Report shows impact of Amazon on local USA communities

Report shows impact of Amazon on local USA communities

Jan 26 2016

One of the most well-attended and discussed sessions at yesterday's publishing industry Winter Institute featured the release of a new Civic Economics-ABA study called The Fiscal and Land Use Impacts of Online Retail, which aims to demonstrate the effects of the growth of Amazon on American towns and cities.

The study determined that in 2014:

• Amazon sold $44.1 billion of retail goods nationwide, which is "the equivalent of 3,215 retail storefronts or 107 million square feet of commercial space, which might have paid $420 million in property tax."
  
• Amazon avoided collecting state and local sales tax of $625 million. Between uncollected sales tax and the loss of property tax, state and local governments lost more than $1 billion in revenue.
• Amazon's warehouses- employed roughly 30,000 full-time workers and 104,000 part-time and seasonal workers. But including all the jobs lost from stores whose sales Amazon supplanted, Amazon sales "produced a net loss of 135,973 retail jobs."
• Amazon's book sales of $5.618 billion represents about 3,600 "bookshop equivalents and 40,000 bookstore employees."

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