One of the best travel books ever written (indeed, one of my favorite books, period, ever) is The Surprise of Cremona by Edith Templeton. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find: your best bet is to track down the 2003 Pallas Athene paperback with an introduction by Anita Brookner.

If you go to the Amazon page for that book, you’ll find there are “7 new” copies for sale. The cheapest is $20; the most expensive is $166.18. Woody’s Books, for instance, is selling the book for $27.50 — plus a $125.79 “sourcing fee”, plus $3.99 shipping from New Jersey — $157.28 in all.

On the other hand, if you check the book out on Amazon.co.uk, you’ll find “6 new” copies for sale, including Woody’s UK, which will sell you the book for £12.99, plus a sourcing fee of just £0.01. Shipping, to the US, is £3.08, for a total of £16.08, or about $26.51 in dollars — less than the sticker price on the US book before the massive sourcing fee. And yes, the book is still shipped from New Jersey.

In other words, the same book, from the same US-based seller, being shipped to the same US address, costs either $26.51 if you buy it on Amazon.co.uk, or $157.28 — pretty much six times as much — if you buy it on Amazon.com. There might be a good reason why Woody’s is doing this. But I don’t think it reflects particularly well on Amazon.

Hamilton Nolan is snarking gleefully over the fact that Thomas Kinkade, whom he calls “Painter of Darkness”, has lost a round of the endless litigation he’s been involved in for years now, ever since he took his company private in 2004. Now I’m no fan of Kinkade. But the plaintiffs in this case are trying to make a pretty astonishing case: that they’re owed damages on the grounds that Kinkade talked a lot about God, and thereby fraudulently persuaded them to place their trust in him.

This argument doesn’t really hold water, and in fact Kinkade has — justly — won the vast majority of the lawsuits which have been brought against him. I wrote about this case at some length back in March 2006, so I might as well just plagiarize myself here: Kinkade is more of a bad businessman than an evil one.

Kinkade took his business public in 1994, with a $110 million IPO. Between 1997 and 2005, according to Kim Christensen of the LA Times, he earned more than $50 million in royalties. And at the end of Jauary 2004, just over 9 years after going public, Kinkade bought back his company for $32.7 million – a price about $14 million higher than the company’s market capitalisation at the time. People who bought Media Arts Group at $20 per share, of course, weren’t particularly thankful that Kinkade paid them $4 rather than $2.30 for their stock. But the fact is that Kinkade was more optimistic about the outlook for his company than the markets were.

The people who ran Kinkade stores are upset at him, because he acted a bit like Chrysler towards dealers it ended up closing: Kinkade forced the dealers to buy expensive inventory which simply didn’t sell, and refused to accept returns unless they were accompanied by orders for three times as much art as was being returned.  Obviously, it was hard for the shops to make money in such circumstances. But I get the feeling they’re missing the forest for the trees: they weren’t losing money because of the decisions being made by Kinkade’s company, so much as they were losing money because they’d hitched their wagon to a company which was in a tailspin.

Obviously, they have every right to try to sue. But it’s pretty hard to make the case that one should expect better behavior from Christians than from non-Christians. And any company, once it starts failing, is going to result in people losing money. It’s also worth pointing out that virtually everyone who entered the Kinkade industry did so out of greed – not just Kinkade himself.

The store owners saw a booming market, and then lost money when the market stopped booming and the internet made secondary-market values of Kinkade’s work much more transparent. Suddenly, the enormous growth in past Kinkade sales was no longer a good thing: there were a lot of Kinkades to go around, and many of the buyers were people who bought on the assumption that their paintings would increase in value and they could make money on their investment. Up until the arrival of the internet, that worked for Kinkade, whose company set the prices for all his paintings and would raise them steadily. After the arrival of the internet, a whole industry arose buying and selling Kinkades at market-set, rather than Kinkade-set, prices. And that was the end of the success days for the company: without monopoly pricing power, Kinkade was nothing.

The stores failed, ultimately, not because Kinkade treated them badly, and not because other stores were undercutting them. The stores failed because Kinkades are a commodity, and anybody wanting to buy one could get a second-hand Kinkade online at a much lower price than that charged at retail. Buyers no longer believed that their paintings would increase in value, so they bought fewer than they used to. And when they did buy, they were likely to buy already-existing Kinkades rather than new ones.

As a general rule, no retailer has ever consistently been able to make money by selling the proposition that his goods are going to increase in value after they’re bought. Kinkade managed it for a few years, but then, inevitably, the bubble burst. And when bubbles burst, people get hurt. It’s not the fault of Thomas Kinkade, it’s simple market dynamics.

Alex Tabarrok wonders why no stores stock cheap (as opposed to expensive) HDMI cables, and Kevin Drum — who used to manage a Radio Shack — recounts his own tale of looking for a simple patch cable:

Last year I made the rounds of every retail store in the area after I got annoyed at the price of a simple Cat-5 network cable, and there wasn’t a single place that sold them for a reasonable price. Not one. It was almost like there was a cartel or something. (And the cartel worked! I didn’t feel like waiting the few days it would take to order online, so I went ahead and bought an expensive one. Their fiendish strategy turned out to be remarkably effective.)

I think there are two very simple explanations of what’s going on here. Kevin hints at the first: if you need an HDMI cable or an ethernet cable or a USB cable, you generally want it now, and you don’t want to faff around with ordering it on the internet and wondering when it might arrive. (Note that Alex’s example of HDMI cables being sold for “virtually nothing” turns out to be one of those examples where next-day shipping — still decidedly less convenient than just walking home with the cable in your bag — costs $30.)

But more to the point, your local retail outlet will quite rationally try to maximize the profit it makes on its HDMI cables. Alex I think is wrong here:

Ordinarily, we would expect competition to push prices down but in this case it seem as if the mere existence of Monster is anchoring high prices everywhere but online.

I think what we’re seeing here has almost nothing to do with anchored expectations. Instead, consider this: most remotely educated consumers will simply buy the cheapest cable on sale, and so there’s a very strong incentive to ensure that item is as expensive as possible.

Why would we expect competition to push prices down? Well, let’s say you’re managing a Radio Shack down the street from a Best Buy. You could, if you were so inclined, start selling HDMI cables at a fraction of the cost of the cheapest cables available at Best Buy. Would that be a good idea? Well, it would get you the business of the kind of people who shop around different stores for the cheapest HDMI cable, and it would improve your reputation as a store which doesn’t needlessly rip people off. On the other hand, people would pretty much stop buying expensive cable from you overnight, and all the associated profits would simply evaporate.

I’ve recently been shopping around for a folding bike — one which (fingers crossed) the security guards at 3 Times Square will let me bring in to the office. There’s a sweet little folding-bike shop in my neighborhood, stocking a pretty wide range of different brands, although they do tend to push Bromptons over everything else. And they don’t stock the cheapest brands. Could it be that the cheaper bikes are simply not very good? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just that if their customers have the option of buying a cheap folding bike for a few hundred bucks, they’ll be much less inclined to drop $1,000 on something else, and the store’s total profits will go down.

I suspect you’ll see the same thing at say kitchen stores: while there might be a big range of pots or knives, most shops selling the high-end stuff will be reluctant to stock very cheap stuff alongside it. Doing so just makes it far too easy for the consumer to decide that the extra cost isn’t worth it.