the corner office

Well, scrap everything I said yesterday. I went to Armstrongs today, and managed to get 6 out of the 9 books I needed, most at between half and a third of the prices at other booksellers. One of the books was a bit more expensive than Exclusives, so they dropped their own price to beat it, no questions asked. The tannie behind the counter was actually a bit shocked when I showed her my little price comparison spreadsheet. I could see her thinking "jeez, we could be cleaning up like everyone else!"

I have to go back to collect one other book which they have on order for me, and the remaining two aren't stocked by Armstrongs, so they'll have to come from one of the online retailers. Somewhat grudgingly, now.

I also popped into the post office this morning. The branch manager said they don't do the calculations themselves, but that she'd noticed that most people have to pay R25 (not sure how true that is). She gave me a number to phone, and after a couple of calls (don't mess with civil servants' tea breaks), I eventually spoke to a helpful bloke in the Customs department at the Joburg mail clearing centre (or some strange place), who says that books, CDs and DVDs are taxed as follows: a 10% ad valorem is added to the Rand-converted price to get to a customs value, and then they add 14% VAT to that. So in effect, if you order from Amazon et al and Customs get hold of your parcel, you'll end up giving another 25.4% of the Rand value to the government. Bastards.

The helpful bloke very pointedly and repeatedly mentioned that the ad valorem is to "protek ve local ekonomie." I didn't really want to enter into a debate about how exactly importing textbooks with no local equivalent into a country with a serious brain-drain problem was harming the local economy, but anyway. I think I can safely say this bloke was the first civil servant I've ever spoken to who ended off the call by cheerfully encouraging me to please give him a call whenever I had more questions. Bless him.