For decades we could approach the cash desk and hope secretly the clerk would make a mistake and charge us the US price shown on the object we were buying , instead of the Canadian price. I don’t recall it ever happening, but I never gave up hoping.
For the past year, as the Canadian dollar rose in value against the US dollar, those old hopes were exposed not only in myself, but in hundreds of thousands of Canadians who knew with certainty the difference between the two prices was not justifiable, except when there was old stock they had purchased at the old price. We waited. The months went by. Politicians actually suggested prices should drop. When they didn’t, Canadians flocked to the USA to purchase goods at substantially lower prices. Even with transportation and accomodation costs worked in, they still saved significant amounts of money, plus got a free vacation.
Be patient we were told; prices are coming down. Wal-mart even abandoned some manufacturers who refused to allow US pricing in Canada. The battle lines were being drawn.
So, now that old stock is gone and the dollar remains basically at par, can we buy at US prices? You bet your last penny we can’t!
This sounds to me a lot like the big savings we were to realize when the government reduced the GST, which many retailers never passed on to anyone. Another 1% profit for themselves on top of the previous 1%.
Retailers have done the math. How much more can they charge consumers before they will actually go to the USA to shop in significant enough numbers to matter? When they do shop in the USA, will they shop in the US version of the Canadian store (called keeping the money in the family)?
So Canadian pricing, which might have been justified once by the actual difference in the dollars, is now justified by the new economic model: all the market will bear.