does it matter where my retainer is stationed? like which city?

[Jojoya]

In otherwords, fk new players.

New players are the ones least affected by the buyer's tax. They were the ones most likely not to know how it worked and so were not taking advantage of it assuming they even had the gil to buy from the MB in the first place (most don't).

The players getting hit the hardest are the wealthiest players who were teleporting around to avoid the buyer's tax on their big purchases. And that's who SE needed to be targeting if the point of the buyer's tax is to have a gil sink to get some of the excess currency out of the economy. A new player might be paying a couple of thousand gil in tax. The wealthy players pay hundreds of thousands.