Let me begin by saying that I am not an economist and the rabbit hole goes much deeper than I’ve managed to crawl myself into regarding the following, and this thesis is open for discussion in and out of my chunk of the internet. Having said that, I was having lunch writing down facts to put in the Jean Caca page (he’s The Source of Manhood… in Man) and around 30 yards from where I was in the mall’s food court I could see a video game store, next to a Converse shoe store and some department store thrown in the corner. It was around 2PM on a Wednesday, so the influx of clientele wasn’t massive by any means. Pondering on the sight before my eyes, I came to the realization that yes, I have in fact bought something in all three stores, and in two out of three cases I felt I was being raped as a consumer by how ridiculously overpriced the items I purchased were (the department store was saved from my overpricing guillotine). At first I thought the overpricing was because they’re specialty stores, focused on their particular niches (video games and Chuck Taylor’s, respectively), but then I remembered that the items I purchased or wanted to buy from said stores could be gotten cheaper in a sweet Candy Land I like to call “The Internet.” This epiphany saved me from paying $50 for a new pair of Chuck Taylor’s, something that to this day makes my blood boil because it represents everything that’s wrong with consumerism, but it did not save me when I was caught on the hype of Halo 3. You can’t bat .500 all the time and the game is very fun, but knowing I could’ve bought the game for $20 less on Amazon doesn’t exactly keep me warm at night. Recently, doors to internet commerce have opened up that drive my thesis even further home (at first it was on the porch, but now it’s made its way into the kitchen), one that I will share with you today.

The premise is simple, and even though you might or might not be able to connect with the analogy I use to illustrate my point, hopefully I’ll make you see the underlying principle of it. So, I brought back the gamer in me back from the dead, and we’re both happy about it. Problem is that being a gamer in this day and age is expensive as all hell. Every game is $60 and up, controllers are $40, and in order to juice out a video game console’s full potential you have to buy a bunch of little gadgets, nuts and bolts in order to really feel like you’re in the cutting edge of technology. Well, even if you have been told otherwise, I don’t shit cocaine bricks that I then sell for $2,000 per white, powdery turd. I write my witty fingers off and earn my keep, the one that keeps this boat rockin’. Now, because all work and no play is an act punishable by death in the House of Rob, there must always be a distraction and said distraction, at the moment, is video games. But alas, we return to the conundrum for the ages: it’s all too expensive. Now, imagine yourself as a Panamanian gamer that’s in college, working a regular job that gets you buy and have passive knowledge of how the Internet works. You save up, sacrificing yourself for that hulk of pixel goodness brought to you by Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony (whichever you prefer) and when you finally have the money to spend on the console and a game, you play it until you beat it. So, what now? Onto another game. But how, if every game is worth $80-$90 in Panama?

Since Panama is the land of the “Juega Vivo” and will forever be known for it, what a lot of people do is they hack into their consoles and place all-region chips so that they can play pirated games. It voids the warranty, but sending off the console from Panama to the manufacturer in the United States if the console check out in a firey blaze is cost-productive anyway. The sacrifice for doing that though, is getting banned from each console’s online playing community… FOR LIFE. Being that online play is one of the better aspects of the VG deal, the average gamer is up shit creek without a paddle. This very predicament was one that yours truly was presented by right after beating his first game. What to do, then? Even in Amazon, $60 bucks for a new game seems a bit pricey.

Enter PayPal.

PayPal recently opened its digital doors to accept Panamanian users, rolling out the myriad of features that make the service great one drip at a time. Now, having PayPal allowed me to forego Step 2 of my consumer nirvana: eBay. Within the first 3 weeks of using eBay, my game library expanded to 5 games, the eBay games in mint condition. The combined value of the 3 games from 3 different sellers add up to the grand total of $87.03, shipping included. Now compare this to the $84.50 I ponied up for Halo 3: Poor Man’s Edition. Something is amiss!

As Panama steadily becomes the darling of both tourists and businessmen alike, my country has been adding services in order to bypass the shoots and ladders US commerce has placed upon us. In my particular case, I don’t buy a thing off retail stores… I buy everything online. I can state several reasons why that is a monumentally bad idea, prime among them being that I’m the poster boy for consumerism, but the benefit here is that I can get exactly what I want, cheaper. This is particularly so when it comes to electronics: ask any person living in Latin America how much an iPod will ring them and they’ll tell you that you’re better off buying one in the US, if you get a chance to go sometime.

What I’m trying to get to here is that, and I’m sure of this, the Internet will eventually phase out retail in Panama (not to mention the world), just like DVD phased out the VHS. Yes, this is a no-brainer for a lot of you out there on the Internet, but that’s because the Internet, believe it or not, is still a niche market. The latest surveys say that around 17-21% of the world’s population uses the Internet on a daily basis, and even though that percentage is growing steadily over the passage of time, there’s still a lot of people in that demographic that don’t even understand the world wide web that well. They have no idea of its full potential, and since most people fear what they don’t understand, they stick to what they know. What they know is celebrity gossip sites, YouTube, e-mail and Facebook. In regards to the Panamanian number of that demographic, it’s a pretty big one considering we’re a couple of years behind in the technology bandwagon: I look at Panama’s network page on Facebook and am amazed that it registers more than 28,000 people, and that’s without counting the other thousands that are subscribed in college networks and the like. Even though the numbers are remarkable, I still get asked where I get my wonderful toys all the time, and every other month I instruct some poor sir or madam on how to shop online because they have been presented with the huge array of possibilities online stores offer to the consumer.

The more people wise up, the less sales retail stores will ring up. Aside from the fact that half of the stores I see in these malls are empty more often than not (and I could provide a thesis for why they’re still in business regardless as hell. Here’s a hint: money laundering) and aside from supermarkets and department stores, I really don’t see specialized business venture doing anything else that’s not going the way of the Dodo. Of course, there is much to consider and the intricacies of Panamanian commerce are much more complex than the picture I’m painting for you now, but Panama still has some road to travel before it can truly call itself First World. We’re certainly on our way up, though.

People will always like the notion of trying before buying. This is especially true when it comes to clothes; I buy all of my shirts online, but everything else is bought here at department stores, because they’re dirt cheap and I can try them on beforehand. In a lot of cases you get what you pay for, but I’m not going to go mountain climbing to fight dingos wearing my $4.99 denim jeans. The knockoff market is huge here, and unless you’re a fashionista (we have them too, and even when Panama is not 3 million people full they still manage to come across as complete douchebags) nobody will bat an eye if your jeans are real or not. Again, the “juega vivo” factor comes into play. The overall sentiment is that “we’re all on the same boat and I’ll be a damn fool if I pay more than $15 for a decent pair of pants when I know I can get them for a third of the price somewhere else.” This principle, my friends, is the exact one I apply in terms of online shopping and that’s why I believe that eventually everyone will jump on the digital bandwagon of commerce… once everyone knows how to work with the system, that is.

Getting stuff faster, better and cheaper. It’s the Panamanian way. It’s also why our traffic system is screwed, drug lords love to use our tax haven sensibilities to store their goods/money, why being a politician is so blatantly lucrative as it is corrupt, why people hack into their game consoles to play games for free, why knock-off products are sold as novelty and no one cares, why pirated movies, music and porn is sold on the street and nobody denounces the sellers, why our beaches are slowly being sold off to multinational companies that have a morbid fascination with resorts, and, ironically, it’s also why there is a company that allows me to comply with said Panamanian way to a T. This is the part of my thesis where I state that the Internet and Panamanians have a lot more in common than I thought.

With the Panama-United States free trade deal all but a given, I’m curious to know if it’ll affect fees in terms of shipping to-and-from Panama. It’s a toss-up, but I imagine I would want to slip something of the sort into the negotiations if my country and yours will be exchanging goods on a regular basis. As our quest for getting and accomplishing faster, better and cheaper becomes increasingly easier thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I imagine that the online-saavy Panamanian (like me! Hi, mom!) will find it irresistible to migrate and leave retail behind. The prospect of having more than 28,000 buying their stuff online though, a lot of them the same people that go to malls and consume there, could bring the economy to a choke-inducing collapse. Of course, it might take us a number of years at the least to be up with the times, considering that Cable & Wireless, our de facto telephone/internet provider despite the “free market” facade they’ve set up for themselves, sells their high bandwidth internet for a ludicrous price. In fact, Panama has the highest internet connection fees in the region, and we’re supposed to be the Mack Daddy of every country in the continent that speaks Spanish (I’m still on the fence about Mexico). There’s so much injustice coming at the regular Joe from all angles that it’s easy to develop a Tom Joad complex… but that’s a fight for another day.

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