Canadian Rip Off 2006: Panasonic Edition

Just internet shopping/dreaming and just wanted to see again how much Canadians are getting ripped off on electronics. No surprise, it looks like we're getting ripped off a lot as usual...Nothing has changed, while our loonie has gradually went up for the past three years...

As you can see, an American TV buyer gets a nice discount (compared to Canadians) for whatever reason the electronics companies claim. But, the bottom line is that companies like Panasonic can price their products any way they like (which they are well within their rights to do), but have chosen to rip off Canadians big time it would seem.

Let's take the Panasonic TH42PX60 plasma TV as an example:

Best Buy USA


Best Buy Canada


First lets convert everything to Canadian dollars (CAD). Just for your information a USD is worth about 12% more than CAD.

BestBuy USA = $1,799 US = $2,015 CAD

Best Buy Canada = $2,799 CAD

Canada/USA Difference = $2,799 - $2,015 = $784 CAD (Other brands might markup 20-30%, but in this case, we're looking at a whopping ~40% markup...Wow!) So we're paying an extra $784 CAD, because that's how Panasonic wants to handle the Canadian market...Interesting...