarded the bookstore association €100,000 and ordered Amazon to start charging for delivery. The court said if the cost of Amazon’s delivery reduced the price of a book more than the 5 percent allowed by law, then the sale violated the law.
LOL. Insanity. God, I hate the French. I mean, I really do.
