Greenfield and other cities impose strict new rules on resale shops :
Moms come into New to You Kids in Greenfield every week to sell their babies’ outgrown rompers to the small resale shop. But the business says it will have to close if it has to comply with a new city ordinance requiring it to take each mom’s picture and send that, along with detailed descriptions of the items she sells, to a police database every day.
The Greenfield ordinance also imposes transaction fees on resale stores that could amount to tens of thousands of dollars annually – a big burden for small retailers.
This also applies to bookstores, apparently:
Half-Price Books, a national resale chain that has a store a few doors down from Reinhardt’s in the Greenfield Fashion Center, will consider getting out of its lease, district manager Joe Desch said.
Half-Price also is thinking about filing a lawsuit against Greenfield on First Amendment grounds, because the new ordinance, which takes effect next summer, will require the bookstore to send police a daily list of customers who sell books to them, with identification and titles sold.
No word on if the book sellers need to provide a book report for their new mommy, the government.
(Link seen on the Twitterverse.)
Horror of horrors, businesses are profiting! Government must rescue us from this calamity!