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.How to stop rip-off retailers Do you know why we pay more for games, for books, for clothes, for pretty much everything in this country? It's not just a matter of distance, or an industrial system that provides a much better basic wage for low income earners than, say, the US. We also pay way over the odds so that guys like Gerry Harvey don't see their fortunes and business model eaten away from the inside by small, fast-moving internet retail startups. tiffany mens necklace There is a Productivity Commission inquiry into all this right now, and it got some publicity last week because Choice finally made their submission, pointing out that Emperor Gerry and his big retail mates had no clothes on. They're walking around naked, turkey slapping us in the high street, just because they can. Not only is there no excuse for us paying higher prices while the dollar remains well above parity with the greenback, for a whole class of goods, distributed digitally, there's not even the excuse of transport or large labour costs to justify the mark-up down under. Advertisement: Story continues below Read this article over at kotaku.com and see if you can get to the end before your blood boils completely away. This is the sort of reporting we don't see a lot of in the mainstream media because the mainstream media doesn't care about the price of things like The Witcher 2. Not in the way that gamers do. tiffany necklace silver Long story short, kotaku interviewed Guillaume Rambourg from Gog.com, a digital distributor competing with bricks and mortar retail outlets like EB Games. He was remarkably frank about the reason why we pay nearly double for products that have no physical presence in the world, that don't need to be put onto planes or ships, or driven out to a Westfield to take up display space. The reason we pay a massive markup to download a game, or a song on iTunes, the reason overseas retailers often won't take our Australian credit cards, forcing us to purchase the more expensive version of the same product here, is because Australian retailers have pressured them into doing so. tiffany braceletGo read the piece. It's totally worth it. I can't wait to see what the Productivity Commission makes of all this. In the end, I suspect market forces will plough these guys under anyway, but until then there are some simple things we can do. Get yourself a US credit card if possible. Shop on overseas websites using a masked server like hidemyass.com or invisiblesurfing.com to disguise your location. Or use a website such as shopUSA.com who will allow you to use their American address as a drop off point for your online purchases, before shipping them on to you down here. tiffany necklace white gold This is one of those instances when you can't expect the government to make it better for you. Retail is a multibillion dollar industry, with massive political power. No politician is going to do anything that gets them offside. But that doesn't mean we have to bend over and take it. tiffany rings The power to do to these bastards what they've been doing to us is at our finger tips. Literally.