I hope avoiding Amazon fits this community rules?
I need a few bits to resurrect an old PC. My Amazon cart is $68 with shipping - we're going to cancel Prime, but my wife is still working on downloading all her photos. Best I can do elsewhere is near double this PLUS shipping from 3 different suppliers and 2 of the suppliers are on eBay, which is also a US company.
I moved to Canada a few years ago from Australia where I had pccasegear, scorptec and others. It seems Canadians have become reliant on the US market and Amazon and we now have no competitive local retailers for this type of thing?
I used to work at Canada Computers, years back. They're still my go-to place for buying computer parts. Apparently they treat their employees pretty good these days too; some old coworkers of mine are telling me how they got big pay bumps, profit sharing and benefits. I actually tried to get an assistant manager to come over to a nice white collar corporate gig with me and he said no because CC were paying him better than we could.
Tonne of nepotism up at head office level, and generally the corporate management sucks in all the ways that retail corporate management usually suck, but they're a hell of a lot better than Amazon, Newegg or Best Buy.