[Iceman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tiberius

Again... must be nice in Ottawa because EVERYTHING here has french on it and we aren't even BESIDE Quebec. And AGAIN, it is not pennies because if there is French on it, it has at least 2 more languages on it then they have to make new boxes with these languages and WE end up paying for it. There is a lot more than just smacking on a language to a card. They have to pay professionals to translate it properly and so on. So maybe "pennies" to make the actual card, but more so to pay everyone who designs, translates, and so on.

The real reason stuff costs more up here is because that is what people pay for it because the Canadian dollar used to be worth more. As a business I know that Canadians are used to paying $1.30 for something that is $.99 across the border so why I would change my price as long as sales continue? A higher average minimum wage also dives up costs for retail, fast food, and other products that rely on entry level workers. Even import costs aren't a big factor on most items as very little even comes directly from the US.


The cost of having someone translate what ammounts to a few paragraphs at most is nothing compared to what it costs to do an actual run of products. Let's say you had to pay someone $1,000 to translate something (which is far beyond any actual rates) and then you make 10,000 units or something. That is $.10 a piece and even that scenario is unrealistically high. They likely have a firm that they contract out to translate all their stuff and the cost spread out over all the product lines is likely very low little considering we are talking about millions of units. The extra language on it is nothing. Heck, you see Spanish every now and then on items in the US. What would cost more is if they it had a voice chip or something and they had to put in a French option. With low dollar amount stuff every penny counts so a total increase of like $.20 per unit would be significant but it is still pennies and that increase gets passed on to us in dollars since retailers like numbers that end in .99 for some reason.


I used run a small production facility. We are talking like 10 employees and orders in the hundreds instead of the multi-thousands. Even though the product boxes were rather large it never cost me any more to change details on the packaging when I wanted to add or change something. It would cost more if I had them do a run and then wanted it changed after the fact and wasn't going to use what they made. Places charge a rate depending on the dimensions, colors, text, etc of what you want made. If it really cost a lot more on something like MU then they wouldn't be $10.99 to the US $9.99. Plus TRU up here is always having that 25%-30% off sale so I assume their margin is at least 40%. I'd guess they pay between $5-$6 per figure. The only reason it would be likely to cost a company a little more is if they wanted to do the multiligual run after all the English units were completed and they were ordering a much smaller run. Look at the latest Rhino wave. We got that up right when everyone else did.