Superfreakonmics, the best-selling book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (ISBN 978-0-06-088957-9) would cost you R225 at Loot.co.za, R289 at kalahari.net and R422 at Exclusive Books. If you lived in the US, you could purchase it at Amazon for $13.96, roughly R105. (Company websites).
This week’s theme: Prices in South Africa
Related facts:
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and how much is the tax? Does that explain loot vs Amazon.
I don’t think it’s entirely relevant to this discussion. The fact just illustrates that South Africans pay more than double what consumers the US pay (at least in this case).
The key issue is that we are third world citizens who pay a significant mark up for the same intellectual property that our first world cousins get for far less. We probably need it more than they do but we can’t afford to buy it thanks to our own bureaucracy and the inflated cost of alternative (first world) technologies (e.g. Kindle).
The SA consumer must be the prime target globally at price inflation and dooping on the planet. We always pay too much as regulation is a joke. What has happened with Bread, Milk, Car price fixing – None of those prices have come down? Follow up and show us the stats on before price fixing – The States Investigation – If there ever was an adjustment afterwards
Book prices are just an example of a wider trend. This is the biggest problem SA faces – [other] crime pales into insignificance in comparison
SA is a small market, and the SA way is to divide and conquer among a tiny number of (apparently) independent companies, which in practice are often pretty closely aligned.
(I noticed that BOTH SterKinekor AND Numetro have recently dropped the ability to purchase child tickets from their online & kiosk offerings. Coincidence??)
The market is then not big enough for another ‘big boy’ to bother competing, and the incumbents kill any little players who try to get in, in order to keep prices artificially high and avoid needing to innovate or compete effectively
The result is massive inflation (official figures are a joke – my groceries have gone up AT LEAST 100% since 2006 for the same stuff)
Some examples:
Greetings cards … the same offerings across all the stores, usually last year’s stuff from the UK that didn’t sell there. (In 2003, I saw a card that said “Happy Birthday Brother – this is the last card I’m sending you this millennium”)
Clothing … in 2007, all the stores had kids clothes with completely the wrong age labelling (e.g. marked 2 to 3, but actually for 6 to 7 year olds) – presumably a job lot that was rejected as ’seconds’ by primary markets in US/Europe etc and bought up here by a single supplier to all the SA stores, and sold on to us at full price
Books are a particular joke as they insult our intelligence by proudly displaying the highly inflated Rand price right next to the US/UK/Canada etc prices that are usually printed onto the books themselves.
It’s not just consumers: my catering company often found it impossible to get even basic supplies for months at a time, as there is often effectively only one supplier (e.g. packaging, chicken, etc).
If they choose to do so, they just shut down availability (no microwaveable packaging for anyone else for 6 months, because Woolworths bought up the entire production capacity;
no chicken breast fillets for weeks, because they decided to keep them for their own value-add offerings; etc)
hmm is it perchance exclusive crooks?
To me this just looks like advertising – therefore spam