> A $300 Wii U in north america costs 300€ in Europe.
I don't get what you are saying. Do you think that the number will always be 300 everywhere. 300 Yen, 300 pounds?
I don't get what you are saying. Do you think that the number will always be 300 everywhere. 300 Yen, 300 pounds?
A $1300 Macbook costs £1,000 here in the UK which is roughly 30% more expensive than a direct currency conversion would have you expect. If you take that $1300 Macbook, add 30% and convert that to Euros it just happens to be that it works out at about €1300 which is what they charge in Germany. Someone posted about that here earlier.
Most of that 30% is due to VAT at around 20% for much of Europe, plus another 10%. It's that last 10% that's the real price difference of the goods.
Personally, I think the main cause of that is the generally higher cost of doing business in Europe (UK included). Everything costs more here. Petrol (Gas) and hence transport, wages, property, corporate tax rates, etc. It's hard, if possible at all, to find anything that's cheaper over here and all of that feeds in to the cost of doing business. The first time I visited the US I was shocked at just how much cheaper _everything_ seemed to be. Frankly, I'm surprised it's only another 10%.
Also, not all states have the same amount of sales tax and some have no tax at all. It would be impossible to show the prices with sales tax when there are 50 different states with differing sales tax laws.
Heck, the state level sales tax rates are even the easy part. Within states there are counties which often levy additional sales tax, and then cities within the counties do it as well. These county and municipal tax rates are additionally often comprised of a variety of "temporary assessments" which appear and expire seemingly at random. Knowing which rate is charged at a given location devolves into a very difficult problem once you realize there's no centralized address-to-jurisdiction database, nor a centralized jurisdiction-to-tax-rate database.
Current practice is, that the tax of the country, where the company is in-cooperated applies.
With that move, the EU wants, that every country is getting their share, and not like is now, that some countries are getting it. But this added bureaucracy is making it much harder for smaller companies.
Numbeo corroborates this: http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...
If you go for groceries, and you see that staple food hasn't increased much, but meat/poultry/fish has gone up in prices due to local producers increasing their prices to match the exporters - so now a kilo of decent beef steaks is around R$35 (~US$15,50), when it could be had for R$10 in 2008.
Entertainment is expensive: movie tickets for US$15. Paul McCartney played in São Paulo a few years back and the cheapest tickets were going for US$300. Nightclubs all have a cover charge of at least US$30. A bus ride from São Paulo to Rio (which is equivalent to Boston-NYC) costs +/- US$30. Any passable restaurant will cost at least US$35/person. I went to visit my parents last year, we went out for a nice pizza place by the beach - R$75 each pizza.
Taking a look at these things, if you are a Brazilian tourist visiting any European/North American city, most of the things you will see are not related to basic cost of living - mostly entertainment and general shopping - and these are indeed cheaper compared to Brazil.