What a Rip-off

Stuff I Miss: Baking, cold weather, American retail shopping.

To clarify, there are actually a lot of familiar brands around here. I just haven't been able to bring myself buy much of it since a discovery at the Club Monaco in Taipei 101. There's a cute pair of sailor shorts there retailing for over $3000 NT, something around $100 USD. I saw that exact pair in the Philly store in May, specially priced at $29. That's a 200% mark-up!!!

I blamed import taxes (and distribution costs), but now I'm not so sure.

Taiwan has been a huge manufacturer and exporter of netbooks since Asus rolled out the Eee PC a few years ago. Taipei is also the annual host of Computex, a ginormous electronics exhibition, where I must have seen over a hundred models of netbooks. Despite this, even among the Taiwanese brands, it's still much cheaper to buy netbooks in the U.S. than it is here. It's easy to get big rebates at Staples and Office Depot in addition to instant discounts, while electronics sell mostly at retail price over here. And keep in mind those lower prices are despite import taxes and distribution costs that I'm assuming are comparable to those incurred shipping goods the other direction. It's also despite much higher discretionary income in the U.S.

So as both importers and exporters, the Taiwanese pay more. The only way I can explain this is the size of the two markets. A bigger market -> more competitors -> lower prices. That's not news-worthy, but it is interesting that market size seems to play a much bigger role than cost when it comes to pricing.