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Comment by ldng | Hacker News Reader

The French government placed on Amazon, AND every other online sellers, restrictions on what type of product could be sold: only first necessity items. The only one refusing to comply, and loudly at that, was Amazon.

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.

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It didn't put itself above the law, because it closed down instead. That's complying with the law. Considering the amount fines they we're threatned with, I agree it was too risky operate. They would have only had to made a few mistakes and they would risk a massive fine.

Amazon has a huge catalog compared to other retailers, and trying to categorise that without mistakes would be difficult and prone to errors.

And why do you think they were threaten ? Because they were found not operating within the bound of pandemic related decrees. They willing did not respect them. Maybe in the USA they would have automatically been fined, but the French negotiated with them and gave them delays. The French Amazon CEO willfully claimed they would never comply. They knew what they were doing and in practice quite literally put themselves above the law.

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.

The fines were enormous for every violation, and EU courts have been doing billion dollar fines of these companies - why in the world would you operate one warehouse doing 10% volume (90% shutdown already) facing huge fines?

They complied with the law and shut down. This further limited covid risks for their workers.

No, they were caught not complying with the law and were threaten with fines. At which point they decided to finally comply with the law by shutting down. BIG difference.

Got it. I'm in the US - there have been boycotts every year of Amazon but they have grown to be pretty large here. How are they doing in france? It seems their model may be less successful there especially if there is more willingness to boycot.

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