Wouldn't it make more sense that the OP is a cross border commuting/shopping Canadian who buys cheaper gas in the US with his Canadian issued credit card?

'Course, he could still be fat and lazy I suppose. :)

This happens often enough to be an issue?

<pedant>

We don't call our currency any such thing. Nothing ever costs a "couple of loonies", it costs a "couple of bucks."

We do, however, call our $1 coin a loonie, based on the picture of the loon it carries. This is much like Americans who often refer to specific denominations by the name of the president pictured on it.

</pedant>

I work at McDonald's, you insensitive clod!

With the exception of electricity, those are all examples of infrastructure that follows the same model as broadband. Water and gas are only available in more densely populated areas, and roads have "less bandwidth" as they become more rural. In fact, although electricity is almost ubiquitous, there are still places that remain unserviced due to high deployment costs with no payback possibility.

Not sure how socialism ties in - at least where I am, water is a public service and gas is private.

I've seen this happen as a side effect of a formal job evaluation process. Employees write up their job duties/skills in minute detail ("I helped the SAP admin by rebooting a server once" becomes "maintain the SAP system") and these duties are then scored by a committee. More "duties" = more points = more money, so of course, the employee is entirely motivated to pad everything. My personal favourite is the educational requirements. I have a masters in an unrelated field, so therefore a masters is a "requirement" of my job that just happens to be worth 2 pay grades.

The evaluation committee normally does a pretty decent job of leveling out the pay grades, but unfortunately it's the originally document often turns into the job posting when that person needs to be replaced.

Not true. The Windows "site license" is an upgrade to the OEM copy of Windows installed on the PC. It cannot be used on bare metal. What businesses do is buy the cheapest possible Windows license with the PC and then image over it with the desired version. (Or get the OEM to ship the image preinstalled for a few extra bucks.)

Actually, it wasn't clear at all. You used

as your example. If you were discussing kroner, you shouldn't have used a dollar sign.

Besides, $1.51 will buy you a coffee in Canada, but in Norway it'll be 20 NOK.

See, the HST IS good for something after all!

So you're going to pay $0.01 more for each coffee?

$1.51 with card = $1.51, with cash = $1.50
$1.49 with cash = $1.50, with card = $1.49