Blacky wrote:
What Trumo will find with such a high tax and a strong usd is people will travel to buy or find ways around it. For a high end giant you could fly to Australia where I live for less than the 25% and bring the bike back, thus my interest in Canada but mexico also makes sense. An example in Australia we have a 10% sales tax and Uk has an17.5% sales tax. The uk tax does not apply to goods sold outside the eu so we can buy bike parts online very cheaply, the 10% coming into Australia does not apply on packages under $1000 as it is too much paperwork. So people will split their build into multiple packages. Thus an arbitrage was built that was great for uk retailers and a killer blow for Australian ones. I recall in the 1990s going to Germany and my friend driving across the border to netherlands to buy bike parts from there because they were cheaper which was common practice. That was before the eu. Before free trade that was what people did, we could be going back to the old days of shopping holidays.
Technically if you drive across the border with it, you are still importing the goods, and they could still ding you on the import tarif at the border if you get caught... That said, many years back I ordered a bike from a US Retailer, shipped it to the duty free near the border, picked it up on my way down to a race in the US, built the bike in the parking lot, and drove it back across the border, and never got asked a question about it, saving a bunch in taxes and duties. but other times ordering shoes similarly, we got forced to pay taxes and duty when returning to Canada (which was still worth it because the prices were so much better from these places than we could locally source). In terms of prices in Canada, it depends on the LBS and the brand, whether they come via the US or directly from Asia/Europe (in terms of whether the tarifs get passed on), historically the prices in Canada are driven by USD MSRPs, and correction to CAD based on an exchange rate a bit shittier than the current situation). I'm not sure whether canadian retailers will adjust prices based on US MSRPs reflecting the tarifs or not (this will depend a bit on what reps/distributors do, where they are buying from the US, or direct from the company, and whether they try to up their profits by factoring in an adjustment for the tarif into the cost they pass on to the retailers.