Amex will be offering a 42″ Panasonic HD Plasma for $700 on Nov 30 via their popular MyWishlist website. More details at,

http://snipurl.com/1uc98

Believe you must have a US issued Amex to qualify for the purchases. If your card is issued in Canada, it may be worth to chase down some friends or a relative in the States.

Ed

Those are fair criticisms. Specifically, the things I have a beef with are:

1. Lower prices would ruin the Canadian used car market. Well, yes, they might devalue a lot of vehicles. But one could argue that the vehicles are already overvalued. You know who would be harmed most by a devalued used car market? The auto manufacturers — it’s their leasing companies who have the residual value of those leases on their books as an asset… that’s suddenly not worth what it used to be.
2. The cost of doing business in Canada is higher. I think this is a smokescreen. Every dealer will negotiate from the sticker price to the invoice price. So the cost of doing business at the dealership level is the irrelevant. The cars themselves are produced all over North America, and trucked all over North America. The invoice price for the same car should be the same anywhere in North America. But it’s not. Why?
3. Taxes are higher in Canada. Corporate taxes are actually not, but we may have other taxes built in. Granted. Break out a line item on the invoice to show the taxes and I’ll be satisfied.

Cheers, A

The Globe-and-mail-not-so-hidden-agenda aside, you don’t actually debate their reasons why things cost more in Canada than other countries, and just rely on rhetoric to make your point - which is a shame. Which of their points is wrong? You seem to imply they’re wrong.

Here is a point that gets lost in all these Exchange-rate discussions — people are “victims” of price descrimination locally too. A 500ml bottle of Coke costs about $0.31 at Costco. It costs $0.42 at Lowblas. It costs $1.11 at Macs. It costs $1.89 at Esso. It costs $2.50 at ScotiaBank place and I catered a meeting last week where the same half-liter was $4 (actually it was a Can, but I digress).

We focus on the tangible part of a sale too much. Your assessment of “uplift” is misleading. The fact is the cost of an item is impacted by hundreds of variables - risk, value capture (which is what I think you meant by uplift), micro / mini supply demand curves, cost of available alternatives, local cost of doing business, etc.

So maybe we pay more for a car, and maybe you should invest a day or two and pick one up in the USA and blog about it, but there are lots of places where things here are WAY cheaper than the USA — like perscription drugs and home/car/life insurance to name two. Which begs the question — WHY are our Drug/Insurance costs so much cheaper than the USA? (if you answer that, you’ll get a start on the converse too) :)

- Don

If memory serves me correctly, Pioneer Canada for example would not honor warranty work on units purchased in the US and stated that the unit would need to be shipped States-side to be eligible. This was last year when I looked at their Plasma units so things may have changed but it is something to keep in mind especially as manufacturers are grappling with methods to mitigate the cross-border shopping.

One thing is for sure though… We are raked over the coals compared to our friends in the US and manufacturers are pretty bad at coming up with proper excuses for the vast difference in price.