Neither Cathy nor myself wears or has ever worn eyeglasses (I recently complained to my doctor that my vision had deteriorated, and after testing he told me to quit bitching because my vision has dropped to  20/20), so we were lost at sea when it came to acquiring and purchasing.

With a prescription in hand we went shopping, with prices ranging from $350 to $550 for a single set of eyeglasses that will need replacing in six months.  These prices seemed dramatically above what the cost ought to be; I’ve bought sunglasses before and paid between $1 and $100 a pair.  “To the Internet!” I cried.  And lo, the Internet said that if we were willing to wait three weeks instead of one to two, it would hand over the same kinds of vision correction devices for $90 $78; actually that was USD, so it was going to be less again.  Not only that, all the stores on the interwebs had memory metal eyeglass frames, whereas the physical stores often didn’t carry that vital (in a three year old) option, hoping instead that arms that were double-hinged might be able to survive (or, given the warranties involved, perhaps even hoping they wouldn’t survive).

Australian retailers are in trouble and want GST charged on all imports into Australia, rather than with the $1000 limit that currently operates; the GST is the least of the problems with retail in Australia.  And the cost of collecting GST on imports is high:

The Productivity Commission said that reducing the threshold to $100 would raise an additional $472 million, but, based on the current customs processing charges, this would cost consumers and businesses approximately $715 million.

So that’s not taxing everything, just anything where $10 of tax could be collected.  An efficient way of taxing imports would be just to tax everything based on the cost of posting it into Australia; one could argue that if someone’s willing to pay $50 postage on something, the goods must be worth something more than… say $50… to them.  So charging Australia Post $5 for the parcel will collect some tax on the thing that we don’t know what the price is, but can make some guesses about its value.  AP will just pass on this charge to the postal services it operates with, pushing up the price of posting to Australia.  People receiving gifts would be able to fill out paperwork to claim this tax back.

The 55m parcels imported into Australia below the $1000 threshold account for a guessed $5.8b of value, that’s an average of about $100/parcel.  My proposal would collect… perhaps $200m, with a very low administration cost – 40% of the tax for 1% of the cost.

But none of this is going to save retail, because the problem retail has with eBusiness is that the fixed costs are so much higher.  Once property prices – and rents – drop to a reasonable level, retail will have a chance.  And for that to happen, many retail businesses are going to have to fail.  Until then, retail is going to need a 50% markup on everything, and will continue to struggle against competitors that don’t need that margin.

Interestingly, our optometrist probably has the right model for a business – they are a service provider providing a service that can only be performed in person, with an adjunct retail business selling glasses etc, ready to mop up consumers who don’t baulk at $550 for a pair of glasses.  They can justify these prices because have the right kind of warranty – two years, no question, anything happens and we’ll fix it.  Accidentally drove over them?  No worries, we’ll replace them.  Try getting that from the intertubes.

Of course, this whole discussion assumes capital and materials mobility, and low labour mobility.  If fuel costs skyrocket, or immigration becomes just a matter of getting on an aeroplane, the whole ball game changes.

Update: Ten days (six business days) after placing the order, the glasses have arrived from China.  That’s right in the delivery window suggested by local providers, and half the delivery time promised by the online eyeglasses retailer we used.  Everything looks great; I’ll whine if anything isn’t right, but with my limited knowledge, all seems well at the moment!  On the downside, our health insurer says that we choose poorly if we wanted a refund; the cheap Internet places they pay out with want $200 for the same glasses, so screw ‘em – our out-of-pocket’s the same whichever way, and this way has less paperwork.

I figured I’d upload the photo to BigW photos the night before, to give them a chance to print them out before I arrived the next day.  I noticed the disclaimer “Delivery Times: Please allow approximately 10 working days for your order to arrive in the mail or to be ready to be picked up in store” but figured this was just legalese arse-covering, applicable to weird things like coffee mugs etc.

I fully expected to get an email five minutes after submission.

I wondered to myself how it is that they can make any money from a single 10c photo, paid for via PayPal.  I figure my order must be costing a buck or two in direct and indirect costs; the PayPal fees alone would be the entirety of the payment.

I didn’t get an email.  It’s been four days now, and the order is still “In production” leading me to believe that the order is going to be printed somewhere that isn’t my local BigW, and is then being shipped there.  Needless to say, I shan’t be collecting it; the day after the photo upload I went to Bunnings for a hinge and some storage boxes, and popped into Officeworks beforehand anticipating some delay in printing – alas, there was a sixty second delay, so that prudence wasn’t required.  Of course, I could have gone to Harvey Norman for the photos but it was an extra 100m walk and another 5c, even if their printing seems to be of a higher quality, a classroom of Prep students isn’t going to appreciate the difference.

Riddle me this: if my photos aren’t printed out at my local BigW, why would I upload them to BigW photos when I could drag myself there in person and collect them within the hour?

Australian consumers can now use their Visa cards to pay for small value transactions of $35 or less without entering a PIN or signing a receipt, Visa announced today.

This requires the retailer to actively persue this strategy, but the payment network no longer demands identification for these “low value” transactions. They claim that security isn’t compromised by this. Their logic goes like this:

1. $35 isn’t much.
2. If someone steals your card, they can only obtain $35 worth of goods and services per transaction until the card is shut down.
3. Your card issuer will eventually notice all of these transactions and phone you to make sure everything is okay.
4. The retailer wears the risk of these unauthorised transactions

So what’s to stop your teenager borrowing your card to go buy snacks at McDonalds (one of the early adoptors of this security-flexibility) whenever they’re hungry? The card company’s logic goes like this:

1. $35 isn’t much.
2. If someone borrows your card without your knowledge, they can only obtain $35 worth of goods and services per transaction.
3. The retailer wears the risk of these unauthorised transactions

So why would a retailer run the risk of a month’s worth of Coles supermarket purchases (another early adopter) – which could easily exceed $1000 with one or two purchases a day – being fraudently run up? Because when you compain to your card issuer, they require a police report. The police, being a diligent lot, will follow up these $35 thefts, go to the stores, look at the video footage, realise they don’t know what you look like, come around to your house and compare the picture against you and decide it’s not you. Then they’ll think “How did this person who isn’t the cardholder get hold of the card and the cardholder didn’t notice until they got the bill?” and they’ll suspect an inside job, and ask you if you recognise the person in the video footage. If you want your teenager to have a crimal record with 30+ theft convictions you’ll scream “Sarah! Come here!” and that will be that; otherwise you might stay quiet.

Of course, it might not be your teenage daughter with the munchies; somebody at work might borrow the card from the wallet on your desk to buy lunch when they’ve run out of cash, or friends when you’re out “dining” at McDonalds.

Worse yet is the organised criminals who can easily prove their expenditure is not their own – it was in another state!  Because there’s no motivation to Express Post your card to an interstate confederate for them to have a quick run around with it before Express Posting it back. In short order it can become quite a bill too – at Apple Stores it’s up to $150 without a signature being needed.  These expenditures can be book-ended by legit local purchases, leading the card holder to say “well, I never authorized that, I’ve still got the card, so you figure it out”.  The costs of these thefts, which all the video footage in the world isn’t going to connect to the cardholder, and with some precautions the confederate either, goes onto the general costs of running the retail operation, pushing up prices.

Retailers always had the option of skipping the need to sign for a transaction – be it on their own heads.  So presumably they think that the video footage will reduce the level of experienced loss.

Now, presumably this fraud will cost less than the expenditure saved – assuming a check-out chick costs $25/hour to employ it implies at least 1.4 person-hours are saved per fraud, and assuming a saving of four seconds per transaction, they’re expecting no more than 1 fraud in 1280 transactions.  But I ask: isn’t it better to pay $35 to Aussie Battlers… working Aussie families… our most valuable assets rather than hand over, say $30, to criminals through lax security?

With contactless payments finally with us, there’s even more reason to fear unauthorized transactions, per this video of a guy stealing the identifying information off a smart card:

It appears that in addition to annual fees, international conversion fees, interest charges and so forth, the price of a credit card is the same as freedom: eternal vigilance.

All of this is lovely and academic, but the activity by retailers and card issuers has the effect of turning every card in my wallet into many unchallenged $35 purchases. This acts as a motivator to steal my cards from me.  If my wallet is stolen, I can immediately cancel the cards, so no risk there. So to get at the lovely $35 goodness, the thief needs to stop me doing that – clonking the victim on the head is a good way of preventing reporting. I like my head. I don’t mind spending 4 seconds a transaction to prevent a increase in people getting brained.

The worst part is there’s no way to opt out of this reduced security; I can’t say to Visa: “No, for my card, only pay money when a PIN is supplied.”  It’s forced on everyone. I remember when these PIN things came out, and I was repeatedly assured that they were more secure than a signature, and I could assure them that it wasn’t – the damn PIN is encoded on the mag strip of the card (precisely copied in seconds!), and any fool can see you keying your PIN in. Now another layer of security has been whittled away, leaving… video investigation.

I feel so safe!

Computer:

• Windows
• Mac
• Linux

Mobile:

• Android
• iPhone/iPad
• Symbian (some Nokia and Sony Ericsson)

Now that Microsoft has bought Skype, it’ll be interesting to see which platforms are supported in, say, 6-12 months time. I bet Windows Phone 7 will be there, but will any disappear?

As Office Watch speculates:

Skype has benefited from being independent of any operating system or platform. If there’s sufficient users for an operating system, Skype made the necessary software. Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, Android etc, all have Skype downloads because it was in Skype’s corporate interest to have broad based coverage.

Now, that corporate interest has changed. Any Skype development will go through the filter of serving Microsoft’s broader corporate agenda. Despite Microsoft’s assurances, that will gradually change Skype into something that gives preference to Windows, Windows Phone and other Microsoft products.

Wired also has a good piece pondering why MS bought it.

So this:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/newscentre/19678.aspx

– which has been quoted widely as the press release for the Royal Wedding Oyster Card, for instance on the popular Going Underground blog — gets moved to:

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/newscentre/archive/19678.aspx

The old link returns a 404.

WHY? It just seems utterly pointless.

The other thing they do is fail to show, or even link to pictures on their media release pages, even in cases like this where the picture is of prime interest, as the story is “Mayor unveils design of the royal wedding Oyster card”. Instead they make you ring the TFL press office.

Perhaps they haven’t noted the rise of social media, where the messages you put out can be spread by bloggers, Tweeters, Facebookers — none of whom will have the time or motivation to ring your press office to get hold of a photo.

If you hide the official information too much, people will end up relying on the unofficial information out there. Less detail, less reliability, and you’ve got less control of the message you want to put out.

Seems an odd way of doing things in the 21st century.

(I only had this rant because I was looking for a picture of the special Royal Wedding Oyster Card.)