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Adobe Bows To Pressure and Cuts Australian Prices
An anonymous reader writes "Software giant Adobe has bowed to public pressure and slashed the price of some of its products for Australian customers a day after being ordered to front a parliamentary committee hearing to explain its excessive charges."
Because they thought they could get away with it. For a long time they were right.
That definitely makes them look not guilty.
Umm, no... That's not what this is about.
.au. Apple does it with iTunes, Steam does it with games. Adobe does it with whatever crap they're flogging these days and so do most of the rest. Hardware as well. When I hear Americans talk about $500 computers at "Best Buy" or whatever, I feel sick. The kind of people who buy computers at Best Buy in the US are the kind of people who pay $2,000 for the same thing, in Harvey Norman, here - and our dollar is worth more than the USD, so it's not exchange rates.
This isn't a taxation issue - it's an extortion issue. This is pure and simple that (predominantly) American companies double, triple and sometimes a lot more than that the price of digital downloads when destination ==
Considering they're all assembled in China, which is closer to Australia, I don't buy that's it's a freight cost, either. It's long been known that IT companies just jack up the price massively if they're dealing with Australia because we've allowed ourselves to become accustomed to it.
As an American, I'm proud of the fact that most prices here are negotiable. Sure, it means a little more work to buy the thing you want at a reasonable price. And honestly, it intimidates a lot of people who were raised to be non-confrontational. Whatever, they can pay the full asking price if that's what they want.
You're right, it is cultural. There's a downside to having a low cost of living, however. You still hear just about everyone in the U.S. complain about the price of just about everything. Even while the poorest of our poor still have a higher quality of life than most of the rest of the world. Even if you're homeless and don't have a dime to your name, most cities have shelters where you can sleep and eat for free. (And even these cost too much to run because we effectively have _no_ public mental health treatment system, which is a damn shame. But that's a topic for another day.)
Because luxury goods are so cheap (big houses, big cars, big computers, loads of cheap entertainment), most of the middle class spends money like they're millionaires. As a result they live paycheck to paycheck and don't save enough for retirement. And then they get outraged that social security is paying out less and less because hey, how are they going to afford to retire now that companies don't do pensions anymore? I'm looking out over the parking lot of the corporate building next door and about 10% of the cars are gas-guzzling sports cars while 40% of the cars are SUVs and pickup trucks. I'm betting almost none carpool. These people are burning up huge chunks of their paycheck before they even get it.
Over the past few years, I've been listening to political news on the radio and it floors me how many otherwise normal, sane people seem to think that it's the government's job to provide them with stable employment and retirement. I'm all for social welfare progams that help the poor, but for christ sake, the middle class needs to wake the fuck up and start spending less while saving more. Instead of asking the government to knock on their door and give them even more money to waste.
Yeah, that's another thing that I noticed when I came to the US: people have an enormous amount of stuff in their enormous (by UK standards) houses. Even after 22 years in the US, I still can't get over how much stuff is available, and how little it costs. Don't get me wrong: I like stuff. But it's overwhelming how much stuff there is.
You highlight a real US problem, though: people not understanding the time value of money. It's not taught in the schools, AFAIK. This leads to living on credit (which is astonishingly expensive, if, like most people, you use credit cards) and living for "now" versus "the rest of your life". Try explaining to the average person that waiting a few months to save for something saves you 10-80% of the long-term cost (depending on how indebted you are). The classic symptom of this: a car dealer asking you what monthly payment you're looking for when you walk onto the lot. And there are insidious money-sucking prices in the US, too: what the average home spends on healthcare, mobile voice/data and cable/satellite is just incredible. And every marketing genius has figured out the recurring revenue model and many households fall for it, e.g. Sirius/XM for your car(s).