how much is the TV tax now? $25 recycling tax on every TV in CA? Why be surprised they will charge more? The power strip idea is a good one.
Down side to this:
We used to get power blink-outs nearly every day, and every time it happened; or any time the set was unplugged, it would auto-reprogram the channels to its memory, and it often missed weaker channels which then had to be hand-programmed. We solved the problem by moving to an area with reliable power.