Costco recently opened a store in Iceland, and its prices were well below the competition with massive crowds of eager customers. A consensus from many Icelanders is that Costco’s success and low prices confirmed suspicions of widespread price fixing and collusion going back decades. For background see:
The video shows a darkly amusing take on bitter criticism of the lack of competition that existed before Costco’s arrival:
Caution: Video may be offensive to Icelandic price-fixers.
For context, consider that Iceland has sent more bankers to prison than the US or UK:
Do you think there is a connection between their aggressive prosecution of bankers for crimes related to the banking collapse and their love for Costco?
Its a novelty thing, I doubt this will change anything in the daily lives of the majority of the population.
Considering the high cost of everything and the confiscatory income tax rate, I’m sure the people
are taking advantage ot Costco to save a little money.
Do they pay property taxes as well?
Yep.
46.3% Income tax + VAT+ Property Taxes
Iceland isn’t a poor country they have one of the highest standard of living.
their social program are insanely well manged.
And well financed by the masses.
and they are rewarded for it the massive success of their manufacturing industry alone has paid for it, they have an unemployment rate of 2%, their national debt has decreased for 6 years in a row, GDP growth of over 3%.
Iceland is diamond.
countries like Iceland, Norway, etc are examples of well manged government spending can do.
watching Iceland bounce back after the 2008 banking crisis has been magical and its mostly due to how smart their government was with investing.
This isn’t a new story really, Costco’s been there for a while as this 2017 story shows:
I’m not convinced it’s good for Iceland, as local mom and pop stores go out of business and money flows out of their economy to some anonymous corporate HQ. Maybe they can have a local gig economy soon…
When walmart opened up in Germany, they couldn’t compete but it was mostly because workers there have real union protection under law and don’t have to put up with WMT’s union busting nonsense it has done all over the world, mostly by closing entire stores on a false premise once it whiffed a hint of unionizing in the air. WMT packed up it’s bags from that and went home. And yet Germany still is home to many discount retailers.
If Iceland was smart, it would fight against it’s local economy getting wrecked by Costco and its ilk, the exchange of a few cheap doo-dads and roast chickens ain’t worth it.
Costco’s wages actually exceed those of unionized workers in Iceland:
A reason why Costco is wildly popular in Iceland is that its low prices exposed the corruption and inefficiency of the distribution system that existed in Iceland while paying its workers very well.
Shouldn’t be that hard when you have a single culture, mostly caucasian country whose entire population is the equivalent of Aurora CO.
