Amazon.com’s prowess as a hiring machine isn’t impressing President Donald Trump, who in an early Wednesday tweet called the company a destroyer of retail jobs.
Amazon.com’s prowess as a hiring machine isn’t impressing President Donald Trump, who in an early Wednesday tweet called the company a destroyer of retail jobs.
“Amazon is doing great damage to taxpaying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt — many jobs being lost!” the president wrote on Twitter.
It’s not the first time Trump has said something critical of Amazon. The company is led by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, a newspaper that has aggressively covered the campaign and the Trump presidency.
But it’s the first time Trump has talked about Amazon’s alleged negative impact on Main Street jobs.
That’s an idea that the company has sought to dispel by highlighting how many jobs are created by online merchants operating on its platform, and by trumpeting the massive amount of blue-collar hiring it does at its warehouse network. This month Amazon held a nationwide job fair at various fulfillment centers intended to fill 50,000 open positions.
In his tweet, the president also hammered Amazon again on tax-related allegations.
It’s unclear exactly what he means since the company now collects sales tax in each state that has one. There is one loophole left: Shoppers don’t have to pay sales tax when they buy from one of Amazon’s many third-party vendors. Such sales make up about half of the company’s volume.
While it’s unclear what prompted Trump’s tweet, The Washington Post ran a scathing editorial about Trump in the paper Wednesday, and there were also pro-tax reform advertisements that ran on early- morning talk shows.
Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Its shares slipped 0.5 percent to close at $978.18 Wednesday.