Okay, this is something that constantly bothers me when I see a price on the internet in US dollars. Why do we Europeans have to pay so much more than the Americans ? I realize we have more taxes, but sales tax is about 20% here, the Euro is about 40% more 'valuable' than the dollar, so even accounting for the extra taxes and the extra transport costs (well, everything's coming from Asia anyway so it shouldn't be that much more) it still doesn't explain why we have to pay so much more for books, cd's, games and pretty much everything else. It used to be that you just looked at a price in USD and than thought the cost here would be the same figure but then in Euro's. However, lately, this doesn't even apply anymore !

Is it our higher wages ? Does the money go purely to the retailers ? Is there some sort of insidious plan to make us all poor ? Or doesn't the market work like we'd expect it to, at all ?

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