Amazon stealing Christmas shoppers

This holiday season, Amazon is unleashing its inner Grinch in attempt to steal business away from local stores.

The online retailer is offering a promotion that will save consumers $5 off their purchases if they compare prices with local stores using Amazon's mobile app. The app allows shoppers to scan the bar code of a product and coonduct a search to find the lowest price.  Customers can also submit prices, to help Amazon be sure they're undercutting retailers. The promo boils down to this: Amazon wants customers to go into local stores, check out the merchandise they're interested in, scan the price (providing valuable data) -- and then walk out empty-handed to save a few bucks.

The promotion is an easy win for Amazon. Not only do they get the orders, customers provide plenty of data to help Amazon ensure their prices stay competitive. It's market research for next-to-nothing; consumers must spend $100 to receive the $5 discount.

But for local businesses, it's not such a good deal. Small businesses already have to deal with the disadvantages in pricing that come with maintaining a physical presence -- rent, staffing and storage -- as well as added costs, like sales tax. In an already suffering economy, some consumers may have already come up with this idea; use your local store to do research and then comparison shop online. But Amazon -- a corporation that is already operating at an advantage compared to small businesses -- is directly encouraging consumers to take advantage of the benefits of a retail store with no intention of ever making a purchase.

In a bleak economy, everybody's looking for a good deal and it's easy to see how consumers might be lured in by the promise of a discount. And onlline shopping offers plenty of conveniences, from locating difficult-to-find items to the ability to browse DVDs in your pajamas at 3 a.m.

But local businesses offer benefits to a community that online stores don't; from the ability to look at products in person to the creation of jobs in the local economy. If local businesses can't keep their doors open, that creates an even bleaker picture for the local economy. It's one thing to have a maintain a competitive advantage; it's an entirely different story to encourage customers take advantage of retailers while helping a corporation undermine them.