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by ge96 1552 days ago
Aren't they marked up if they know you're a foreigner.
2 comments

I used to have this mindset... but then I realised that even if they charge e.g. $25 to a local and $50 to me, I'm not personally worse off.

There is little benefit to me in bargaining my way down to $25 - yeah they might think they've conned me, but (as long as it's not factory made junk) I'm happy to pay $50 for something that I like, even if I could negotiate it down to $25. The $25 saved simply doesn't mean that much to me in the grand scheme of things, but most likely does to them.

If you don’t negotiate when negotiating is the norm, seems like you might find yourself surrounded by venders pretty quickly
I have to buy many online goods in USD with my devalued currency. Isn’t that the same?
Not really. With these souvenir shops etc they have a baseline price X for locals and then a price Y for tourists where the price Y is deliberately higher.

In the case of online goods they have a price X in USD because that is the currency the seller has / uses. They sell it to everyone at that price, they don't upcharge people who have to convert currencies.

Now, it is very well possible that those people will have to pay quite a lot for it, but that's because they buy from a seller based in a region that's financially better off and as such has higher prices in general, not because the seller tries to get as much as possible out of them.

They sell it to USD to everyone, but price discrimination is real and people absolutely pay widely different amounts for the same physical (and digital) products online all the time. Purchaser's country can definitely be taken into account.