This sounds a bit like the general situation in Australia.
It annoyed me to no end when I lived there but the locals didn't seem to worry.
It annoyed me to no end when I lived there but the locals didn't seem to worry.
As a Canadian living in Australia since 2011, I have to disagree. Politically Canada is much more of a protectionist nanny state than Australia.
For mobile service in particular (i.e., the topic of this dicussion), Australia is much more competitive than Canada despite also being a very large, sparsely populated country. I pay $25/month for unlimited calls and 18 GB of 4G data (https://www.aldimobile.com.au/plans/value-packs/). Unlike Canada, Australia allows strong, foreign competitors to provide mobile service (e.g., Vodafone and Optus).
Other ways in which Australia is less protectionist than Canada: - parallel private healthcare system - parallel private education system (although not at university level) - buy alcohol anywhere, not just at government owned stores - no dairy and poultry "supply management" - foreign owned supermarkets (e.g., Aldi)
Australia is far from perfect (e.g., the natural gas cartel is far too powerful) but on the whole there's far less government interference that protects cozy domestic oligopolies compared Canada.
I think where Australia suffers is in things like imported goods (often there's an extra 20-40% markup beyond the maybe 5% higher shipping cost. Or sometimes it's shipped directly from China, but still way more expensive. I think many brand owners have just decided Australia will be able to tolerate a higher cost than the rest of the world.
Oh yeah, crazy that somewhere in the middle of nowhere is more expensive than one that is not.
It seemed like everything you might want to buy that had a brand attached to it was like 20-40% more expensive in Australia, for no particular reason. (Apple products, Intel CPUs and commodities like RAM, SSD and GPU pricing were exempt - those have pretty straight-forward global pricing.)
But.. say, random things like B&H Speakers? Or whatever else. Probably 40% more! Etc. So many things were so much more expensive in Australia for seemingly no particular reason. Freight costs didn't make up for all of that cost disparity - there was something else at play.
I almost left the day job I was sent to do in Melbourne to work on building a price search engine for the Australian market. I couldn't really find anything that was useful/structured enough back then (2012).
I'm curious, has this opportunity been filled since then?