deeaa
September 8th, 2009, 10:32 PM
Well,
Finally I got a notice the Danelectro Transp.OD I ordered is arriving this week.
Can't wait to test it.
Annoying, however, how expensive it can get to order pedals etc. from behind the iron curtain of U.S.A. these days.
I forget exactly how much the pedal cost - 28 dollars or something like that, but including shipping and insurance and all it came to about 64 dollars already.
Then it gets to the customs, and unless I want to drive a 100 miles to go get it, I have to pay transfer fees and customs clearance to be done by the postal service so I can get it - no, not home, but to a post office a mile away.
That's another 33 dollars, bringing the cost of the pedal to 94 dollars already. SInce that's a little over 50 euros (64 to be exact) I guess it also means VAT and customs duties are added, bringing the cost to almost squarely a hundred bucks. I'll be billed for those later on, they say.
Well, I hope it's worth it.
But it's crazy you end up paying almost four times the money when ordering from the U.S. sometimes. Plus it seems to take roughly three weeks, even though it came by air mail.
No wonder I've sometimes worked around that by asking some friend in the U.S. to buy&send me stuff in personal mail as a gift without any receipts etc. included, as an used item, in which case there are precious little fees involved, just the postage really.
It's superbly annoying if I need to, like, order gun parts like trigger parts or anything small, even just screws, as with gun parts I also need to fill in like a dozen forms also for the U.S. customs and supply all kinds of documents and permissions and even hand-written assurances about intended use etc...emails and faxes won't do, they have to be in insured letters no less.
It can take literally _months_ to get even tiny gun parts delivered these days.
Easier with music stuff, but still quite difficult.
Another thing is, even when buying from Emay UK, the seller may be based in UK, so you order stuff Bona Fide thinking there's no customs because it's in EU, but then the company WAREHOUSES stuff in the U.S. anyway, or the UK site is just a frameholder of sorts, and the actual goods are shipped from accross the pond from Fortress America, and the same problems arise - and you won't know that until you've confirmed the deal!
It's crazy. But then again, everything related to U.S. traffic is so hard these days. My buddy just flew to Santa Barbara to take part in a scientific convention, and he had to like go to the U.S. Embassy for an interview to get a visa, and provide all kinds of documents complete with lists of any and all diseases he'd ever had and family tree info and whatnot, took a month to secure the visa. I don't think he would have still gotten the visa unless he'd had a personal written invitation from some big shot scientist in the U.S.
Used to be quite similar with East Germany and USSR, back in the day.
Finally I got a notice the Danelectro Transp.OD I ordered is arriving this week.
Can't wait to test it.
Annoying, however, how expensive it can get to order pedals etc. from behind the iron curtain of U.S.A. these days.
I forget exactly how much the pedal cost - 28 dollars or something like that, but including shipping and insurance and all it came to about 64 dollars already.
Then it gets to the customs, and unless I want to drive a 100 miles to go get it, I have to pay transfer fees and customs clearance to be done by the postal service so I can get it - no, not home, but to a post office a mile away.
That's another 33 dollars, bringing the cost of the pedal to 94 dollars already. SInce that's a little over 50 euros (64 to be exact) I guess it also means VAT and customs duties are added, bringing the cost to almost squarely a hundred bucks. I'll be billed for those later on, they say.
Well, I hope it's worth it.
But it's crazy you end up paying almost four times the money when ordering from the U.S. sometimes. Plus it seems to take roughly three weeks, even though it came by air mail.
No wonder I've sometimes worked around that by asking some friend in the U.S. to buy&send me stuff in personal mail as a gift without any receipts etc. included, as an used item, in which case there are precious little fees involved, just the postage really.
It's superbly annoying if I need to, like, order gun parts like trigger parts or anything small, even just screws, as with gun parts I also need to fill in like a dozen forms also for the U.S. customs and supply all kinds of documents and permissions and even hand-written assurances about intended use etc...emails and faxes won't do, they have to be in insured letters no less.
It can take literally _months_ to get even tiny gun parts delivered these days.
Easier with music stuff, but still quite difficult.
Another thing is, even when buying from Emay UK, the seller may be based in UK, so you order stuff Bona Fide thinking there's no customs because it's in EU, but then the company WAREHOUSES stuff in the U.S. anyway, or the UK site is just a frameholder of sorts, and the actual goods are shipped from accross the pond from Fortress America, and the same problems arise - and you won't know that until you've confirmed the deal!
It's crazy. But then again, everything related to U.S. traffic is so hard these days. My buddy just flew to Santa Barbara to take part in a scientific convention, and he had to like go to the U.S. Embassy for an interview to get a visa, and provide all kinds of documents complete with lists of any and all diseases he'd ever had and family tree info and whatnot, took a month to secure the visa. I don't think he would have still gotten the visa unless he'd had a personal written invitation from some big shot scientist in the U.S.
Used to be quite similar with East Germany and USSR, back in the day.