Price Fixing

British Airways got hit with a very hefty fine last week. It was for colluding with another airline to add on exactly the same fuel surcharges . Virgin Atlantic was equally guilty but so far as I can tell they got away with paying nothing because they reported the offence. Things don't work that way here, if you are equally culpable of a crime then admitting it provides mitigation and can reduce the sentence, it does not eliminate it. If individual criminal justice worked like that, imagine what you could get get away with …

Yesterday I went to PC World and bought a printer for the business. £29.99. Perfectly reasonable. Looking around any shop or site these days, that's a fairly normal price for a mass-produced shoebox-sized block of shaped plastic and metal with a few electric motors, transistors, integrated circuits, some consumables and a small book of documentation. The costs of production, transport and marketing must be fairly close to that. So I don't bother hunting around online to save a few percent.

At the checkout, the cashier told me that I also needed to buy a cable to connect it to the PC. The cable probably has less than a thousandth of the materials and complexity of the printer. They said the only cable available was £14.99. Eventually, when I had finally stopped laughing, I walked next door to Currys Electrical. You can guess the price there.