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I always have to laugh when people complain that they're being ripped off because they have to pay for something... and then turn around and absolutely refuse to do their job for free.

That said, if there was one person in this world who would do his job for free, it would probably be Ian. There have been times you could hardly get him out of the place with a crowbar...

There is, admittedly, sometimes a fine line between a fair charge for a service and outright extortion. There are also cultural differences - in the U.S., for example, it's common practice to include an 18% gratuity into a restaurant check for parties of 6 or more, whereas I imagine that there are places in which such a practice would be considered terribly impolite.

That said, I've witnessed people bitterly complain about the price of an oil change, during a sale in which the customer cost was literally $15 more than the cost of the oil and filter. That doesn't even cover the wage of the mechanic to perform the oil change, to say nothing of the charge incurred for disposal (in New Jersey, you can't just throw out used motor oil.) The same people would fight tooth and nail about the margin we would make on selling a car, when in fact the margin on a new-car sale was FAR less (as a percentage of the price) than an almost any retail product you could imagine. These same people would never go into a grocery and haggle about the price of toilet paper, even though TP has a profit margin nearing 50% for the retailer.

I googled this and found some interesting markup percentages :

Text messages - 20 cents for a message that costs 0.3 cents to process. Markup 6,000%.
Bottled water - Sources vary, but markups in the region of 4,000%
Brand name drugs : Markups range from 200 to 3,000%
Printer ink - Produced for a dollar a gallon, sold at a 1,600% markup.
Hotel minibars - Markups of 400%
Coffee - 300%
Wine - 300%
Greeting Cards - 200%



Amazing what some companies get away with. Fortunately I use very few of those products!

In some cases, its cheaper to get a new printer than it is to replace the ink.


I can understand the markup on drugs (gotta pay for liability insurance somehow).


And I get unlimited texting... so that markup is variable depending on my text amount.

Mikey wrote:I think GK asks a valid question - if your business were converting currency, would you do it free of charge?

I don't see that there's a massive amount of effort involved in in it. Especially if you are just taking money out of your bank at a cash machine in the destination country. Even then you get stung for a fee/bad exchange rates.

You can't combine that term into "fee/bad exchange rates." Exchange rates are an independent entity; fees are what a person gets for doing their job of changing the money for you. If an individual or company performs a service for you, then they should absolutely charge you a fee. Would you consider it a "rip-off" if your bartender made you pay your tab, or grocer made you pay your bill?

stitch626 wrote:In some cases, its cheaper to get a new printer than it is to replace the ink.

Douglas Adams once said that most companies are not in the business that you think they are. The example he used was printer manufacturers like Cannon, IBM, etc. Their business isn't selling printers, printers are sold at a loss to the company as a way of recruiting customers. Their business is selling printer ink.

He's comedically correct as usual to a point, but trust me - they're making plenty on the machines, too. I don't have the inclination to research the cost of every component in a printer, but I'd be willing to bet that all of them plus the salary for the assembly time sums up to be a LOT less than the retail cost.

I kinda doubt that they make a profit on them, actually. Printers here can be pretty cheap now - I've seen one for £20 before now. Loss leaders are nothing new in sales, after all.

I admit I haven't shopped for one in some time, but loss leaders are used by retailers to fill splash ads and to bait-and-switch new traffic, not by manufacturers to wholesale product.

I dunno, I've seen instances of printers being cheaper than their ink refills.

Also by most accounts my Kindle cost Amazon almost the same amount to make it as I did to buy it. When you consider that a book for it costs 80% to 100% of what a conventional book would cost it's easy to see how they still make their money.

Amazon's profit on ebooks must be insane. They have an open publishing policy, anybody can upload anything and start selling it - Amazon itself does absolutely nothing in the way of checking, editing, promotion. They get a percentage, and all they have to provide is a small amount of storage and a little bit of bandwidth.

Mikey wrote:You can't combine that term into "fee/bad exchange rates." Exchange rates are an independent entity; fees are what a person gets for doing their job of changing the money for you. If an individual or company performs a service for you, then they should absolutely charge you a fee. Would you consider it a "rip-off" if your bartender made you pay your tab, or grocer made you pay your bill?

No, it doesn't work that way here. You get given a rate for buying and a different rate for selling. The fee is buried in the fact that neither of these rates is the prevailing rate at the time. That is what I object to. Our post office does a scheme where they will "buy back your unused holiday money commission free", and yet you still don't get the money you had to begin with. I know this for a fact as we had to cancel a holiday once and returned all the money. I was not best pleased.

Yes, but that fee is independent of exchange rates. When I was 9 years of age, my sister went to Europe for a couple of months. I toyed with the idea of buying a shitload of lire at the time, as they were exchanging at about 2500 to the dollar. Well, I didn't, and the next time I looked up they were at 1500 lire to the dollar. He who hesitated was indeed lost, but I couldn't very well blame an individual for "ripping me off" because the rates changed. That's an organic fact of economics, no different than the fact that hurricanes suck but can't be blamed on somebody.

Similarly, if you bought foreign currency at a favorable exchange and changed it back at a less-favorable one, that's hardly the fault of the people who are merely performing the exchange for you... especially if they're doing it free of commission.

Mikey wrote:Yes, but that fee is independent of exchange rates. When I was 9 years of age, my sister went to Europe for a couple of months. I toyed with the idea of buying a shitload of lire at the time, as they were exchanging at about 2500 to the dollar. Well, I didn't, and the next time I looked up they were at 1500 lire to the dollar. He who hesitated was indeed lost, but I couldn't very well blame an individual for "ripping me off" because the rates changed. That's an organic fact of economics, no different than the fact that hurricanes suck but can't be blamed on somebody.

Similarly, if you bought foreign currency at a favorable exchange and changed it back at a less-favorable one, that's hardly the fault of the people who are merely performing the exchange for you... especially if they're doing it free of commission.

As I just said the fee isn't known to anyone buying money over here. You may do it differently here you just get told two rates.