trust in capitalism?
Exchange rates have little or nothing to do with retail pricing. Otherwise, retail prices would be in a constant state of flux. Import tariffs and other import costs have a much greater impact.... In the end, it's best to just not worry about what people are paying for goods in other countries because there is nothing you can do about it anyway.
This is a pretty bleak assessment of a fairly depressing state of affairs though isn't it?
The major input into the price fluctuation is tarifs and duties that the average consumer has no way of knowing much about.
We have to take it on
faith more or less that companies are being honest about the "increased cost of business" in country A, B, or C. History has shown that companies behave mostly
dishonestly when it comes to things like this. Most of them see their role as being "the business of making money" rather than consumer service after all.
In Canada for instance we have been paying between 15 and 30 percent more for American products for at least 20 or 30 years based primarily on the idea that their dollar was worth a bit more. Now *our* dollar is worth more, but not only is there not a huge drop in prices, there is virtually no drop at all. Most of the American companies that have been contacted about this by price activists in Canada have explicitly stated that they do not anticipate any price reductions at all, period.
The Canadian economy is robust and doing about a hundred times better than the American one (almost literally). We have low taxes, no debt, a far far lower low deficit (trillions lower), and an economic and taxation system almost indistinguishable from the US in most key areas, yet we pay 20 percent more on everything?
There may be many different reasons for price differences and some of them are of course going to be valid, but considering that the consumer is working with a virtual vacuum of information, the US companies are almost certainly just taking advantage of them.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if there is a way of charging more for the product and if
no one is actually watching (i.e. - the consumer has no realistic way of verifying what contributes to the price structure) ... then capitalist ideology almost
demands that these companies rob the foreign consumers blind.
I am reasonably certain that they do.
