Where's that?

Say, there's more news about this on my Yahoo page tonight. Apparently Canadian postal parcel sorting outfits are glutted with a huge backlog of parcels, due to cross-border Internet shopping by Canadians taking advantage of the weak US dollar. Parcels are getting delayed by up to several weeks now, because the mail sorting centres can't deal with the volume. It will only get worse as Christmas draws near.

Furthermore, some Canadian booksellers are now grudgingly selling their books at the US dollar price instead of the inflated Canadian one.   (our books normally have both a US $ price and a Canadian $ price printed on the cover...and the Canadian one is about 40% higher than it should be at the present currency rates!) They figure that it's better than simply losing their customers altogether to Internet buying from the USA.

The reason the bookstores are particularly vulnerable is that they display the 2 separate prices side-by-side on the books, and the shopper can immediately see that he's being ripped off if he pays the Cdn $ price. This is not so obvious with most other items.

The Canadian dollar is now worth about $1.05 American.