Connectivity Kings: Oh, Canada. With 60 percent of its households connected to the Internet, Canada is well ahead of the United States. But Canadians lag well behind their southern neighbors in terms of spending their cash. Charles Mandel reports from Ottawa. [Wired News]
When I'm living in the US, I don't even hesitate to buy something online, I even have the Amazon one click thing setup. Things are usually a bit cheaper than retail, plus if the merchant is out of state, you don't pay any sales tax. At home though, I almost never shop online. Canadians buying from US web merchants -- which is really what we're talking about: name one Canadian internet site worth shopping at -- have to worry about high "international" shipping charges (okay, Canada is not international, it's just right across the border people). And of course we can expect Canada Customs and Revenue's goons to open our packages to charge us GST, PST and possibly duty. Then when we look at our credit card bill at the end of the month, we remember that the exchange rate is like one point six something, and it probably would have been cheaper, easier and faster to just get off our asses and drive to chapters to buy the damn book.
Really the moral of this rant is, either Canada should move out of the e-commerce stone age, or we should just abolish the border altogether.
10:28:16 AM 
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