prices in the US v here

[juicynectarines]

I've recently realised that some shops (particularly US ones like JCrew) charge in sterling here what they charge in the US for the same thing.
This has really annoyed me but I don't know if I'm being silly. Just don't see why something that is £60 here is $60 there but there must be people here that will pay our rip off prices otherwise surely they would fall?!

£60 here is what? $90 ish?
$60 there is what? £40ish?

Seems odd to me too, but..... Things are only worth what people are willing to pay, if people are happy to pay £60, good luck to em.

I think Apple do the same (or at least they used to)

It really boils my piss - more so that DP has an uncle who lives in the US and he refuses to ask him to buy and ship items even though he would save himself a fortune

Their expenses there are very different to trading here don't forget.

Partly due to taxes as well - UK price includes 20% VAT, US price usually is before tax and you have to add that on at the till.

This is nothing new
Taxes added post purchase
Cost of infrastructure/ supply chain
supply and demand

Fwiw uk companies charge a premium there too- eh ted baker, Ben Sherman, all peddled as premium brands more like Paul smith

A couple of reasons:

US prices are given without sales taxes, whereas UK prices include VAT (20%).

The larger US economy with larger economies of scale and greater competition means cheaper prices.

It's annoying though.

I remember being cross when I saw that my friend, who lives over there now, bought a brand new, top-of-the-range 4x4 Volvo, for around the same price as a 2-or-3 year old used one would be over here. You can't even blame import duties, as the bloody cars would have sailed past the UK on their way to the US in the first place.

US prices are given without sales taxes, whereas UK prices include VAT (20%).

The sales tax in my county is 6.5%. So, a $60 item here is roughly $64 after taxes. Here in Ohio, we don't pay sales tax on food. Some states, like New Jersey, don't charge sales tax on clothes. Others, like New Hampshire don't charge any sales tax on anything.

Often it doesn't work out as cheap as you'd think by the time you've paid sales tax (rates vary by state).

It's not just the tax on the items - its the tax on the petrol (gas is currently about $2.15 a gallon - I know I am here), Higher rates of income tax and NI on top - both of which eat into a companies profits over here...

... on the other hand Thank Goodness for the NHS, Social Funds and all the benefits the Americans can only marval at

There is a great variation on sales tax in the US; it varies by state and by counties within states. I live in a state that uses sales tax as a main source of revenue and has no state income tax, but we don't tax food purchased n grocery stores. The rate in my state is 6-7 percent.

I live in the US. I'd say as a general rule, the numerical price in £ is the price in $. So an Apple product for $399 (approx £260) here would be £399 in the UK. Ditto J Crew prices and so on.

However, overall, I'd say cost of living is about the same. We used to live in London. We now live in DC. Rent is high in both, houses are expensive in both (though housing is still cheaper here than London). Here we pay school fees as the local state schools aren't good so that sort of makes up for the house price differential. Food is astronomical if you want healthy and decent fruit and veg. Ditto anything to do with telecomms. I pay $100/month for my iPhone contract. It was about £25 in the UK for an equivalent package. Cable and so on costs loads. Books are cheaper to buy in the UK than here, even if they're written by American authors (think £5 in Tesco for the latest bestseller, vs. $29.99 here).

Petrol and utilities are cheap. We can drive to NYC and back on about $50 (4 hours each way). Gas and electricity are super cheap. Water is more than we paid back home. It's swings and roundabouts. We pay a lot for health insurance, obviously.

But you spending £60 is the same as a US based person spending $60, they don't have the benefit of an exchange rate. In times of a strong dollar you wouldn't get that benefit anyway.

I have lived in the US and have a house/family there. The cost of shipping anything here is vast - the import duties/handling fees can easily double the spend in $.

Yep Nell, I found the cost of living in the US higher than the UK, food especially for fresh non processed food, utilities, house tax. My electricity bill was enormous, air con/heating driven.

Fuel may be cheaper but distances much greater generally.

Don't envy us too much. Property tax in California is 1.25 % of your purchase price....every year....forever. the amount never changes....so even when you pay off a modest Californian mortgage you need to pay 500 to 700 $ a month every month. Compare that to council tax. Don't get me started on health insurance. Yet still we are better off here than we were in London somehow. London...amazing plAce it is....is for the wealthy now.

Yeah I'm in NJ. Property taxes if $50k a year are not unheard of. Yeah they are bigger homes but not that big.

Lots of things cost less but there are a bunch of things that cost more. I will add college tuition to the list. I'm Canadian by birth thank goodness. That's where my kids are going to school if they want to come out the other end debt free. Tuition is 'only' £4k a year or so. Total cost doable on £10k a year so £40k cost. DHs boss has spent over $750k putting 3 kids through college. Yes he earns a lot but unless you are bill gates that kind of spending hurts.

Agreed, Kierkegaard - life here is bloody expensive! And anything gained by American shoppers on buying cheaper at the GAP or J. Crew is lost again by paying eye-watering sums of money for anything European in origin - food, clothes, cars, anything imported.

Illinois taxes everything including food, and my county has particularly high sales taxes on top of state tax. Then my municipality tops that up too. It comes to about 10%.

Property tax amounts here change frequently and are based on assessments of current value. Some people easily pay $50k annually (not me thank goodness). There is a cottage industry based on challenging your assessment. The county takes a slice and then the municipality takes its share. I don't complain because for really high local taxes we get great schools, police, libraries, parks and recreational facilities, meals on wheels for the elderly, trees on every street that are well cared for, an animal control department that will come and rid your attic of opossums or raccoons for free, streets cleared of snow in winter, and since there is overall honest and transparent local government i am pretty satisfied that contracts are not awarded to friends and relatives of local govt officials (unlike the situation in a nearby large city).

Plus my county pays one of the highest per gallon prices for petrol for some reason. People who head out of town on road trips post photos of gas prices they encounter on FB.

Many European car manufacturers have plants in North America, esp Mexico.. Volvo cars sold in the US generally come from China. Volvo is owned by a Chinese holding company and has many manufacturing plants in China. Left hand drive Volvos are likely to come from Malaysia iirc.

I often wonder why the Republican Party is so opposed to single payer taxes to fund public health. At present, American business that is in competition with many European businesses faces far more by way of overhead than businesses do in states where systems like the NHS operate.

A former colleague of ExH's recounted the tale of the day he brought his DD to Harvard and was chatting with other parents at a reception designed to stop them from hovering and getting in the way as the students were herded around to activities. He found out that he was the only person paying the full whack, tuition-wise. Everyone else qualified for varying amounts of financial aid (essentially a writeoff of cost of attendance by the university) and some were going for next to nothing.

Don't forget that one of the reasons the UK looks expensive right now is the exchange rate. I live in Europe, and when sterling was weak I regularly used to order on-line from the UK (clothes, electrical devices) because at €1.10 to the £, UK prices were way cheaper.

Now the pound is ridiculously strong, and the UK looks waaay expensive. We holidayed in Ireland in the summer and just by crossing the border to the Republic you could save 20% on diesel. (Three years ago the cross border commerce was all in the other direction).