I was recently at Gatwick Airport looking at the duty free electronics
in Dixons Travel. I was just window shopping, killing time before
my flight. I was looking at the memory cards and noticed some rather
odd pricing. I recently bought a SanDisk SDHC Class 4 32GB SD Card
from Amazon
from here.
The cost of the card was £12.80. Whilst I was in Dixons Travel I
scanned over the memory cards and really couldn't believe what I was
seeing. Below is a table of what I found:
NB. the 64GB CF card linked on Amazon is only a UDMA 6 rather than a
UDMA 7 which was at the airport.
Dixons Travel @ Gatwick Airport
Dixons Travel @ Gatwick Airport
Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam
As you can see the markup starts off at just under 500% for a 16GB card.
The price hike does reduce to about 200% for the most expensive cards,
but I would have liked to see a few of the lower end cards (4GB and 2GB)
to really see where the percentage markup would get to. I just think
it's sad that people who don't understand these things will likely pay
the airport prices not realising how big the markup is. In short, the so
called "duty free" at airports is a complete rip off for memory cards.