I've always been irritated by the difference in Canadian and U.S. prices on many things, including magazines, and at the excuses that's it's due to complicated issues like the currency imbalance and increased distribution costs in Canada. The recent jump of our dollar to 10% above it's U.S. counterpart brought a renewed focus on this issue, and renewed consumer complaints about these overpriced products. Granted we're back at parity now, but we're still annoyed at the differences.
Now U.S. publishing giant Hearst (Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Seventeen, etc.) has eliminated the problem - the separate U.S prices are gone from the copies they send up here. The Canadian price is still higher, you just don't see the difference. Hearst said this was done "to eliminate any confusion in the marketplace". So it turns out it wasn't so much the up to 30% difference on various magazines that bothered us all, it was just us simple Canadians being confused as to whether we were being ripped off or not. I'm so glad that's been cleared up.
If you'd like to thank Hearst for this, I'm sure Jessica Kleiman, Vice President, Public Relations would appreciate your feedback.
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