Can anyone explain why there is such a discrepancy between the US and Canada for the price of DVD's and Blu-ray Discs?

With the two currencies virtually at par, I can't understand why this takes place other than the sellers simply can get away with it.

If you check the prices at amazon.com and amazon.ca, you will see there is usually a significant price difference. Even when one pays sales tax, if you have a larger order it tends to be cheaper to buy from the US.

There are few labeling differences between the discs in question, often suppliers do not even send out a bilingual cover for the disc and the Canadian rating code is on the cover for the US version.

So what is it? Simple greed or is there a good reason for the discrepancy?

Hmmm...maybe we could meet at the border and trade DVDs and BDs for some cheap pharmaceuticals! 

Is it a holdover from when the US dollar was worth more than the Canadian? The same applies to book.  I'm looking at a Grisham hardcover that is $27.95 US and $33.00 Canadian.

Oh good grief. I was going to stay out of this but why are companies not allowed to make a profit. As someone who spent many years in y younger days involved in retail (brick & mortar) I can give you a rule of thumb for ANY product, the COST to the retailer from the wholesaler is approximately 50% or the MSRP. As we all know very few products can be sold successfully at MSRP, with some very notable exceptions which I shan't go into. out of that discounted price which can take a price to just over 10% over cost, retailers have to pay all of the overhead, taxes, payroll, etc, etc, etc.. Back in my day the "normal" wholesaler profit was his cost +30%. So now we are down to the film distributor and the claim is that they make an shocking amount of profit on TV Series, they may or they may not. Does restoration in any form come free...hardly, computers can restore many media into near pristine condition relatively inexpensively but still not free. The painstaking hand-done restorations are now reserved for the true "gems" and "treasures'. But the digital restoration job done on Mission: Ipossible is certainly impressive given the 40 year old nature of the show. So there is one cost. The originalproduction costs were absorbed long ago, and most actors from that time get nothing to near nothing Pn the form of residuals...but we want more than just the shows, we want goodies, those goodies aren't free, the actors do not involve themselves in thes productions for free nor should they. Then there is the issue of music rights in some cases, notably "Happy Days" and" WKRP", if the distributor had paid for the licenses to play the music as it originally aired the price to the consumer would have been exorbitantly high, in some cases several tens of thousands of dollars or even hundreds for a 5 second clip of music. There is alot involved in the entire process and everyone in the chain has to make money or we have no product to buy, don't forget to add approximately $2.00 to every title for the cost of piracy and shoplifting.

So lighten up already. If I have any beef at all with the system, it is the insertion of the middleman (wholesaler) to the process. I am old enough that I can remember when wholesalers were not significant, a retailer could go directly to the manufacturer and buys his goods. Now the ONLY stores that can deal directly with distributors is those stores which can make mega-purchases.

Way back when, I happened to be involved in book sales (paperback) for a company, one of several areas. Back then paperback books were a guaranteed sale, anything that I could not sell, could in essence be returned to the publisher for credit. At the beginning, I was doing what had always been done, ordering 2 and 3 copies and not generating any sales to speak of. One day I recall asking a rep why WaldenBooks was getting their titles two weeks before me, he said "you know those dumps with 36 copies or more in them" they get shipped for release on the date of release, the book sellers which order small quantities get shipped two weeks later. Want to guess what I started doing, IMMEDIATELY, after all anything which was not sold I could get credit on....no brainer.

Ma and Pa Kettle will buy two copies of AVP: Requiem and probably has to sell them at near MSRP, a big boxer will buy 100 copies (at least) per store plus their internet presence. Who gets the best price?

Skip

This is purely a guess drawing on my experience in the retail, roop. I don't think there is any deliberate gouging occurring. What is suspect is that dealers more than likely periodically, maybe monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, whatever, adjust their prices relative to whatever currency you might be referring to. It is easier with the internet, but having spent years in the business, the idea of  daily changing my prices based on the exchange would have me climbing walls in short order. You may be able to find some reference to this in websites, if my theory is correct they would not necessarily adjust their prices immediately going the other way, which means you might get a bigger bargain than you should sometimes.

Skip

I too was led the believe that price adjustments for currency occur on something like a bi-annual basis.  Of course, it won't shock me to find out that it really works more like the gas business.  The second some bad news occurs on the market, the price at the pump jumps, however it takes months when the reverse is true. 

It is normal, that prices stay the same even though your currency has now a different value compared to another. All these years, where the Canadian Dollar was worth less than the US Dollar nobody complained about the higher prices. Just because the US economy is now so weak, that the US Dollar has currently become such a weak currency, doesn't mean that the Canadian prices will be adjusted to it.
What do you think would happen, when the Canadian prices would drop because the neighboring country has currently a weak currency, but then the US Dollar would gets strong again and the Canadian prices have to be adjusted again (to a higher value)? How many complains would there be?

Or do I misunderstand something here and the two currencies are a special case? Are the two economies especially entwined where it is understood that the Canadian Dollar has a specific correlation to the US Dollar which has now be changed?

Quoting TomGaines:

Quote:

Or do I misunderstand something here and the two currencies are a special case? Are the two economies especially entwined where it is understood that the Canadian Dollar has a specific correlation to the US Dollar which has now be changed?

Tom, I am not an economist. Here is my guess though. For some time now the Canadian Dollar has been, in my opinion, undervalued against the US Dollar. I think the intent was to give us an advantage in trade as the US and Canada are respectively each others largest trading partners.

Over the past year or so, due to a number of factors, Canada has been unable to maintain what I think was a deliberate attempt to keep our dollar low. Politics aside Canada has also been steadily reducing its deficit when a number of other countries, particularly the US, have been increasing theirs.

Canada continues to have a trade surplus with the US because we are actually their major supplier of crude oil. We also export a great deal of other natural resources to much of the world. We have a relatively small population for such a large country 30 million people for the second largest geographic area... That said, the US and Canadian currencies are tied together and I think it is unlikely there will be a shift back to the old days of the Canadian currency being allowed to remain undervalued.

At the cost of manufacturing jobs (we tend to pay higher wages in Canada for that type of job) and a number of other factors, we still have a lot of resources to sell. Personally, I think we are not as good as we could be about secondary industry, but that will have to change with time.

When you have an elephant next door (no reference intended to US Politics  ) Our economy will always be directly impacted by our southern neighbours.

That said, I want to pay the same for my DVD's and Blu-ray discs!!!
   

I always head down to the Alexandra/Arlington area every year to take advantage of Black Friday. I have been doing it for years, and with the higher dollar the last couple years have been SWEEEEET. But I find that outside of amazon.com, a lot of the regular priced stuff is not much different most of the time. Despite a MASSIVE difference in the SRPs, retail-wise if you are canny and prudent you can usually find a more-or-less equivalent price up here. Especially in Alberta where there is no provincial sales tax (not that I live there anymore    ). Amazon.ca IS a massive rip-off compared to Amazon.com however.