Sho Fukamachi Online

Mackie, I love you but why are your prices in Australia so unbelievably high?

Check this out. I’d love to pick up a pair of your new MR5s for my home setup (I already have some HR824s, and they’re awesome). So I look at the prices.

USD $150 each at sweetwater
AUD $400 each at online stores here

A current currency conversion: 150 U.S. dollars = 163.51 Australian dollars.

Don’t bother pulling out your calculators, that’s a 245% increase AFTER currency conversion. Someone is making a killing here, and it’s your brand that looks like an absolute rip-off. And don’t say it’s shipping, they’re made in China and Australia is *closer*.

I know the Australian distribution is probably not really your #1 concern but please can someone at least take a look at it? These guys are making off like bandits. I don’t mind paying a little more since we’re a smallish market, but how could anyone pay that much more? Two and a half times as much is insane. If you wonder why you don’t have any customers here, now you know - your local distribution partners are ripping you off blind, and as for the customers - we all know how to find US prices, and we all know the AUD is practically equal to the USD.

Would *you* pay a 245% premium, no matter how much you like Mackie?

Well, anyway, thanks and I just wanted to get this off my chest. Great work on all the products as usual, I love them. Just please fix the pricing situation in Australia : (

thanks a lot!

Sho

I have a pair of the fantastic Mackie HR824 MKI monitor speakers. They’re great, easily the best midprice monitor speaker on the market, in my opinion.

So naturally I was interested when the MKII was announced, especially since my MKIs are sitting thousands of kilometres away! And with the AUD pretty strong against the greenback, surely the price would be reasonable, right?

WRONG!

Price in America: USD$599 = AUD$625.23 each = AUD$1,350.46 for a pair.

Price in Australia: AUD$2,999 for a pair.

The speakers are identical save the localised power cable. Voltage is switchable on the back. The Australian price is 220% of the American for the exact same fucking thing.

Fuck you, Australian distributors. The only way I’d pay you more than double the proper market price for a pair of these is if it included a free kick right in your useless, greedy faces.

UPDATE: annoyingly, on the mk2 the voltage is NOT switchable on the back, locking us into the Euro or AU model. I don’t know any good EU online stores but the list price is EUR€599, about AUD$995 each. I wonder what they cost in China - where all this stuff is made.

Anyway, the price difference with the US model would easily cover a huge stepdown transformer.

It infuriates me that these power compatibility issues even exist! It all just gets turned into DC internally anyway. Why isn’t there a range of standard interchangeable transformer modules on all electronics? Then they could just make the same thing a million times, and slot the module in as required. Methinks the savings gained by doing that would be outweighed by the arbitrage-style profits lost by being able to segment the markets, DVD Region style.