Poorly Informed

Crikey has been running an interesting regular piece on the gouging of Australian consumers by local "Bricks and Mortar" businesses. I don't want to make it easy for the non-Crikey readers to find it. But if you are interested then go to the Crikey web site and start looking.

I have been thinking and talking about this for some time and am really surprised that it took so long to get into the public domain.

The reality is that we Australian's have been paying too much for stuff for far too long. Four or five years ago I was ranting about how we were paying too much for housing. Two or three years ago cars were on my list. Today I am raving about shoes and cosmetics and bike gear. Tomorrow?

And finally it looks like some of us are paying attention - because the *OZ retail industry* is in slowdown mode. And they don't like it very much.

Not so long ago Gerry Harvey and other retailers were moaning about how internet retailers were eating their lunch and how the lack of GST on internet purchases was so unfair and other baloney.

Well it turns out that the price difference between online and offline retail prices is usually much much more than the GST component and these offline retailers have been gouging Australian's for decades.

Why is it for example that cars in Australia are nearly double what they are in the USA?

And how do you think Gerry Harvey became a billionaire?

Is it magic or because we haven't been properly informed?

If the bricks and mortar world want to stay in business then they will need to get competitive. But they aren't used to that and so they will try to squeeze their supply chains - probably starting with their staff.

So I guess we can get ready for another round of "Whingeing" about "Workplace Flexibility" and how we need to make it easier to re-deploy Australian workers and bring in more cheap labour from elsewhere.

Because we couldn't ask the billionaires to reduce their share of the cake could we?