Cross-border shopping (a sort of travel)
“OTTAWA – The federal government needs to launch a comprehensive review of its tariff policy to help bridge a yawning price gap between Canadian and American retail prices, a Senate committee said Wednesday.” Senators call for less tariffs to help close the Canada-U.S. price gap
However, I don’t get the following: “The senators said some of the fault lies with shoppers. Canadians are not price-savvy enough, and don’t bargain enough,”
How can you bargain? A price is a price, you don’t go to the bookstore and say, “I am not paying the CAD price, I am paying the USD price!” As far as I know the books are the only product where both prices in CAD and USD are displayed so it is easy to compare.
As a matter of fact when we were in the States my wife always tried to buy clothes and shoes – that we heard should have been cheaper – but she could not find anything, that was worth buying as she said she could have bought cheaper back home. The truth is that she mostly buys what’s on sale.
However, we did not go to the famous outlets where again we heard the prices are very good. With regard to outlets, I found this comment on internet, don’t know how accurate it is: “What I notice is that ppl mistakenly believe that if they buy something in an outlet store in the US it is the same quality as the original product in the higher priced stores. Nope, this is not the case. Most often, the designers come out with an inferior knock off for the outlet stores, which is just cheap garbage. The reason that the masses don’t know the difference is that they are not high end shoppers to begin with. They compare outlet quality to Walmart #$%$, so they don’t really know that they are buying garbage or that they did not get a good deal on it at all”
I still remember once we came back from the States and at the border they asked us what we bought: “Nothing”, we said. It seemed so suspicious not to have bought anything that they searched our baggage.
So basically you have to know the prices at home. A 1-1 exchange rate and higher Canadian sales taxes would generally mean US shopping should be cheaper for Canadians (it certainly is for Europeans)
Outlets in NY isnt cheap and usually the clothes in outlers are passed fashion.
Some items like books are protected, because of the fear that the Canadian publishing industry (totally subsidized anyways) would die. Same with clothing, manufacturing, auto sales, and pretty much everything else. You can’t compete with a market 10x bigger than yours. Not a big surprise. Same with airline prices…AC would have a heck of atime if there was real price competition here. Now if there were real cross border free trade without any protectionism on either side, I bet Canadian companies would do great!