They weren't shut down, that was Amazons decision. The court only told them to reduce operations to specific categories of its store site - the idea was to somehow reduce operations to a safe amount as Amazon had repeatedly failed to so by itself. Amazon then made up the nebulous "essential products" category and made sure to complain loudly about the supposed nonsense the court required while it shut down french warehouses completely.
I don't understand whats the problem with that?
According to Amazon they found it difficult to workout what was and wasn't an essential item according to the rules. I would imagine with a catalog as big amazon that's probably true. They decided to shutdown instead which is perfectly rational given the amount fines placed upon them if they did accidentally ship an item. The goverment got what they requested, no non essential items shipped.
I would imagine amazon would have preferred to keep operating, so I believe them.
> I would imagine amazon would have preferred to keep operating, so I believe them.
This was an union driven lawsuit. Shutting down operations to stamp out union activity is rather common with companies large enough to cover the short term costs of it.
Put itself above the law to gain a competitive advantage is unacceptable to me. And now they are making a lot of publicity on tv to remend the damage. A little too late, I'm boycotting them personally.
Amazon has a huge catalog compared to other retailers, and trying to categorise that without mistakes would be difficult and prone to errors.
And no, Amazon has the same catalog as other French retailer, at least in France. Amazon just chose to play dumb with both catalog filtering demands AND physical distances in warehouses.
They complied with the law and shut down. This further limited covid risks for their workers.
During this month they were to keep operations artificially low. As far as I could find the court cut down the categories they could sell to around 10% of what they normally sold to ensure reduced activity. They were also reminded to enforce the existing social distancing rules, avoid large meetings, etc. . I currently regret not keeping a link to the list of categories around when I found it shortly after the court case, now Google only seems to return a flood of news pages all repeating the same source free articles.
Whats the problem with that?
People seem resentful they closed because they calculated it wasn't worth operating. What do people expect? increase the difficulty of doing business and you won't have business operating.
I also suspect they felt they would be dealt with unfairly compared to native retailers, as the goverment has called Amazon a threat the French way of life and other rhetoric.