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Re:Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes (2013) by pavlov on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @07:35PM (#12553213)
A simple camera charger that costs $5 or 10 in the US costs €70 to 100 in Finland, due to "luxury" taxes.

Nonsense.

Also, store opening times are nowadays unregulated in Finland.

Re:Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes (2013) by maus42 on Thursday September 22, 2016 @12:06AM (#12554255)
>Also, store opening times are nowadays unregulated in Finland.

Well, that was a very recent change. But I don't know if that's very representative of Nordics in general, I know that shopping hours have been deregulated in Sweden for a quite long time.

Re:Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes (2013) by pjlegato on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @08:11PM (#12553347)
It's true.

Source: I went to Helsinki and forgot my camera charger. That's what they told me in the shop when I expressed shock that they wanted over €100 for a simple charger.

Re:Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes (2013) by PhasmaFelis on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @08:52PM (#12553503)
That sounds like a clerk who's really not interested in having a long chat about corporate pricing policies with a tourist right now.
Re:Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes (2013) by orly_bookz on Thursday September 22, 2016 @01:51PM (#12558681)
Or a clerk who made fifty bucks or more off of a gullible tourist...
Re:Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes (2013) by maus42 on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @11:56PM (#12554215)
Majority of the so called "luxury taxes" (that were really named so) existed maybe one or two hundred years ago, mainly targeted then-existing aristocracy, but most of such special taxes are long gone. (Maybe the after-effects are still showing up in weird places, like your clerk's imagination...) One gem was the literal "tax on fun" (which applied to cinema shows and dance halls), but that was discontinued in the 1950s. I guess only "luxury taxes" that we have now are quite "normal" by Western standards, like sales taxes on confectionery and alcohol and cars.

More recently, a couple of generations ago there might have been import tariffs on consumer electronics...?

I can't think any other tax on the product itself than the regular 24% value added tax. (Of course, the indirect ones, like income tax paid by employees, tax on corporate profit, etc probably show in the final price.)

Foodstuffs do have lower VAT rate (around 10%), so maybe the clerk was thinking about that, but that difference doesn't explain a 5€ -> 100€ hike. Maybe you just managed to wander to the most expensive retail store in the downtown and had an unusual camera model...

Finland is expensive place, but most of that caused by more mundane reasons than special "luxury tax", like indirect taxes, regulation, and shipping costs raising the general price levels.

Re:Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes (2013) by vertex-four on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @08:47PM (#12553483)
I can promise you that there are not ~$100 in taxes on a $5 item, "luxury" or not. There's something else at play there.
Re:Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes (2013) by infinite8s on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @10:18PM (#12553865)
That sounds like you got the 'tourist' discount.
Re:Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes (2013) by Sharlin on Thursday September 22, 2016 @03:50AM (#12555230)
If anything, it's called "manufacturer brand tax". It's pretty much the same everywhere. You can get cheap knock-offs in Finland too...