A confused customer unwittingly lead me to a discovery about Amazon.co.uk a couple of days ago.
She was an American lady that now lives in the UK who had enquired in the past about the possibility of our cinema doing a screening of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. She had been told that there wasn’t a print available of the movie in this country.
She obviously got hold of the wrong end of the stick and thought this to mean that the movie was unavailable in any format in the UK and so asked a relative in the US to send a DVD copy of it from there.
She proudly presented me with said DVD and explained the whole saga of the events to me. Unfortunately it isn’t as simple to show a DVD as she thought and I had to tell her that it wouldn’t be possible. Firstly there is the compatibility issue we would have to find a player that could project a region 1 DVD then in order to screen it to the public we would have to sort out the rights for a public screening with the film distributor. We could have done a private screening for her but that would have meant she would have had to hire the screen which would have been very expensive.
Anyway her claims that there was no copy of the movie in this country piqued my curiosity; surely she was mistaken so I searched for it at Amazon. I did of course find it and at a very reasonable price of £7.97 on DVD.
I also noted that it was available from Amazon Jersey at the lower price of £5.63 (plus £1.24 for delivery).
Amazon Jersey!
I didn’t know there was an Amazon Jersey. Apparently Amazon has decided to exploit a loophole that allows purchases of less than £18 to be imported to the UK without having to pay duty on them. As Jersey does not currently impose VAT, small value items can be thus be purchased for a lower price from Amazon Jersey.
Tags: cinema
