Yesterday saw the grand opening of Westfield, the largest indoor shopping centre in Europe. Now normally I wouldn’t be overly gushy about the birth of such a retail behemoth, containing, as it does, more mobile phone shops than your average Daily Mail subber has brain cells, but this one happens to be right on my doorstep. If I were to look out my office window (presuming I had an office window, which I don’t) my very breath would be snatched from my lungs by Westfield’s majestic potential to suck the pound coins from my pocket. But don’t just take my word for it, gaze upon the wonder yourself:

My gusset is damper than a Monet lillipad at the moment and my wife is spraying my Visa card with SmartWater and inserting it into an Albanian drugs mule with two splayed rubber-clad fingers as we speak. The only Richard Widmark on this otherwise spotless panty of a purchasing palace is the presence of an Apple Store…

Don’t get me wrong, I own an iPhone and adore it. The Apple Store’s touchy-feely approach to product display is admirable in many ways, and far be it from me to suggest that the self-proclaimed ‘Geniuses’ who staff their ‘Genius Bar’ are in any way just a bunch of hippy-drippy slacker-cracker Haight-Ashbury mutations of Butlin’s Redcoat BS merchants. Once again,  I’ll let you be the judge:

No. My issue with the Apple Store lies in the West Coast smugness with which it extorts spondoodles of cash from it’s iObsessed clientele, and it is extortion, don’t doubt it. Check out the price of a pair of Shure SE530 In-Ear headphones - RRP in every online retailer you can find, around £220. Apple Store price: £330. A third more expensive? Why thank you, Mr Jobs. Even a relatively inexpensive accessory – the iPod radio remote, for example - will cost you at least a fiver more in-store, and there is no excuse for that, other than to take advantage of the poor technothrawled saps who will slash open their wallets anytime Apple dangles a shiny touch-enabled device in their gawping faces.

I’m not asking for much. I’m not asking you to disavow all things ‘i’. I am merely recommending that you remember the credit crunch and refuse to buy your polished ivory powerbooks replete with babyskin trim direct from their creators. If you still choose to needlessly massage their already obscene profit margins then I can only assume your name is Croesus. Either that or Roundcat.