People living in the cities will now be able to buy a book significantly cheaper than someone living in a rural area. And a bookstore in a city will be able to outcompete a rural one, since they'll have more local sales but the rural bookstore will not be able compete on price for the mail orders.
* Accepting Amazon's claim: this strikes me more as the removal of a rural subsidy (cheap delivery to hard to reach places, Amazon skipping out on every tax they can to lower prices) than the imposition of an urban one. Maybe a distinction without difference economically, but it's an important political distinction.
* Not accepting the claim: wouldn't this support rural bookstores? Amazon's conceit here is that people want convenience, which a local rural bookstore surely provides over an urban one for rural dwellers. Whether they "compete" with urban bookstores is sort of a red herring, given that (small) bookstores qua businesses tend to be labors of passion that aren't looking to edge out some distant urban competitor. That doesn't mean they can (or should) go broke, just that the economics aren't necessarily a dog fight between rural and urban.
A rural bookstore won't have sufficient density of local customers to be viable. They need to make additional sales from somewhere. That "somewhere" has to be mail order, where they maybe could be competitive due to lower costs. But now they can't actually compete.
(This is all purely hypothetical, and explaining how the statement could be true. Probably it isn't, since there's no way an indie bookstore competes on price with Amazon.)
Seems like a harsh but fair move on France's part to stop unfairly subsidizing rural areas. Honestly living in rural areas should cost more - maintenance of infrastructure, power, etc are significantly more costly for rural areas in a way that's not nearly accounted for by their tax base.
If you don't have incentives for rural living you 1) depopulate your food production labor base and 2) don't have people in a place that will defend it with force.
This probably sounds crazy, but I think the best way to incentivize food production laborers is to pay them a fair wage.
Rural areas have a mix of the estates of the top net worth individuals and the laborers who work there. The wealthy are subsidized along with the working class. It makes more sense to stop subsidizing the rural areas entirely and then pay the working class fair wages.
As for defending the rural areas with force, that's the whole point of having a national military - it's not like we're going to forcibly conscript everyone just because they happen to live in the region.
I don't know about France but in the US the number of high net worth individuals who live in rural areas without making their money there (e.g. big farm owners, mine owners, etc.) is very small.
