Outis

Cousin Reginald Plays Pirate, Normal Rockwell, 1917

The BBC has a short but welcome article on the uncompetitive pricing of high-tech goods (in this case, software) in England.

I would add that it’s worse in Spain where spotty availability makes high prices only part of the problem.

The BBC is right to point out that the sticker shock comes from having access to the web. Imagine a world where the price of a product on your Window’s monitor is much, much less than the prices you see when you go window shopping downtown.

That’s absurd.

Downtown prices should always beat the web. Otherwise, there’s not going to be a downtown for much longer.

As the BBC piece points out, the market in England is like a “treasure island.” Only, there are not supposed to be islands in the global marketplace. That’s what the web is for.

If a customer is willing to pay for shipping and handling, they’re probably willing to pay that much more for a product at a local store for the sake of not having to wait or for wanting to make the local market a place worth browsing.

If a downtown store is able to buy its merchandise from the Internet, at everyday low prices, why isn’t it then selling those same products to local customers with a mark-up comparable to S&H? Isn’t that mark-up, at a high volume store (i.e., downtown), more than enough to finance Europe’s fancypants social security net?

On a related note: our friend, who has a DJ set at the FIB show where we are also playing, is coming over to our house so she can use my “American” iTunes.com account to buy some songs.

You see, she can’t buy them with PayPal and there is no iTunes.es ready to deal with this country’s bass akwards lack of secure electronic payment methods.

Here is a consumer, with money in her hands, in country where the “scandal” of music piracy is making waves (well, on the airwaves, at least) and she cannot buy a song in mp3 format from the mp3 store.

Folks, she’s left the money on my table. Please, take it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 21st, 2005 at 5:18 am and is filed under Technology, Europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.