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12 Christmas Gifts Not To Buy Online
nsingapu writes "While online shopping is booming this Christmas, niche products like "two turtle doves" purchased on the Internet are becoming increasingly more expensive then their non e-tailed counterparts. PNC bank has updated their annual tongue-in-cheek economic analysis, based on the cost of goods and services purchased by the True Love in the holiday classic, "The Twelve Days of Christmas." The analysis compares the cost of traditional goods against their cost thoughout the past 20 years and against the price when purchased online. PNC concludes that most items are more expensive to buy over the Internet, primarily due to the cost of shipping, and that the abundance of cheaper labor in countries such as India and China has resulted in pressure on U.S. manufacturers to outsource."
The sad thing is that some people are going to read this tongue-in-cheek analysis and really think that the Internet is more expensive because of shipping. From an economic perspective, purchasing commodity items on the Internet is more efficient than slogging around from store to store to find the cheaper price. On the Internet, you have nearly infinite choices. I guess if you compare purchasing an item in Best Buy to purchasing an item on bestbuy.com, you might come to the conclusion that purchasing things in the store is cheaper because of shipping costs. But if you compare the cost of purchasing an item in Best Buy to the cheapest listed cost of buying the same item on pricegrabber.com, pricewatch.com or any of the other thousands of sites that show the cheapest price, provide coupons for purchasing on the Internet, etc... The Internet will win every time.
I'm a big tall mofo.
You are aware that China and India are two different countries, right? We're not talking about confusing Nauru or Tuvalu with Vanuatu -- you seem unable to distinguish between the two biggest countries in the world.
Regarding the grandparent's point: I'm concerned about the dollar policy as well but it's worth keeping in mind that "China and India are stealing our jobs!!!!" and "The falling dollar is making imports too expensive! Our lifestyles will be destroyed!!!" are mutually incompatible manifestations of hysteria. You can't have imports and not have imports.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
No, he just gave a list of reasons why you shouldn't trade with China, most prominently its occupation of Tibet and its poor treatment of the Tibetan people, then proceeded to say that those were reasons not to trade with China and India.
That's like me making a list of reasons why you shouldn't buy, say, Cuban goods and then concluding that those are good reasons not to buy from Cuba or from the US.
Now, if he had mentioned any reasons why trading with India was bad, such as the loss of tech jobs there (as if that's not the fault of greedy US employers rather than the fault of skilled Indian technicians), then perhaps you might have a point. But he didn't give a single such reason and just tarred India with the broad brush that he'd used to tar China with. And, as I've pointed out, India isn't China and it isn't guilty of brutalising Tibet or any of the other things that the AC did deign to mention, so mentioning India in the same breath as China was entirely inappropriate.
Boy, I bet that the irony of you mentioning Indian worker and environment protections in the same week as the 20th anniversary of Union Carbide's Bhophal disaster, which it still hasn't cleaned up or properly compensated the victims of, just passes over your head.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Mainly it's our business because it's also our environment -- we do all live on the same planet, you know. Of course, this argument works both ways, and so it's a difficult argument for the US to make these days, given the Bush Administration's "fuck you" posture on Kyoto, global warming, mercury emissions, etc.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
No, the falling dollar is a cheap trick to finance the national debt, at the risk of losing the dollar as the world currency. It's a risky bet, as a lost reputation will be ever so hard to regain.