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Australian Govt Forces Apple, Adobe, Microsoft To Explain Price Hikes
An anonymous reader writes "Live outside the U.S.? Tired of paying huge local price markups on technology products from vendors such as Apple, Microsoft and Adobe? Well, rest easy, the Australian Government is on the case. After months of stonewalling from the vendors, today the Australian Parliament issued subpoenas compelling the three vendors to appear in public and take questions regarding their price hikes on technology products sold in Australia. Finally, we may have some answers for why Adobe, for example, charges up to $1,400 more for the full version of Creative Suite 6 when sold outside the U.S."
should bloody well be on that list as well.
Printing the instructions upside down costs money silly.
"Why? Because fuck you. That's why."
difference in pricing models like this encourages piracy.
With the Oz dollar so high, everything looks ridiculously cheap.
This is almost across the board for imported goods sold under regional licenses, look to Fender (banning US/Mexican resellers from shipping to AUS), the costs of TV/Stereo gear etc.
Some vendor gouging occurs like when we were meant to get cheaper goods due to a 25% import tax being replaced by a 10% sales tax... and prices were stable, but until Aussie consumers stop paying for racism vendors will keep charging for it.
When you print money to pay off debts the currency devalues and it is a no brainer. THe exchange rates are going downhill as the house wants to debate whether to default or not eveyr 3 months.
Therefore, the Bank of Australia wants a higher percentage to avoid the risk as the dollar is the worlds worst currency right now with the highest risk. ... Well Japan might be tieing the US in this area if the government improves more printing of money.
So MS responds with the 30% premium to convert dollars to Australias currency by passing it on to the consumer.
IT also explains why healthcare costs are skyrocketing up with insurnace, food, housing and student loans while incomes decline. All this free money given to rich by low interest rates inflates the money supply.
Holy shit. It's a real life application of the Chewbacca Defense. This is amazing... :)
Interestingly, one Australian company made the submission that it was cheaper to send an employee business class from Australia to the US to buy a certain piece of software there, stay for a night or two in a hotel, fly back, and pay import and/or GST at customs than it was to get the software locally.
Stop pretending you have a clue about economincs - AUD is TOO strong for our other economic indicators and not directly tied to this issues.
Its a real life case of idiot-with-a-microphone.
Chances are he is in fact a billion dollar a day trader though - he clearly shows that level of understanding.
They're talking about Australia...not the US....although you did miss out the "stupid", "fat" and "poor" bits..apart from that your description of Americans was spot on! Well done.
Smaller market = higher overheads
There are still support, distribution costs and compliance costs associated with having a local operation - only a fully online model alleviates that and even then time zone issues imply potential for increased costs
To some extent, digital distribution and limited local support brings these costs down - the perfect example is Apple whose products are now more or lineball with US markets thanks to digital distribution of software, useless tech support and enough volume to compare to US stores for sales and basic support overheads.
High cost, low volume products will always have a premium (or at least an argument to made that this is the case with enough spin even it's not the case in reality) ...
There is NOTHING this committee can do to prove otherwise !!!
That is the only honest answer that there is. As long as artificial monopolies like 'regions' are tolerated it will only continue. There is no valid reason why software or other companies should be able to use globalism for cheaper labor whilst denying consumers globalism for cheaper products. I don't see how things are going to change until world governments start demanding better treatment though.
Why are textbooks 1/10th the cost in Indonesia? Why couldn't I buy Top Gear in the US for years when it was available for cheap overseas in the discount bin? Why are Corvette's twice the price in Europe? The list goes on and the answer come back to artificial monopolies charging more because they can. Introduce competition, make grey market imports legal, demand manufacturers honor warranties regardless of the country of origin, allow people to buy software in any country regardless of where they live etc......
The next gen of consoles are going to screw us on digital sales, infact anyone selling movies / games / music digitally in general, I hate to go all tinfoil on you guys but they've proven time and time again, they simply do not care about foreigners.
If you can charge bob 3$ for the icecream and mary 8$, then do it â" especially if you're the only place selling icecream now. Only bob is America and we're mary.
To take it to 11 on the tinfoil mode, when things become all digital "they" will have control, full control. EA have already proven just how evil digital control is, go find a GOTY edition of Mass Effect 1 2 or 3. They don't exist. You think you're getting a bargain when you buy Mass Effect 2, a 50$ US PC game for 5$ on a Steam sale? Awesome! (Well you are, it's still good) but the DLC is on THEIR controlled internal store and it's ONLY on their store and do you think the DLC is marked down to 10 or 15% of the original cost like the full game? Ok what about 20%? or 30%? No. Not only is it extremely rarely marked down, when it is, it's a small amount (I think it's been on sale twice, in nearly 3 years)
The console manufacturers are sadly GOING to region lock us when it's all digital and they WILL charge us more than Americans. Interestingly we probably wouldn't even notice or care if it was 20 years ago and we didn't have American buddies posting on the same forums or links to deals or reddit threads or whatever saying "holy crap, I just got a sweet God of War 4 deal on the PSN store for only 9.99" â" except we'll click the link "not available in your region" or "on special, this week only, 49$ AUD"
Australians need to be prepared that this whole digital thing IS going to shoot us square in the wallet, then the face. I'd wager good money on this.
Long story short, region free PS3 took me from being a dodgy pirate to someone really happy to purchase games, I'm happy to pay 20 to 50$ US a game, no qualms - hell the Americans do it, don't you? Except they frequently try to stiff us from 95 to 120$ US a shot,....... it's unreasonable, it's bullshit and unacceptable.
Even worse is on digital stores online, they detect my IP and the price for a digital product of 1's and 0's is 30 to 100% more. It's _incredibly_ frustrating as almost any foreigner could tell you.
Long story short? You think this is bad now? Just wait, soon there won't BE steam "gifting" from your American pals, there won't be a US PSN store to log in to with PSN credits you purchased on Amazon, there won't be stores which will ship you foreign region free games. There won't be a G2play where I can buy a cheap key of Diablo or Starcraft cheaper than the Blizzard online store or retail. Why would Blizzard, EA, Ubisoft provide these 3'rd party 'stores' keys to sell?
Australians, in my opinion we're actually in the peak part of bargains right here, in 2011/2012/2013 and maybe 2014 - we've got fairly cheap international shipping, we're in the mid retail -> digital conversion so everyone is clamouring for our buck. Soon the loopholes will be closed, the infrastructure, policies, design all in place for a single store for companies and bam. Kiss the awesome times we've had goodbye. :/
Finally, most stores won't do deals like Valve, they seem to be one of the few with respect for the customer, we're in for a bad time
It's called capitalism. Just what does it take to get it through your thick un-American socialist sculls? These companies are merely trying to maximise their profits and are pricing their products in such a way as to accommodate the local markets. Where is the problem in that? If you don't like how Ameicans do things then build your own damn software. Let's just see how that works out for you. You should be lucky that we even bother "selling" it to you anyway for all the good plastic Monopoly money is worth.
I think these companies should be forced to not sell their products in Australia. That will teach them.
Australian citizens should not be forced to pay for products that they don't want or need.
Yes, because you can ask the soviet union (USSR) how well price fixing works and how it doesn't ever lead to shortages and black markets.
Come to think of it, you can ask the USA right now how well their price fixing of money is working. Yes let's print $90,000,000,000.00 per month to loan money to ourselves because nobody else in the world thinks we're a responsible borrower who will pay back our debt.
And honestly it's like Obama says: "Raise the debt ceiling because we have to let the world know that we can definitely pay our debt, if they lend us the money to do it"
Liberty.
I mean, I hate those drunk alcoholic loud-mouthed mental patients but that usually doesn't translate into business price points.
I hate MS, Apple and Adobe too. Unfortunately, I'm not related to them to the degree that would allow me to sign their papers for a forced admission in a mental hospital or rehabilitation clinic.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
http://i.imgur.com/YOrVZ.jpg
Sometimes I need to pretend I am a rambling mad man as a joke amongst friends. The problem is I can never quite pull of something which is coherent enough to actually be said by someone, yet insane enough to actually stand out as this guy is obviously a rambling mad man.
My go to response used to be some mish-mash of an Allen Ginsberg poem, something like...
"I passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, if I was expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull..."
It's good, but it's hard to memorise. Like myself, most of my friends have at least some university level economics/finance education, so from now on, I'm just going to memorise your comment, as my go to rambling mad man impersonation.
In other words, thanks!
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The government isn't popular enough, so Gillard ordered a market research report into technology. When she got the results, she picked up an iPad and strolled around the parliament with it for a fortnight. Now she turned to page 2 of the report and launched a very obvious but practically useless 'public questioning'.
.. and will probably release the 'Australian Edition' of the software with a free clip-on fuzzy Koala, Apple is going to justify itself with shipping costs and Microsoft is going to re-design it's software pricing for Australian businessees to make it appear cheaper but actually be even more outrageously expensive
Adobe is going to hear more bitching from their paying customers
Julia Gillard is going to win the next election because Joe Hockey will take over leadership from Tony Abbott and G comes before H.
It's not really that complicated, as long as you don't have a PhD in economics it's pretty clear. The fact that it's not more commonly known is purely because people are incredibly lazy when it comes to intellectual matters.
someone who trades a billion dollars is not an idiot, he is smart enough to have a billion dollars to toy with at his whim, what do you have?
. . . it's because they have to translate their product into a weird foreign language. Right?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You could stop buying the products. If enough people find the offenses of these companies egregious enough and stop purchasing the products they will change their behavior. You have to be willing to do without it though, not just pirate it, or they will blame the piracy as the reason they are losing business instead of their crappy model.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
It's not that non-US prices are higher, it is that US prices are made low. This is because Americans are cheap bastards even though many have lots of money to spend. It is a big market, but one you can only break into at discount prices. On the plus side, it is easier to offload low quality goods to the US. Many companies are learning fast and sending lower QA-scoring product runs to the US, sometime even seperate products for specific low-quality US chains like Walmart. However, if your products are new or susceptible to review, or cheap enough to produce copies like software, you send the quality stuff and lose out on per-unit profit to get a share of American consumerism.
As a consumer in the long term, I wouldn't try rushing to emulate the US. Sure, you can get bread and cheese there at a super low price, but on the other hand you're likely to end up eating cheeze whiz and wonder bread.
It's not just translating documentation. Video games also have to be rated in each country where they're sold, and ratings boards don't tend to give discounts just because their countries are smaller markets.
Many products cost the US$-price in Euro here ... or even more in Euro than in US$ ... e.g., one of our customers complained about our price for a Fortinet device. They looked up the device on the Internet and found it on some supplier's page ... after converting the prices, it turned out that the street price in the US (including VAT but without state sales tax) was about more than 40% under our wholesale price (without VAT) according to the official price list (and we already get a pretty good rebate on the official prices). Try to explain that to your customers ...
But then, I reckon with all the lobbying, why would the government bother ... it's just the citizens losing money to an out-of-country company ... :(
I wish they did this for cosmetics. Clinique face cream costs $25 USD and $110 AUD for the exact same product. It is outrageous!! There is one site I know of that will sell it for about $45 (obviously they are there to make money just not parallel import).
It is cheaper to fly to the US for some IT week-long training courses, stay the week plus weekend than a similar course attended locally. Cheaper including accomadation, food and flights as my colleague at work has experienced. Maybe we are meant to see the price gouging as opportunities to see the world.
Why can't Adobe charge whatever they want for their products?
Aww how cute, you think rich people are rich because they're smarter than everyone else. How's 6th grade these days?
All your 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 are belong to us
A lower UID, but only new money log in.
Seriously retards have billions, it doesn't take brains to inherit.
Hi there, I've got a degree in economics, you're wrong. That shit's retarded.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
It's not just Apple, MS, etc. either.
We get ripped off on most things here. Rear tyres for my car - US price: $300/each. Local price? $900 each. Computer stuff is generally more expensive in terms of AU vs US dollars by a factor of 1.5 or more. Our dollar is currently above parity...
Fuel is about $1.50 per litre. A coffee from a cafe is about $5. A subway 11" long sandwich is about $6-7.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Except all this shit generally comes from CHINA and we are closer to China than the US is. We export far more per capita than the US does actually.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Simply don't enforce any copyright laws against these products until the pricing reaches parity. "Authorize" a local "distributor" to sell it at the cost of the blank media it is distributed on. Make sure businesses are aware that they can get in on this action too, and that any copy acquired in this manner will be free from any future prosecution of copyright infringement. If the companies don't play ball after that, Australia suddenly becomes a much cheaper place to set up a small business... win-win.
This is a repeat of the tactics the music and publishing industries used for decades. CD's used to cost double the price of the equivalent in the US and the release of books and music would be delayed usually by months. I think it was sometime in the 90's that the govt. brought in the parallel import rules, basically cheaper CD's and books could be imported (legally) from overseas if the local distributors didn't bring them in within a reasonable time. Don't quote me on any of this, IANAL and it was a while ago. My point is that the entertainment industry have been doing this to us for a very long time and the govt. has had some impact on these sorts of practices. They just need to act. A lot of the software priced like this is technical and productivity based where there is no alternative and adds to the high cost of doing business in this country. I've got memories of walking into one of the big name brand music stores in Asia 20 years ago and buying the same CD's I could buy at home for $10 when they were $30 in Australia, they were not pirate CDs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't think there has ever been a single bit of software documentation ever produced that has been translated into "Australian".
Also ratings boards don't charge.
Australians are fine with Costs More.
But they're not fine with "Costs more than getting someone in the USA to purchase it at full retail, and send it via express international postage, plus giving them a hefty commission for their trouble".
There's sites like AusGameShop that more or less purchase games off the shelf in the UK and sell them to Australians for a fraction of the Australian price...
Shipping CAN be cheap, if you use the right shippers. It is often cheaper for me in Europe to get an item made by a Japanese company from Ebay from a Korean seller because Korean mail is relatively cheap, so is Chinese btw. However, having the same item shipped from the US is insanely expensive. Getting the item locally is more expensive EVEN after paying the extra levies for taxes, customs charges and post office charges for handling the custom charges.
But these shipping costs have next to nothing to do with the real shipping costs (fuel, handling) and more with "get as much money as you can get, then waste it".
The world would be a better place if every country ran one post office system designed for nothing else but enable everyone in the world to ship to anyone else at just a bit above cost to enable investments. You got to remember for this that Japans and Korea's economic miracles did NOT happen with LARGE companies but with very small ones shipping small samples to anyone they could sell to. That is how Sony/Nintendo etc really got started. It is why shipping from China is dirt cheap, they know they need every export they can get. The first Chinese made phones were of course really iPhones but the second batch, the crap but cheap ones made their way abroad via the post office. Individual western buyers just buying them in China directly. Before you can open your international office, you made a LOT of trips to the post office to deliver orders.
But the post office and its system of deliver anytime anywhere to anyone is of little use to mega-corps, they just want the luxury of being able to send bulk very cheap through systems that barely have any real coverage and want the post office to magically be able to afford to deliver the remaining packages for the same price in the remotest areas.
Consider it: It costs nothing more to have a package delivered to the heart of London then it does to the Scottish highlands, population 1. That is real useful if you are a tiny company in an outskirt of Being and got a hot gadget you want to sell.
And it works more or less. There really is no need for a package to cost that much more just because it is sold in Australia even if you have to ship it individually per post and not per shipping container.
What is left is: Charge the suckers for everything they got, they will pay.
And the suckers do. Uptake of open source alternatives isn't higher in Australia so it is only good business sense to charge more. When a slave begs for the whip, give it to him.
While I don't know about software, hardware is often produced for the US and imported to the Netherlands from there.
I recently pre-ordered a Leap Motion. It's presale price is $69.99. If you order it from the Netherlands, they take care of any import duties since they ship it from a European warehouse. This hikes the price, including $12 shipping, up to about $96, which boils down to about €70.
If I were the importer from the US, I'd have to pay duties myself, but only if they intercepted the package. Sadly, I don't get the choice to try and stiff my government. But that is the reason why people tend to order from the US rather than locally.
I used to work for an Italian producer in the lighting sector. We had almost no sales in Switzerland. The Swiss used to buy from a distributor of ours located in the south of Italy, where we sold at lower prices. Mind you, the lamps physically moved south then north again, adding more than 1500 miles in transportation.
Isn't this just about the market? Australia has a very strong economy, very high minimum wage rates, average salary is 50k I think....those prices are what the market is willing to pay.
What has this got to do with the government?
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
The only thing they did in response was to modify their online web shop so that Australian customers could only see the AU$ price and conceal the US$ prices out of shame.
Come here and say that, cunt! *hic*
Historically, the AUD has been worth about 0.75 USD (click on 10 year). It wasn't until the global financial meltdown that the AUD shot up in value to where it surpassed parity with the USD (Australia's economy wasn't hurt as much because they didn't have a housing bubble at the time, though they have one now). If you compare before and after, the AUD increased in value by about 40% against the USD. If you compare the software prices, they too are about 40% higher. Surprise, surprise.
When companies conduct business internationally, they usually negotiate a fixed exchange rate for a year (or a quarter). It helps insulate their annual financial planning from fluctuations in the currency markets. So when the AUD first shot up, the vendors importing US software still had to pay 1.3 AUD per 1.0 USD, even though 1.3 AUD was now worth closer to 1.4 USD. The next year when they went to negotiate currency exchange prices again, the US companies said "OMG! You want a 40% price cut? You can't be serious!" And the Australian vendors didn't have purchasing power to negotiate a better deal. So year after year they got shafted with prices based on pre-2007 exchange rates. (In the US companies' defense, they probably argued that if the AUD shot up 40% in a year, it could drop 40% the next year, and they weren't willing to take that big a risk and adjust the exchange rate by that large an amount. But it's unconscionable that it's continued for 5 years.)
Steam games are consistently higher priced - and you can't get round it with VPNs or Paypal - the credit card # proves you're in Australia.
And it's not like it's priced in Aussie dollars with a mediocre exchange rate - The games are priced on the same store.steampowered.com website in USD dollars.
So why more expensive now? Ah - because steam games would undercut the price of boxed games in stores.
The truth is that no individual can stop price gouging by ceasing purchasing products, and nobody (besides the government) is well enough organized to create a persistent protest on the scale required for these producers to take notice. Personally, I feel that if these companies cannot explain their actions, the Australia government should take the extraordinary (and unpopular) action of preventing the companies from trading here (and other countries suffering these issues should do likewise). Between the loss of sales and pressure from resellers, it would be a very short time before these companies came to the table.
If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests.
Heck, I know people who are able to get car tires from online US-based shops like tirerack.com, get them shipped to Australia (at great expense due to the size and weight) AND pay a shop to fit them to their car (also costs a fair whack of money) and its STILL cheaper than buying them from the local shop.
Level 1
$1210
- a detailed written description of gameplay
- written documentation of contentious material (that may leade to an M rating or higher) on Attachment One of the Computer Games application form
Level 2
$890
- a detailed written description of gameplay
- a separate recording of any contentious material in the game (that may lead to an M rating or higher), and
typical gameplay footage
Demonstrated
$2460
- a detailed written description of gameplay
- a completed Checklist for Demonstrating a Computer Game, and either
Attachment One of the Computer Games application form, or
a separate recording of any contentious material and typical gameplay
(If the Board needs you to demonstrate your game, and you have applied under a different fee, you need to pay the difference between the fees before processing can continue.)
FROM: http://www.classification.gov.au/Industry/Journey/Pages/CGnonA/Step3.aspx
There is likely a couple of things occurring: 1) The US is the market where standards are set. Australia is a peripheral market that follows the standards set elsewhere, almost regardless of price. Hence, the price is lower in the US to make sure the product is the standard. Profits are then generated in wealthy peripheral markets where high mark-ups can be established. 2) There is a widespread perception that the Australian dollar is very over valued. Companies may set prices higher in anticipation that the currency will eventually fall in value. 3) The Australian economy is relatively strong compared to the US economy. Hence, there is different set of demand curves in Australia. The Australian government could pass some regulation forcing companies to sell their products in Australia at their lowest global price after adjusting tangible cost differences or not sell at all. This would probably be breach of the US-Australia free trade agreement though...
New Zealanders have it worse, i.e. compare windows 8 pro upgrade prices.
USD $199
GBP $189 ($298 USD)
AUD $399 ($410 USD)
NZD $499 ($415 USD)
Ok, so it is not that much worse than AU, but when you compare CPI's, NZ pays through the nose for foreign hardware and software.
The same thing applies to clothing as well. For example, a pair of Tommy Hilfiger/Calvin Klein/<insert brand> jeans might be about 50 USD in the US. If you buy them in Europe, you will be paying 120 EUR (=160 USD) for the same pants. This is why I go to the US every year and bring a big empty suitcase. I spend 1500 USD on clothes and I basically get a free two week holiday compared to buying the clothes here in Europe (Finland) at 2-3x the price. How can it cost that much more to ship the pants from <insert poor asian country> to Europe vs US?
We sell a specialist electronics product in markets around the world and, up till about three or four years ago, Australia was by far the highest retail priced market we operated in. The reason? They still have a tier based distribution system. With the growth of internet retailing/marketing, most other countries in the world have moved to a single distributor selling direct to customers with possibly a parallel sales network through local stores where useful (think Apple store model).
But Australia for some reason (probably because it was historically more isolated, yet big enough to sustain an internal market) has been slower to adapt to this change and still typically has a master importer who just send boxes to the regional distributors, who then send the boxes on to the retailers. This is now breaking down and investigations like this will hopefully speed things up.
Ten years ago my parents bought me a video camera, they were on holiday in the USA. A few months later it broke. Panasonic UK refused to service it (even if I paid) claiming that it was not one of their products. Basically they were protecting their extra margin because these things were sold at a higher price in the UK than in the USA. This is short termed thinking - I will avoid buying from them ever again.
Companies like globalisation - they make goods where it is cheapest and sell the same stuff at different prices everywhere. But if we, the consumer, try to do the same they stop it. There is an inbalance of power, large corporates abuse it. We like to think that we live in a free market, we do not.
The Aussie power plug is the most likely case for things to cost more. Anything that can be plugged in need a C-tick which is just like the FCC testing but it requires more paperwork and the standard is very slightly different. Other things have unique standards such as a kitchen faucet has to be certified to the local standard. Many of these standards are voluntary in the US under the UL approval process but are a legal requirement to follow an expensive, unique AS or ASNZ standard.
Cars have to be crash tested for the local market.
Local sales and support costs are far higher since local staff costs are much higher than in the US since minimum wage jobs there are often $20 to $30 an hour here. The cost of everything is higher so staff that can demand it, do want far more money. Construction costs are some of the highest in the world.
Local inflation is driven by a requirement that 9% of all employees money gets dumped into mutual fund like retirement funds that are simply trying to out gamble everyone else and not really invest so they are throwing around money like crazy.
The real issue is that land prices are hyper inflated and simply insane. The makers of Autocad have an office an hour drive away from down town sitting on land worth 10s of millions yet the same office in a almost rural area in a US city might cost nearly a million dollars. The land prices mean rent is very high and there are examples where the 2rd largest mall in town spent over a billion dollars to upgrade so basic economics say the rent of the smaller stores need to increase by at least $20,000 a month. The Costco built in Melbourne was the most expensive one in the world and far more expensive than the ones they have built in Tokyo.
We often buy servers. When it comes to Australia, we know it has to be a lot more expensive. Once, we tried to ask our California-based hardware provider to quote for hardware + shipping, and it was even more expensive than then very high priced local vendor. All that because of huge shipping fees. No wonder...
Though, this should apply to physical goods only, not to software.
I think the main reason for the problem is not the companies per se (because I still believe that it's up to the company to setup the prices for the products), but the problem is with the absence of the market of computer programs and music, so you cannot resell them easily. Because if you could, naturally companies would appear who would buy in US and resell them in Australia, with smaller markup then Adobe/MS etc. That would balance the prices everywhere. So I'd say that making the trading/reselling of computer programs possible could be the solution..
Only one other commenter mentioned the minimum wage in AUS, which is $15/hour. That is compared to $7.25/hour in the US.
I have no idea how the taxes compare and affect the actual "in your pocket" amount after all is said and done, but clearly having a job in AUS would seem to assure you of an income many Americans can only dream of.
High income/high cost people also get to enjoy more mobility than low income/low cost people with regards to traveling and vacations.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Freight charges. Somebody has to pay for shipping those bits. You know charges for air freight are higher than for sea freight. That's the speed difference. We ship at nearly the speed of light so that's gonna cost.
Go to Dell's website. Compare the prices in various regions, incl Aus. The prices in Aus are generally close to double what they are in other regions. Double. Seriously, double. When I worked out in Asia, it was cheaper for us to get someone to buy them elsewhere and fly over with them.
And before anyone says that tax in Aus is high, and it's expensive to ship to there, that includes any import duties and the cost of the flight.
On top of all that, you still have to deal with Dell.
Local staffing and building costs can't explain it all. Dell still have massively inflated prices in Aus, and from what I can see they barely have any local presence. Everything is shipped and operated from out of Malaysia.
This is an excellent question for the government to get involved in. While they are at it, could they please find out why U. S. consumers pay so much for medicine while the rest of the world gets lower prices?
Economics 101 - Producers charge what people will pay. Simple. If you don't like the price don't buy it, or buy it some where else where it is being sold cheaper. People think that there is some magical right price. Not so.
So your point is what?
The assuie government knows full well that US prices don't show tax where as their do so just on that alone their prices should always look 10% higher. I suspect Australian workers get better pay so for physical items at least the staff in the country would likely be more costly.
I think companies use this knowledge to bump up prices in their favour sometimes and I think the government in this instance is passing the blame so people don't ask what they're getting for that 10%.
Its because the cost of providing support in Australian English is so much higher than providing support in US English. I mean, have you ever asked an Australian customer to decipher US-English tech support as given by the Indian call center? The Australian-English speaking Indian guy just costs more.
And let people buy from Thailand or whatever and import to Aus.
Agreed. However it does take a certain amount of brains and self restraint to hold on to it...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It has to cope with the disk drives spinning the opposite way and the display origin being bottom left.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Instead of paying for photoshop, we should download GIMP and donate the price we would have paid.
We'll never make it.......oh! we made it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWf3iJjqYCM&list=FL7kKrE4eTs17mQl7eyvJIOg
This pretext FAILs for digital downloads like Adobe or iTtunes.
It fails because futures or hedging only adds interest to spot trade price.
It fails to explain geographical discrimination if postage is available.
It fails to explain why ARBITRAGE is not occurring.
They probably charge less in the US because we're so poor.
For the other two companies we are getting reamed for products that are obtained online and supported by a reseller - NOT the manufacturer - with an acceptable margin on their cost price.
I'd also point out that when you look at the purchasing power of the US $ vs Au $ (eg how many minutes of work is required to buy certain items), in many case we Aussies need to work more than twice as long as a resident of the USA to purchase the same item. The argument that 'Aussies earn more' doesn't hold water when you look at our purchasing power.
Just have your goverment ban discriminatory regional pricing and regional copyright restrictions. Then buy it online at American or Great Britain or Hong Kong prices.
but what do you really expect when you are on the suction end of the US empire wealth pump.
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
It'd be wrong to charge someone more based on the colour of their skin, but not their nationality apparently.
Government Graft.
Answering stupid questions from a government?
Paying import taxes?
Paying 20% higher salaries than elsewhere due to social programs?
Long distance telephone costs?
Currency exchange overhead?
Required interpreters? Australian English is very different from American English.
Payments to keep the FBI from stealing their servers "in-country?" Sorry - that was New Zealand?
Add all those things up and that is a 40% added cost, minimum.
I never said they were smarter than everyone else, just said they are not an idiot
and Aww how cute, did you spend a lot of time coming up with that pointless attempt at an insult?
If they're compelled to explain the prices, all they've got to do is lay down a quotation from "The Great Train Robbery." I don't see the problem.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It's entirely possible that the costs of government regulation are at work here. Assuming that we're talking about physical product and not just an electronic download, there are all manner of import/export regulations that have to be complied with and fees that have to be paid. Granted, Photoshop isn't a controlled product (as far as we know), but take ITAR for example. Yeah, it's supposed to apply to "arms" but in reality every screw and bolt that goes into a controlled item is considered a controlled item even if you can go buy it at Home Depot. Just registering with ITAR costs $2500 a year. The paperwork to export is extensive. Companies have employees dedicated to compliance. They all have to get paid, get benefits, a 401(k), perhaps a pension. All of that costs rather a lot of money. And for what? Denied persons/countries will still find a way to get the stuff they want. So really, all this does is add bureaucrats AKA Ship B people.
Thank you for proving my point. It's well established that you can't make money if you're being paid less in interest than you're losing to inflation. In order to make money you need to actually have interest rates marginally higher than inflation. What's more, you can't invest small amounts of money as efficiently as you can large amounts of money leading to the situation that the GGGP was talking about.
But, then again, why should I assume that a specialty that only recently discovered that not everybody makes purely rational decisions with full knowledge of what they're doing, would understand something that simple.
I hear that Google charges 4 times as much to use it for a search in Australia. :-)
"And people were willing to pay it."
What other reason is there?
Just needs the government to call "bullshit" on grey import bans.
Or don't they sell stuff in the USA?
I don't think it's worth the price. Therefore I will confer with my government so we can negotiate the price that is acceptable.
What? You're not allowed to NEGOTIATE if you're an individual? When did that become "law"?
If this comment contained even a germ of truth - the price in AUD should be falling relative to the USD, as US-based companies would prefer to hold more of their reserves in a safer currency, therefore they would try to do more business there. The fact that the movement is in the opposite direction means that you're so wrong it hurts.
"The Aussie power plug is the most likely case for things to cost more. Anything that can be plugged in need a C-tick which is just like the FCC testing but it requires more paperwork and the standard is very slightly different. Other things have unique standards such as a kitchen faucet has to be certified to the local standard. Many of these standards are voluntary in the US under the UL approval process but are a legal requirement to follow an expensive, unique AS or ASNZ standard.
Cars have to be crash tested for the local market."
These add little to the final price, mostly because in most cases we accept stuff that has been tested to equivalent international standards with little more than a paperwork check. The problem for a lot of products is that the business friendly US makes a lot of these standards as optional, so the testing isn't done. Where as EU products require little to no modification because they already comply. Regardless all of the factors that you mention does not explain the size of the markups that we see here. Particularly for products that don't have any of those issues. (eg: look at the price difference between verisign.com and verisign.com.au SSL certs)
Ah Ha.
The mines are not doing their fair share this year regard Guberment Taxes.
So, Australia Feds then start hitting up the prostitutes like Apple, Oracle, Microsoft et al. for some cum.
"You make a grown man cry .... you make a dead man cum .... ." ;P
Why would you even say that? Work for ADOBE much?? While Gimp has a lot to be desired, on a basic level it does the same thing. If you don't believe me- "GIMP is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. " "Adobe Photoshop is a ...graphics editing program used for image creation, motion graphics editing, and advanced image analysis features."
While Adobe Photoshop is far superior in many ways it doesn't have to be that way. "GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything."
We'll never make it.......oh! we made it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWf3iJjqYCM&list=FL7kKrE4eTs17mQl7eyvJIOg
VOLUME is why.....there are 360 + million people in the U.S., and there is more competition, mostly in manufacturing, plus retailing, so tho' you sell for less, there's a hell of a lot more sales to be made, so plus dollars to be earned. Of course transportation costs are all part of the factor. Now, there's more Chinese and Indians anywhere else in the world, so greater volume. However, under a country (communism) where the Government controls virtually everything, they can to some extent control pricing, but that also creates black market knockoffs! Here in the Philippines, certainly in provincial towns and I'm sure also to some extent in Manila, the vast majority of the general public buying in the computer world, are not paying Microsoft and other software prices, PIRACY thrives! Off course Linux & Ubuntu stuff is free, except hardware, & most of the comes in from China (Family trade thrives here!).