Or Australia at least. Why are things so expensive here?

It’s like this. I use eBay a lot (you know, the site where you buy something because it’s $50 cheaper than retail and then pay $70 for shipping and handling) and most of the time it’s cheaper to buy from America! This is particularly true for high end electronic equipment.

It’s becoming ridiculous. I recently bought a multi-unit power pack from America, ate shipping and handling, ate the currency exchange rate (the Australian dollar is worth roughly 79 US cents), and ate the $13.95 or so it cost me to buy a transformer so I can run the thing on 240v…and it still worked out cheaper than buying from Australia!

I don’t pretend to know much about economics, but it’s like anywhere from 20% to 60% gets added to the price as soon as something enters the country. A $600 Ibanez guitar becomes a $900 Ibanez guitar. A $2000 generator becomes a $3000 generator. Sometimes the prices are ludicrously, insanely out of line. I own a Marshall amp that cost $1000 Australian, and I just talked to a guy in the UK who bought the same amp for 200 pounds. Yay. Great stuff to hear.

I don’t fully understand why this is, although I’d expect it to have something to do with us being a vast country in a remote location of the globe with a small population. That’s what common sense suggests, anyway.