For all of Amazon’s technological innovations, the tech giant has also excelled at exploiting loopholes during its history. In its early years, that meant taking advantage of tax laws that allowed online retailers to avoid collecting, and thus charging, sales tax, which created a pricing advantage over traditional retail shops.
As a publicly traded company, Amazon convinced investors from early on to let it play by a unique set of rules: Reward us for revenue growth now and we promise the profits will follow at some point in the future.
