Tram Town
Friday, December 17, 2004
| Category: Sums Bridie Smith, Consumer Affairs Reporter with the Tullamarine Trotskyite Tribune is championing the cause of the producer rather than the consumer in this article about books, GST and Amazon. You don't need to get your spreadsheet out to figure that the example that they give makes Australian publishers' and retailers' markup the main cause of the flight to Amazon: [Why can't I change the text size here, w-class???]
BTW "flight" is hardly a fair description. I was in Readers' Feast (also mentioned in the article) a couple of days ago (purchasing Michael Crichton's excellent State of Fear) and the queues were a good 10 minutes long. That is, of course, partly due to the fact that, like many such stores, their stupid computers make transaction times outrageously high. Just decriminalising their books takes a good 20 seconds and that should be the total transaction time for a single book purchase for cash ("Are you a member of our Frequent Intellectual's Club, sir?"). |
