Harry Potter Storybook incident in my country

@krfanlim (232)
Malaysia
December 10, 2008 9:18am CST
Months back, the Harry Potter series released it's final instalment of the book, "The Deathly Hallows", which is very much sought after by fans worldwide. And there was an incident that happened in my country, Malaysia. You see, there are reputable bookstores here such as MPH, and Big Bookstore which sells books (well, of course books! Whatelse? LOL!!) and have always been selling those books that sells like hotcakes. Back then, the books were sold for RM89.90 per book, which is pretty pricey. But the retail giant hypermarket, Tesco, wanted its share of the cake. Tesco also imported these books and introduced a price of about RM40+ and that was ABOUT HALF what the major chain of bookstores were selling at!! (Btw, both Tesco and those bookstores were selling original copies of the book). Then, the game was on. But it wasn't such a fair game, thought the reputable bookstore chains, so they really made lots of noise, and came to somewhat close to a petition against Tesco. But while the debate Tesco against those bookshops were on, Harry Potter fans here were happily paying for the lowered price Tesco was offering. And in just a couple of days, the books were out-of-stock in all Tesco hypermarkets. And the incident ended with a lowered price by those bookstores to RM69.90 (still SO EXPENSIVE!!) while Tesco stopped their restocking of those books. I think that, as a customer, Tesco is doing a really good job on lowering the prices, although being a hypermarket which is supposed to sell groceries and household items just suddenly jumped into the bandwagon of selling books for a cheaper price, thus, competing fiercely with standalone bookshops. What is your opinion about this matter?? Do you think that the competition is fair among these two parties??
2 responses
@baldie (74)
• India
10 Dec 08
sure competition is nice and lower prices are better. But the loser is always the friendly neighborhood store. When looking for a book available nowhere whom will you approach to get it for you? Your local store whose owner you probably know or the faceless giant super store which wont even acknowledge you? The sad part is that the smaller stores can't compete and are forced to shut down and along with a shop you lose a friend.
@kaliyha (591)
• Philippines
10 Dec 08
Ahhh.. the sweet smell of free market. When things like these happen, I think that the winner are the consumers since the more competition there is, the more the prices of the products will go down.