May17
While Overstock.com and Newegg might be breathing a little easier today having won their patent cases against Alcatel-Lucent earlier this week, the retail industry is nowhere near in the clear of patent trolls. Patent trolls – companies that buy about-to-expire patents and go after companies using, inventing, or patenting similar software – are no longer [...]
May10
| Also posted in Events |
With trade associations forced by logistics to plan Washington “fly-ins” months ahead of time, all too often their members arrive pumped up to lobby on the big bill of the year only to find Congress has already passed it – or delayed it until next year. But that wasn’t the case with NRF’s annual Washington [...]
May09
| Also posted in Events |
You could hear the anger rising in the voice of Representative Steve Womack as he stood before a Washington hotel ballroom jammed with retailers this week. He was explaining how customers in an electronics store back home routinely use smartphones to check online prices of merchandise, then click “buy it now” in plain sight of [...]
May07
| Also posted in Events |
It has been said that “patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.” Leveling the playing field where online retailers are obligated to collect sales tax, just like their brick-and-mortar counterparts, is a fine example of that. After more than a decade of patience, persistence and a good dose of perspiration, the United [...]
May07
| Also posted in Retail Trends, Video |
In the final hours before the Senate’s historic Monday night vote to approve sales tax fairness legislation, NRF executives took to the airwaves to argue that “a sale is a sale” when it comes to requiring online sellers to collect sales tax the same as local stores. NRF Senior Vice Presidents David French and Ellen [...]
May06
It’s been a long road for sales tax fairness. The Marketplace Fairness Act is the culmination of more than 10 years of lobbying, testifying before Congress, and collaboration with local retailers to explain the advantage online retailers who don’t have to collect sales tax have over brick-and-mortar merchants who do. Over the years, lawmakers have [...]
May03
The Senate is set to take a final vote next week on one of the biggest high-tech public policy questions of our times – whether Internet retailers should be required to collect sales tax the same as local stores. But retail trade associations from across the country are using one of the most low-tech traditions [...]
May01
Congress is in recess this week, but debate over sales tax fairness hasn’t taken a vacation. On Monday night, NRF Vice President and Tax Counsel Rachelle Bernstein sat down with PBS’s Gwen Ifill on the NewsHour program to discuss what’s at stake. The Senate is set to vote May 6 on the Marketplace Fairness Act, [...]
Apr23
Ask any reporter in Washington who’s covered the sales tax fairness debate and you’ll find out I’m the PR guy who’s been crying wolf for close to a dozen years. In 2001 or so I was saying legislation to level the playing field between online retailers and bricks-and-mortar stores was a no-brainer for passage. By [...]
Apr19
Anybody’s who’s taken a high school history class knows how patents are supposed to work. Somebody like Thomas Edison spends years testing countless filaments in order to perfect the electric light bulb. He then obtains a patent that gives him exclusive rights to the invention, allowing him to make back what he spent on research [...]