{"id":3847,"date":"2014-04-03T10:04:32","date_gmt":"2014-04-03T15:04:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/?p=3847"},"modified":"2017-11-19T20:20:11","modified_gmt":"2017-11-20T01:20:11","slug":"going-south-to-save","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/?p=3847","title":{"rendered":"Going south, to save"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Border\"<\/a>Providing for a family of six is expensive.<\/p>\n

So Fernando Vasconcellos trys to find savings where he can \u2013 starting with the food they eat. Vasconcellos doesn\u2019t go to his neighborhood Loblaws to do groceries for his large family. Rather, every month he drives for more than an hour, crosses the Canadian border and shops in the small border towns of Massena or Ogdensburg, New York.<\/p>\n

Vasconcellos is my father. We moved to Ottawa five years ago and soon came to\u00a0 realize\u00a0 we could save money by shopping in the US. We assumed the hour-long trip was not worth it and any savings in the groceries would be offset by the gas used to get there.<\/p>\n

But when we did the math, we realized that not only was the trip not that expensive, the gas actually paid for itself.<\/p>\n

As Vasconcellos explains, it requires 15 liters of gas to get to Massena or Ogdensburg. That is a quarter of a tank for an average car. If the shopper arrives in the US with a quarter of a tank and then fills up, the savings on the three quarters of a tank are enough to pay for the gas used in the trip.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter we realized the trip paid for itself and everything we saved there would be real savings, we started going every month,\u201d Vasconcellos said.<\/p>\n

Our family isn\u2019t the only one that\u00a0 routinely shops in the US.<\/p>\n

According to a TD report in February 2014, more than 23 million Canadians visit the US every year, leaving $22 billion in the US economy. Eighty per cent of those are overnight or same-day trips.<\/p>\n

However, things for cross-border shoppers in the near future.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe weaker Canadian dollar in relation to the US dollar will reduce the incentive for Canadians to go shopping in the US,\u201d said TD economist Jonathan Bendiner.<\/p>\n

Vasconcellos has already felt it.<\/p>\n

\u201cRecently the lower Canadian dollar makes the trip to the US not as advantageous, but we still save enough on the groceries to be worth going,\u201d he said. \u201cWe save thousands of dollars every year by doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fact that Canadian residents are spending their money in the US has also caught the attention of the federal government.<\/p>\n

In the 2014 federal budget, then-\u00a0 finance minister Jim Flaherty proposed tackling \u201ccountry pricing\u201d by making companies explain when their products are cheaper abroad than inside Canada.<\/p>\n

Bendiner said country pricing is indeed something that can encourage people to go shopping south of the border, and it\u2019s something that can be reduced with government intervention.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s all a matter of reducing incentives for people to cross the border to shop,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Yet one does not need to travel to the US to benefit from lower prices there.<\/p>\n

Derek Van Schie is vice president of Strader-Ferris International, a company specializing\u00a0 in clearing products between Canada and the US. He provides a service called \u201cMy US address\u201d where Canadians can shop online and send their packages to a Strader-Ferris\u2019 warehouse in Ogdensburg. They can either pick up the packages themselves or have the company ship it to Canada.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes products have free shipping within the US but are expensive to ship to Canada. If you live close to the border you can save by shipping it to us, then pick it up,\u201d Van Schie said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been using [Strader-Ferris\u2019] service for years,\u201d said Vasconcellos. \u201cWe save on our groceries and use the trip to save on online shopping as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEven if the Canadian dollar falls to the point where it is not beneficial to shop in the US anymore, we will keep going just to pick up our packages,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Providing for a family of six is expensive. So Fernando Vasconcellos trys to find savings where he can \u2013 starting<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[300],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-finance-2014"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3847"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4518,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3847\/revisions\/4518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}