In Linton, as the rest of the country we pay as much as 50% more for on-line products than the average world customer. It’s called ‘geo-blocking’ where, like film and TV classifications countries are assigned a financial formula to ensure that the price they pay in India is relative in terms of GDP as Australia. There overall prices are far lower so that global corporations can compete against the local product and if you buy on-line in Linton the overall prices are higher because our wages are higher and global corporations can charge more and still compete against the local product.
Put another way, if a pair of shoes can be made in China by Nike for about $15.00 they can afford to sell them in India for about $20.00 lower than Indian retail and delivered direct from China (a billion potential customers is also a good incentive). In the United States where wages are higher they can sell them for $180.00 or more, while other stores have to pay rent and staff and the like to sell shoes Nike can just sell direct door to door and even discount against there own shops and retailers.
In Australia, despite the fact we think we have the highest wages but don’t, our minimum wage is far higher than the U.S.A so in G.D.P terms we can afford to pay even more, so the shoes will retail here for $220.00, again, delivered straight from the factory with no middle man no locally employed sales staff and as a result extraordinary profit margins.
The major retailers will tell you that ‘price, price, price’ is all that drives their customers. Locally made comes second and quality is sacrificed to price every time. Consumer organisations will tell you that ‘parallel imports’ where shops like Sam’s and Reject will ‘wholesale’ direct from India at far less cost and thus sell the product far cheaper does nothing for our local economy. Great they say ‘it drives down prices’ but at the same time we are deliberately under-pricing ourselves and driving holes through our employment figures.
What is better - an additional 10% and full employment or 10% less and longer dole queue’s. Already to keep down unemployment statistics a ‘job’ is defined as about 8 hours work and not the 20 hours it used to be.
Here is some sage advice, admittedly information we got through subscribing to ‘Choice’.
When buying on-line (and we only do it when it cannot be obtained within 50Km) we can go through a whole process to purchase something ‘we could not find in Australian shops’ (in our case a Koran in English) only to find at the checkout that it could not be shipped to Australia. Fortunately we already have a spurious overseas address so we arranged for the book to be sent from the U.S address to the school in Bangladesh which was our target destination.
According to Choice these third-party delivery services such as MyUS.com, Lil’ Shoppa, HopShoGo and Bongo give you an American address for parcel forwarding and they can send it on to Australia. Some companies such as Price USA even buy the product on your behalf and use their local agents to ship it to Australia. But be warned - they are not free - they all have a fee of some sort hidden in the pricing structure commonly called ‘package and deliver’. So one needs to watch out for the additional costs.
If the product is not available in Australia then you have no other alternative than to either pay the extra or look for a locally made equivalent product which gives Australians work and probably works out about the same in overall costs. I believe that there are many out there that buy a bargain on-line only to find after the final bill comes in they could have bought it cheaper in Linton.
Regardless of what we are shopping for purchasing overseas can have major problems - no warranty for a start - faked parts is another - and medicines? No - unless you want to kill yourself (seriously).
Being obsessive-compulsive the Astonisher lives by an astonishing number of self-imposed rules and protocols designed to keep idle hands busy. Our policy in general is:-
1: Buy in Linton
2: Buy in Ballarat
3: Buy on-line in Australia
4. Buy where available.
We always believe the Australian economy must come first (a pity our elected representatives don’t care about that) and will lobby for a GST to be applied to all on-line purchases not just those purchased in Australia. If we want a level playing field then we have to apply the same taxes across the board regardless of price or origin. We don’t have GST on goods under a certain value as the bean-counters say it costs more to collect than what they will collect - what they don’t tell us is that GST on pricier items will more than cover the cost of collection on the lower end of the scale - let Peter subsidise Paul. They’re just too lazy and complacent and worried about getting home for the X-Factor to bother putting it in place. Why increase our workload?
The State Liberal Government was turfed out because it allowed 60% of green waste to go into land-fill (only Labor is that wasteful?) but they did rule that ‘geo-blocking’ was in such a grey area in regard to World Trade Regulations that they shouldn’t make it illegal to flout the rules governing such practices. ‘If one could one should’ was the outcome. Pity they don’t like that concept when it comes to personal taxes. Apparently it’s the downloading and not the smuggling of USB sticks up our arse that makes the difference.
Just as a demonstration of differences between countries. Taxes for on-line purchasing in America are for any purchase above $15.00 and in the U.K it’s $25.00 (so much for the too expensive to collect argument) but in Australia the maximum that does not attract taxes is $1,000. Basically Australians can buy almost anything they want and our politicians couldn’t give a toss.
There is another way to get around your Internet Shopping problems. You can save yourself some time and money by getting yourself a legitimate U.S downloading address using a VPN (a virtual whatever) through Free and Paid VPN servers. Readers should Google TorVPN, Logmein Hamachi ( a sort of Beam-me-up Scotty type site) Hotspot Shield, HMA. IPVanish (sounds more like a slash in the dark) and Overplay. You connect to your VPN server (which pretends to be your computer - good if you’re also Julian Assange) and allows you to set up an account and use a legitimate U.S postal address. One is not quite sure if the Sheriff has realised yet that there are 17 million people living in a two-bedroom flat in Little Rock.
Yet another alternative to VPN, if you spend quite a bit on imports (GMH for example) is to adopt a US based domain name such as un-block-us.com for about $5 a month. The Astonisher gets many Linton stories through our domain in Croatia to protect our local sources.
Again - rerouting your internet connection through a DNS server (we know that one to be Domain Name Server - Duh!!!!) by changing the setting on your computer (in our case permanently on another computer but not something we can tell you how to do - a Geek did ours for us) can also trick the site you’re attempting to hack (line through) access into believing your computer is in that country.
A word of warning at this point. Be warned about the possibility of bill-shock from excess data usage charges on the faster 4G network if it ever gets to Linton which has been found to increase data usage by up to 50% in some cases. Much of this caused by the multiple routing and other data sapping uses you might put your computer through for some of these exercises.
After whining on about buying Australian I’ve just realised I’ve told you all about not employing local talent with the exception of local geeks setting up nefarious ways to beat the system.
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