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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

A cheap deodorant (Dove/whatever) is like $2-3 in expensive parts of Europe. That's not worth stealing. What makes them $8 or $10 in manhattan? It's an expensive area and I guess there aren't many large stores to buy from but more smaller pharmacies, but that still doesn't explain why there is a 2-3x price difference for deodorants in particular.

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Commercial real-estate. When your store cost at least 10k or even more in rent. You have to sell awfully many deodorants to cover it. And labour isn't exactly cheap either if you want to get some.

That's a good explanation of general price differences between an expensive and a cheaper area, e.g. that Manhattan prices would be 50% higher than more rural New York prices. But I was under the impression here that deodorants in particular were 2-3x more expensive on manhattan, but that the difference was smaller for other goods.

Usually the US (Even the most expensive parts) would be a lot cheaper than e.g. Oslo or Zurich. That's not the case unless there is something else going on here , e.g. that they aren't the same product due to different size and so on.

In Sweden, deodorant sticks are smaller than what I’d get in Canada. There’s also an appalling lack of variety. In particular, you never see Old Spice. I think there is a lucrative business opportunity in bringing American deodorant maximalism to the nordics.

> deodorant sticks are smaller than what I’d get in Canada.

This must be due to the size of the north american armpit.

> There’s also an appalling lack of variety. In particular, you never see Old Spice.

There aren't any Tim Hortons either but I'm not sure if "Brand X is missing" and "There is no variety" is generally the same thing.

That was just an example. In general, the Swedish drugstore will have 5-10 options, whereas the Canadian equivalent will have dozens.

A lot of American products have strong scents that are not really liked in Europe. Old spice started really aggressive advertising campaign a few years ago here. They had frequent and obviously high-budget commercials in TV and stocked middle shelves in popular stores, but no one wanted to buy it. People say it simply stinks. It's another Hershey chocolate.

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