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| Authored by: tknarr on Thursday, June 14 2012 @ 06:02 PM EDT |
Should another business be able to effectively put you out of local
business by competing directly against you with your own product just because
they found a way to undercut your costs by purchasing your book in other
location and getting it shipped in so they can sell it at a "used"
price?
I think the magic question is more "Should it be a
violation of the law for another business to do this?". It's a problem in retail
now: store A needs a product, store B has it on sale, so the owner of store A
walks over to store B, buys a bunch of the product at the sale price, comes back
and puts it on his shelves. Right now the law says that store B's allowed to
refuse to sell to the owner of store A, but if they do sell to him they
don't have any legal claim against him for reselling their products. Why should
books be any different in this regard? [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 14 2012 @ 06:07 PM EDT |
On one hand, not having this sort of restriction certainly
makes life simple and tends to reduce business profitability
(generally a good thing). (think value-cost as utility
generated)
On the other hand, well, consider the possibility that, in
the absence of these restrictions, businesses may choose
between:
(a) selling only to 1st world markets for 10 USD (because 10
USD can not be supported elsewhere)
and
(b) selling everywhere for 3 USD.
...and that they will choose option (a) because it is much
more profitable, thereby removing a lot of goods from
circulation elsewhere and harming the people there.
Of course, then you think further and realize that those
businesses probably would be foolish to make that choice, as
piracy would suddenly boom and those areas would develop
local industries that would eventually become
competitive...so they'd probably choose to sell for 3-4 USD
everywhere.
Really don't know the answer either. I do believe that the
vast majority of the price difference is usually not due to
cost of labor for mass-market items - so the price
difference is pure profit. (They're usually made in low-
cost countries.)
--Erwin[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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