I'm still relatively new in this country, so I really shouldn't start messing with diatribe about things which I am still learning. But it seems plain to see that the Australian consumer is getting raped. And I'm still trying to figure out where in the system all the profit is being taken - though it appears that huge profits are being taken across the board, throughout the entire distribution chain.

For instance a hardware item I was looking at yesterday (Zip-it wallboard anchors) costs about $10.00 for a hundred in the U.S. - or about 10 cents each. The cheapest I can find them here is for $120.00 for the same quantity or over a dollar each. Now that's a bit of a difference. Sure, there's shipping and duty to consider, but somewhere in this distribution chain a 1200% surcharge is getting added to this item. 

Amanda was looking yesterday at horse saddles. Australian horse saddles. We can buy them cheaper in Arizona than we can in Australia. Even shipping them across the Pacific and back again - is still cheaper than we can buy them about 250 kilometers from where they're made. By hundreds of dollars on a nominally $300-400 item. If you're a local, you can pick them up for just under $800. We can ship this Aussie saddle from the states to our doorstep for about $500.

The other thing to consider is the plummeting U.S. dollar. As the dollar has collapsed, the Australian prices on U.S. imports haven't budged. The merchants are still pretending that there's a 2/1 exchange rate. There isn't. It's rapidly approaching 1/1. The situation isn't any different for Chinese goods, which are often selling for 4-8 times the manufacture cost, even if you measure everything in the same currency.

Subtract known shipping and tariff rates and currency conversions, and you still end up with 400% or greater surcharges in most cases. I was in retail not that long ago, and don't see any problem with profit, but this situation is way beyond normal profit margins. It's even outside the edge of exorbitant profit margins. Gouging is the only word that applies.  

A ruthless retail giant like Wal-Mart could wreak havoc on this country just like they did in the states - if they control the entire distribution chain. They could sell goods for less than anybody here and still maintain huge margins and walk away with record profits - while shutting out all the competition. It's ripe for this to happen.

This worries me. In the meantime, I think I'll just be buying a lot of my stuff over the net from somewhere else in the world, like a growing number of people are doing here. I don't care if it costs $50 in shipping - it's still cheaper in the long run.    

Well at least our power outage today didn't compare with the fiasco that hit San Francisco yesterday. I feel blessed. We had a scheduled interruption for about four hours to finish up the job they were doing three weeks back.

One of the workers came by to check on the breaker, so we asked what it was they were doing to the lines. Turns out that when they put up the telephone pole across the street, they encroached on our neighbor's property by about 18 inches. It was a simple mistake. There's a big drainage ditch and common sense says to put up the telephone pole on the edge of the drainage ditch rather than in the middle. But he complained to the council, and they complained to the power company. So here they were, rewiring the entire block to move the pole over 18 inches into the center of the drainage ditch.

Part of me applauds this action. Government doing the right thing by its citizens is a noble virtue. But now they've stuck an electric pole that supplies a quarter of the town smack dab in the middle of a drainage ditch. I've seen this ditch when the monsoon rains hit. Sure hope the pole doesn't get swept away in the next big rain.

We were out looking at floats (horse trailers) yesterday near Joadja. A commercial comes on the radio...

Some bloke looked up at the mountains, saw that there was snow on the mountains, and said, "Gee - let's call these the Snowy Mountains". Another bloke looked at his house plant, saw that it was in a pot and said, "look - a pot plant".

The commercial is only about half way through, and I'm already in hysterics. You see I'm about the only person around here rolling in laughter and wondering why there isn't a queue of college students getting their picture taken under the POT PLANT SALE sign at the BONG BONG Nursery. [In the states, a pot plant is a marijuana bush and a bong is a type of hookah].

Anyway the commercial continues...

In the spirit of these great Australians, we [an unnamed global fast food company symbolized by golden arches], invite you all to visit our website at www [.........] dot com dot a-u and name our new hamburger meal.

I go through some amusing mental choices... like MicroMeal, seeing as how their flagship meal on this side of the pond isn't much larger than the basic 99 cent sandwich in the states. But Amanda (born Australian) doesn't even hesitate....

 "Turd Burger".

 

I'm starting to get the electricity under control. Have managed to pick up most of the wall-wart transformers I need. Incidentally, for the benefit of anybody that may have to follow these footsteps, forget about Tandy and Dick Smith as electronics suppliers. You'll go broke. There's a little place in Bowral called 'Leading Edge Electronics' that has much better transformers for about half the price. They've also got a better selection.

I also have pretty much given up the process of converting most of the wall-cord equipment. Some of it can be rewired, but it's a very painful and time consuming process. So instead, we've set aside one room of the house with 'Yankee Power'. I've got the familiar U.S. power strips and line cords everywhere; all feeding off of a 2kw transformer that I picked up at Fry's for $150 USD. If you attempt this, get that transformer (or three). The biggest they've got on this side of the pond is 1kw for about $300 AUD. Big difference. You'll still have to change the power cord because the Fry's transformer is set up with a UK plug, and you don't want to pump a couple kilowatts through a little plastic Aussie travel plug adapter (which you also want to pick up a few dozen of at Fry's for $1.50 USD each - you can't find 'em here at all because nobody here needs Aussie travel converters). The power strips I'm using are the super heavy duty metal Home Depot power strips with about ten plugs and a fifteen foot cord. They're about $50 USD each. I've got six or seven of 'em from my music shoppe days. The only problem is the built-in surge suppressor. If you turn on the 2kw transformer, it will send a surge and throw the house circuit breaker every time. I took some clippers and clipped out the surge suppression circuitry on a couple of these boxes as I got tired of walking outdoors in the cold to reset the breaker. I've converted over enough stuff that I probably won't need the other power strips, so I'll probably sell them for $100 AUD each (or whatever the market will bear) on ebay.com.au. Yankee power strips sell at a premium here, usually along with a transformer and some kind of home theater device that somebody tried to save money on by buying overseas - and then spent a fortune trying to get working on 220v50hz. And mine are the premium power strips, not the $4.95 USD economy strips that sell here for $50 AUD.

In the Yankee room is my recording equipment, but also such things as region 1 DVD's,  NTSC television stuff,  and any other foreign formatted thingies.  It's starting to feel like home, so I draped a couple of US flags in the windows. Well we still need blinds and they're the only pieces of cloth I could find that are near the correct size. We used the extra sheets for the other windows. I've also got about 600w of 60hz power available, but luckily most of my stuff runs off of the transformer and I haven't yet had to build a container for a few 12v batteries and charging equipment to supply the sine wave generator. We'll probably need it for Amanda's and Isabella's sewing machines - so there might be yet another Yankee room dedicated to sewing.

UPDATE: Looks like the sewing machines will also work just fine on 50hz. Yay! Thanks to Chinese manufacturing and global markets. Ten years ago this wouldn't have been the case. This means that so far we haven't found a single thing that absolutely needs 60hz to run.  Of course the big reason for that is because we sold all the stuff that we knew positively would be a problem...

One  of the problems with living in a rural place is that you no longer have economies of scale when it comes to service outages and such. We lost the internet all day yesterday and today. Oh and the phone. You couldn't get to the outside world from Robertson. But since only two thousand people were affected, it wasn't the same as if you lost say the internet link and phone service to Sunnyvale, California. Seems there was only one guy in the entire country who was able to fix the problem and I guess he must've been out in Perth and Robertson isn't quite as important - as say Perth. At least they got everything finally working tonight. They were originally claiming that it would take another day or two.