Amazon’s Discrimination Against Illinois Sites

A couple of weeks ago, Amazon announced that they were going to cancel their advertising program for sites base in Illinois (including this one). This is in response to a bill signed by Governor Quinn stating that Amazon has to start charging sales tax for Illinois.

First of all, I would like to point out that I too disagree with this law. However, two wrongs do not make a right, and for Amazon to discriminate against sites purely based upon what state the site is in is unethical. New York has a similar law, but Amazon continues to advertise on sites in that locale.

I have links to products on Amazon on this site as a service to readers; if someone likes the role-playing book that I reviewed, I want to make it easy for them to purchase it. I am not doing this for money, and in fact this will not affect my profits. I have yet to receive a single check from Amazon as only a handful of people have purchased anything via the links. I am upset because Amazon feels that people and sites in Illinois are unimportant.

Over the next two weeks, I will be replacing the links on this site and at "Music Reviews". I find that the service I will be moving to is inferior to Amazon, but I do not have much of a choice. If they decide later to come back, there is a good chance that I will not switch back as I do not want to partner with a company that does not care about my business relationship with them.

Also (as I pointed out in the letter that I sent to them which is posted below), I will be less inclined to purchase from their store in the future. If they do not care about my business relations with them of an advertising nature, how can I trust that they care about our vendor-customer business relationship. I only purchase a few thousand dollars worth of items from them a year (including some of the role-playing materials reviewed here), so I’m sure that I’m not making a huge impact on their bottom line. But, it’s hard to buy from a company in good conscience that basically said f*ck off.

This is not meant to be an attack on Amazon, nor am I encouraging anyone to stop buying from Amazon. I still hold out hope that they will do the right thing and implement the required changes in the next two weeks. These changes should be quick and relatively easy to implement (speaking as a programmer by trade who has just had to write tax code for an unrelated reason at his day job). This is one of the reasons that I have been reluctant to switch my links over sooner (the cut-off date is 2011-04-15).

As promised, the letter I sent to Amazon follows:

I am disheartened by the news that you are preparing to abandon those of us who happen to live in Illinois. But, I have faith that you will be able to implement the required changes in a month instead of discriminating against us purely on the basis of where we live.

If you do decide to discriminate against us based upon our location, I will be much less inclined to buy anything through Amazon in the future. I do not see a reason for doing business with a company that does not care about me as a business partner.