Weirdly for me: IKEA. I’m within ~240 miles of an IKEA in Canada and an IKEA in the US.

While they’ve started to inflate some items to meet currency conversion rates, some items are still cheaper for me to purchase in Canada directly and bring back to the US.

For instance, even at small scale: one BILLY bookcase, article number 205.220.46, is $90 CAD (~$65.70 US) at IKEA CA and $79 USD at IKEA US.

YMMV coming back across the border but in my experience I just got waived through the border every time I told them I was “just coming back with some cheap crap from IKEA”.

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echoangle an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Is your time and car free or do you want to make the trip anyways?

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BizarroLand 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Travelling to a no sales tax state for large purchases. Sales tax is roughly 10%, state with no sales tax is 150 miles away for me.

Doing the math, 300 miles round trip, 30 miles per gallon, $4/gallon for gas, if I'm buying something that costs more than $400 I get a free trip to other state.

Downside is that you're only breaking even for the time, but if you're making a $1,000+ purchase then it's definitely worth the time for me to make the trip.

	▲	shagie an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Some states have that as a "you should/need to declare that as a use tax." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_tax It's likely poorly enforced, but it's on the books and it's a complicated one to track. It was more of a concern when internet sales didn't collect state sales. There's also Simplified Sellers Use Tax lawsuit that was recently in the courts.