Buying Australian

There are generally only two places where I buy books. One is an independent bookstore on Bourke St in Melbourne and the other is a major US online retailer.

The former is my favourite; the store is not large but I don't ever recall them ever not having a book that I was looking for. If that ever did happen, I strongly suspect the staff would recommend something that would turn out being better than the thing I was looking for. It wouldn't matter which member of staff I spoke with, either. They all seem very switched on. This isn't a place for discounted books, but I don't mind. This is the type of institution that I support because it's useful; but also one whose existence makes me feel a bit better about the world.

My second bookstore is so practical that I still find it a bit disconcerting. I order from my desk. They have pretty much everything I could ever think of. It arrives on my desk at work within about a week. And it's cheap.

I buy from both and both delight me, in different ways.

Last week, I turned on the 7.30 Report and heard the CEO of a major Australian "big box" bookseller decrying my second favourite bookseller. Apparently, a combination of avoiding GST and the strong AU dollar is driving them out of business. The Big Box is considering sending online sales offshore to avoid GST and help the compete.

I found this man and his interview very annoying.

The simple fact that any Australian who's been shopping in New York or Hong Kong will quickly realise is that, even at historically moderate exchange rates, Australian get screwed when it comes to shopping. Part of this surely has to do with low economies of scale for serving the Australian market. However, I recently spoke to someone in a bike store about a particular brand of bike shoes that the store was now charging customers $20 to try on. "These cost half the price online," he confided "we know everyone will buy them online. The guy who owns the licencing in Australia charges such an exorbitant price that we can't drop our prices; charging people to try them on is the only way we can make money from them". So perhaps, opportunism in this market is also playing a part.

Clearly, retailers not having to pay tax from overseas is an unfair imbalance in the market and perhaps one that will eventually demand correction. Obviously, it does not make sense to let industries be destroyed when the dollar is high when they will be critical again if the exchange rate backs off.

However, big book stores aren't losing market share because of international competition; they're losing it because they're paying for a warehouse size area of prime retail space and they still can't manage to stock the book I'm after. As a friend who works in the industry once commented "when a book hits the bestseller list, they buy in a thousand copies, but no one there realises that this book is the second one in a series and that people will also want to buy the first book. They don't buy any of those and people come in and want both.". Who'd have thought - it seems that knowing about books might be of benefit in selling them.

This morning, again, in the Australian, Gerry Harvey of Harvey Norman was bemoaning the inequities of being an Australian retailer. I suppose that's his job and is new found concern with the Government's tax coffers is only to be expected. The point he perhaps misses is that shopping at the types of stores he operates is, for many including myself, a sort of retail hell. The staff are unhelpful. Either they ignore you, or they're trying to sell you crap you don't want or need to boost their commissions or move rubbish floor stock that no one else is dumb enough to buy. It's big. It's confusing. The store is in an unpleasant location, usually on a main road, and the bleak, bare frontage is a beacon of (sub)urban distress. I shop in these places - sure. But I don't want to. The fact that buying online means I can avoid this is an integral part of the attraction.