Remind myself I'm an idiot

I feel like I want to throw up.

So I'm just cleaning out my pockets tonight and I find a bill with my credit card info on it for a total of over $70... for the comics yesterday. I don't know how I didn't notice but it's a shock to realize it after the fact. And at that particular shop it was just the two trade paperback collections and the Ghost in the Shell novel. How is it possible?

Well, the cover prices on DC and Marvel trades follow some kind of alien conversion process... The She-Hulk book for instance is $20 in American money. But the Canadian tag? It's $30!! I mean, whoa - that's a 50% difference - and the last time I check, the relation between Canadian currency and American currency had been on a closing trend, not splitting. How the hell are they justifying this?

The two major outfits in town have approached the problem in two very different ways...
The Comic-book-shoppe is having a standing policy to charge 20% below cover price - but this applies to hardcovers only.
Silver Snail (the distant cousin of the famous Silver Snail in Toronto) has taken to charging what appears to be a kind of arbitrary discounted price based on actual currency exchange rates.

Over time, Silver Snail's policy has saved me hundreds of dollars since they started this last summer. And my pimping shirt for CBS has been saving me tons too on just about everything else... the catch being I can't be walking around in a T-shirt during the winter months, of course. *sigh* I sure hope it warms up by the time the Civil War trades are released in a few months. Because this is ridiculous. >:(