Price-gouging online Kiwis

By Bill Ralston In Commentary

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The world has become one giant hypermarket, where you can buy almost anything you need – but not always at the price you like. Take books, for example. A recently published novel by Emma Donoghue, Room, has a cover price of $30 in a New Zealand shop. Yet it sells for the equivalent of NZ$17 in a bookstore in the United States. More astoundingly Amazon, the grandaddy of online shopping, has it discounted to NZ$9.62 (at the rate of exchange when writing), about 30% of the price here. Why, so often, do we find New Zealand prices are so much higher than those in other countries? Economists ...

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