Mook wrote:
Come on. Anything particularly dangerous needs a prescription from your doctor. Even if the pharmacists did advise/control you can always visit a few pharmacies in a row - cough medicine anyone.
Yes, if you insist you can end up screwed. But I guess you are missing your own comment here... Even if pharmacist advices/controls...
After that point, it is your own willfull negligence which hurts you.
With stores, it can be your (and salespersons) ignorance.
If you were a buyer for a big chain then I might believe you - but I doubt it.
All the stuff you wrote is another of these myths that everyone here believes. How about more basic economics - "the price is what the market can bear". As an example, Finland has the cheapest cars in Europe (before taxes); are Finns ordering so many new cars as to make them cheaper?
Or is this because of how elsewhere cars are taxed?
Another example: when we had our second child we identified the pram (lastenvaunu) that we wanted and priced it up - the shop in Lauttasaari selling it wanted 1000 Euros for all the bits. I managed to find it from a small shop (not a chain) in the UK for around 600 (including postage).
And you have not grasped that your small shop in UK will be in immediate vicinity of few million potential customers.
For big store that particular store is around 1 million, at best. With high expenses.
You clearly have little grasp of running any kind of business.
As I said, Verkkokauppa, Lidl and it seems specsaver are starting to break the monopolies, but I guess it'll take some time...
Nah. They can try to get bigger marketshare, but if they want to start making profit, they have to hike up the prices. Verkkokauppa for one is not exactly cheap.
Lidl & Specsavers is just about big chain from abroad trying to grab marketshare so they even might sell at loss, or take advantage of large purchases of rest of the chain to get stuff little cheaper.
Lidl buys crap X for amount of 2000 containers and sends few to Finland. Even with losses from trasnsportation it can be little cheaper than purchase of 200 containers for Finland limited storechain.
Like said, you foreigners just do not grasp that this is not UK or Germany. Assuming same things apply is, in short, stupid.