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The All New Kindle - ripoff!

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Renegade:
VAT=20%
Does that do most of it?
-Dormouse (October 03, 2011, 03:19 AM)
--- End quote ---

If the price Carol quoted is VAT inclusive, then yes.

Carol? Was that price with VAT?

Darwin:
In the UK prices quoted include ALL taxes. This makes shopping in the UK (or Korea or Europe generally for that matter) a pleasure because you look at the price, you count out your change, and that's what you pay at the til. In Canada (and the US) we have "open" taxation, which means that the labelled price is the "true" price before taxes and taxes are calculated and collected at the til. BS in my opinion. It makes shopping confusing more than anything, especially because, as 40hz points out, every state/province has their own tax structure.

Darwin:
OK... shouldn't have said shopping in the UK is a "pleasure": alcohol and sweets are cheap, but darned near everything else induces profound sticker shock. I remember being in university in England in the mid-90's and again in the early 2000's with the exchange rate being around 2.5 Cdn. dollars to the pound and thinking "Wow! Stuff here is cheap!" until I realized that 4.50 pounds was more expensive than $5, whcih was almost invariably the case - you could swap out the pounds sign for a dollar sign and that was the way things were priced. I remember USED Levis jeans, which I used to buy for about $30 NEW in Canada, being close to 100 pounds in 1994. Crazy.

Carol Haynes:
Someone pointed out to me that the UK version included taxes and Amazon US ads taxes at checkout - but even so the state with the highest sales tax is California at 8.25% so even at the most expensive in the US it costs $118, still $21 cheaper than the UK market (and over $100 cheaper than SA).
-Carol Haynes (October 03, 2011, 02:52 AM)
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That was the point of my previous post - the UK VAT is included BUT even taking that into account AND adding Californian Sales Tax (which is near double most states, and quite a few are zero rated) the UK version is still $21 more than the US version.

I don't see how shipping or import/export duty would have much bearing - the devices are probably all made in the far east and shipped directly to the sales area. Even if it was shipped to the UK from the US the sort of bulk Amazon ship and the margins that they can acheive with shippers would not amount to $21 per unit. Plus if they are exporting product they will be able to recoup the import duties.

mahesh2k:
Letter from Jeff Bezos on amazon front page.

Kindle Fire has a radical new web browser called Amazon Silk. When you use Silk – without thinking about it or doing anything explicit – you’re calling on the raw computational horsepower of Amazon EC2 to accelerate your web browsing.
--- End quote ---
;D

I just connected this and this with the bolded quote.

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