UK buyers beware of EU goods

ok folks, this is starting to get a little political, can we please stick to the postage and VAT issue and how to avoid it as best we can.

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Ehā€¦ elect better politicians seems the only legal way. Otherwise it appears your at the luck of government mismanagement sending your package through without collecting fees of some kind. :man_shrugging:

Legally apart from praying that some package will pass under the Customā€™s radar there is little to do, or buy in the UK or go live in the Channel Islands ā€¦ if Iā€™m not mistaken they have special taxes there, like Duty-Free or stuff like that.

When I lived in Switzerland half of the parcels passed undisturbed, impossible to check them all,but also living near the Italian border if I bought something from Italy I sent it to a friend across the border and then I went to pick it up myself

Now here in Oz itā€™s the salesman who has to charge me 10% GST even from overseas

Indeed Jim, you donā€™t do this kind of thing.

You also donā€™t have a decent (and largely free) medical care for everyone
and you donā€™t have a decent educational system allowing everyone to get a degree and leave university without huge debts

Europe and the US have different priorities. We think that inclusion and solidarity are much more important than individualism and a survival of the fittest struggle for life.

The UK has taken the incomprehensible but democratic decision to leave the EU. Strangely enough, they seem to have some troubles to accept the consequences of that decision. Or maybe not that strange because they have been lied to by their own leaders for decades about the good and bd of the EU, and only now they see what it all realy means.

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You are absolutely right, but the reply is unfortunately and inevitably again political.

Avoid VAT means buying on the black market, and by doing that supports criminal gangs, and undermine the government social system.

OK, that system is nowhere perfect, not in the least because too many citizens activelly undermine it in small and big ways.

How to avoid VAT: I do it by not buying anything I donā€™t really need: stock is very small compared to many here. Hence, my financial investment (including VAT) is minimal.

Without going into the politics, as you did, my specific comment was about levying a fee or tax against goods you may or may not have paid anything for (like a gift). IF the US was charging me customs fees on all those samples I would have refused them all. And who would that have gained? Certainly not the vendors or manufacturers looking to market their products. Nor our members/myself who got kits in exchange for content. Nor the mailing companies (many of them government owned) who got revenues and additional duties from all those subsequent shipments. So my point is that those policies are often short-sighted and not really looking at whatā€™s fair. Only what they think is going to bring in revenues.

Fair enough ā€¦ and apologies as well.

The politics are at the moment very sensitive here, and specifically for me considering my daily business, and yes, your remark although correct triggered a snotty response which was not asked for.

This whole Brexit thing that started this post is now showing its true meaning. I read about empty shelves in stores, retailers that refuse to send items accross the channel between UK and Europe, increased taxes and administration, price hikes ā€¦ and for what purpose??? Nationalism? I hope not, we have some experience in Europe what that leads to. Or greed of a cynical leading class that expects to make money/get power from this on the expense of their own population?

I donā€™t know, and I donā€™t understand.

Maybe it is all going to calm down in a while and a new balance is going to be foundā€¦ but I fear that this balance will have lasting negative consequences for people ā€¦

I suppose that the various customs services in various countries have decided to slap customs and sales tax on everything crossing the border, otherwise every single package would be labeled as a Free Gift.
During the summer 1983 I worked in a shop selling crystal (glasses, vases, art et.c) and we always labeled the goods bought by US tourists as ā€œFree, Giftā€ when we shipped it to them (some brought it with them and some wanted it shipped, especially if it was large volumes/weights)

Iā€™ve had a set of canopy masks arrive safely from Poland.
All the CN22 forms on the back filled in and no ransom note. Seems small, inexpensive items should be fine. Letā€™s see if I have the same luck with my figure from CSM.

Well, Iā€™m not sure that you can have a discussion about the relative merits and values of any tax without involving the politics behind that tax. Also, I donā€™t live in either the EU or the UK, so I donā€™t feel like I have, as the saying goes, ā€œa dog in the fight.ā€

However, I can say that there are any number of small businesses in the EU and the UK that I donā€™t patronize (even though Iā€™d gladly purchase their products) because the government imposed added costs drive up the total cost beyond what is, admittedly in my own opinion, beyond reasonable. Sure, I might not be paying the VAT, but when postage rates are multiples of cost of the product, that total cost is no longer competitive or attractive (and it seems to me that VATs, customs, and national postal rates all lump together into the same ā€œgovernment imposed added costsā€).

So, sure, this hurts me a little since I donā€™t buy a goodly number of products from those small businesses that I would otherwise like to, but I also donā€™t believe that Iā€™m the only one the US market that feels this way. I honestly believe that these added government costs hurt their own domestic economies a lot more than they hurt me.

Itā€™s the small business owner and entrepreneur who loses out on his or her sales, sales that could add up to significant additional income and perhaps make the difference between staying in a profitable business and throwing in the towel.

The same might be said for small business owners here in the US who lose out on customers in the EU and UK because of customs and added postage costs once their packages arrive in the destination country. One might argue that reducing potential imports from outside their country helps encourage domestic sources for the same products and goods, but when youā€™re discussing really small business that make unique goods protected by intellectual property rights, there can be no legal domestic source for that same product (without copyright infringements).

At any rate, not my dog, not my fight, but lumping the very small business and discretionary consumers into the same big-government revenue streams hurts those businesses and consumers disproportionately a lot more than it hurts other larger and more competitive industries and consumers who are looking to buy products that have domestic equivalents available.

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Customs have always been a way for kings and governments to get cash.
Taxes on sales have also existed for a very long time. Trade was restricted
to cities and the taxes/tolls levied at the gates in the city walls.

Trying to use tariffs to protect the domestic industry interferes with the mechanisms
of supply-demand and competition which is the foundation of a market economy.
Imposing tariffs to protect domestic industry is close to the socialist/communist ideas
of a plan economy (the ruling elite decides what will be produced in which quantities and
at which, artificial, cost).

Postage and packaging has a cost and needs to be paid by someone in some way.
The cost might be hidden in the cost of the product but it is there and will always be paid.
Different carriers charge different postage rates for the same service. For Swedish companies
it used to be a clever idea to send their mail in bulk across the Baltic and then pay postage for the individual letters back to Sweden. The cost for travelling across the Baltic twice was less than domestic postage in Sweden even if it ended up in the hands of the same postman delivering the mail to the same letterbox. State subsidies were probably involved somehow ā€¦

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I usually never buy from US because compared to Asia or Europe for me the cost of shipping is usually too high

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Interestingly enough, a couple of the very few EU / UK vendors that I do business with are book sellers who seem to employ a similar method. They would appear to ship their books sold in the US in bulk by some carrier (commercial or national postal is unknown) to a forwarding address here in the US which then mails them individually to the recipients here (and possibly to other addressees in Canada and Mexico). I suppose this is another sort of ā€œdistributor systemā€ for companies. Iā€™m actually surprised that this isnā€™t more commonly done.

Another method Iā€™ve used is to put together large ā€œgroupā€ orders with an EU vendor for a bunch of guys in one of our local modeling clubs. We then prorate the shipping costs amongst ourselves based on either the gram weights of the items or their costs (depending on how the vendor calculates his postage). Usually we can realize a good break on the per-item shipping cost this way.

These are unfortunate work-arounds that canā€™t be applied to the vast majority of small EU and UK vendors, though.

I suppose none of this is really new. I was working temporarily in Germany about 15 years ago when my on-site job conditions changed unexpectedly and I needed some outdoor clothing and boots. Rather than shop around and buy all new locally, I had my wife pack up a box with the appropriate clothes and a pair of broke-in boots from home. She sent the box to me via UPS, but all the trouble I had in Germany trying to not have to pay import duties / customs on my own property was nutsā€¦ hugely time consuming and involving lots of driving to and from the small town where I was working to the nearest large city and the UPS office there. The drag on productivity was quite surprising.

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Modellbau Kƶnig have ā€œfreeā€ postage for large orders.
I hold off on purchases until I have enough items to get over the limit.
The limit for shipping to the US is 450 Euro or 545 USD at todays exchange rate.
A group order should be possible to get over that limit ā€¦

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Another part of trivia:
I worked 6 months in Switzerland in 1989 and the company had an office in Germany so it happened that they moved software between the offices (defence related so electronic transmission would have been a no-no).
Big computer tapes with SW worth millions on them were considered worthless junk by the German customs, unused blank tapes were hit with customs. If they had to move an empty tape into Germany they made sure it looked used, seals broken et.c.

My brother bought a double cassette tape player (JVC ??) in England in the early 70ā€™ies.
We spend hours looking for a Swedish wall plug so that he could tell the Swedish customs that he had brought it with him from back home. Power cord with a British plug on it would ruin the story ā€¦

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Reminds me of a similar experience. I worked for a company in Belgium that also had a company in an african country. One day we sent a whole truck with machines to that company, used machines, but of very good quality and very similar to what we were using in Belgium.

The complete truck load was sent back because the customs did not accpet that we were sending ā€œjunkā€ in their direction.

A few months later we sent the whole load a second time, only now we had fereshly painted the machines in green. No problem whatsoever.

Perception is everything.

A lick of paint works miracles ā€¦
works the other way around to,
rough up the paint and ship valuable machines at more or less scrap metal value to dodge customs ā€¦

Done that!.. :joy:ā€¦I bought restored and resold a few Vespa scooters from the 50ā€™s-60ā€™s, bought in Italy and imported to Switzerland, to pay less taxes and also to speed up the bureaucracy I stopped in the parking lot of a shopping center before Swiss customs, I disassembled the Vespa more possible parts so that it looks more like a piece of scrap metal than a restorable vehicle.

However country you go bureaucracy you find, customs clearance of a Vespa in Switzerland took about 30min, same thing in Italy it took me 6.5 hours !! ā€¦ :face_with_symbols_over_mouth:

Cuts both ways. EU customers have to pay for goods from the UK as well.
Small orders will get hit more by the fixed handling fee. My daughter got two wands
from the Harry Potter Shop, Ā£32 each + postage/packaging/handling.
The fees add upp to Ā£21:50 or a little over ten quid per wand.

Iā€™d like to have a few words without witnesses with Mr Farrage ā€¦

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This is what I know so far:
The UK government now want ā€˜foreignā€™ companies to:
A) collect UK VAT,
B) pay to register with HMRC to pay that tax.
C) shipments will/may/no bodyā€™s sure yet, STILL attract Customs & Post Office attention & Charges.
D) Shippers such as DHL, DPD, FedEx, UPS TNT are adding charges, minimum of Ā£11.00, on top, in order to collect said HMRC charges.

Companies such as Amazon & Ebay, will, where a parcel will cross UK borders, add those charges to shipping.

Several US small scale manufacturers, such as TMD have said they will not do extra unpaid work, and then pay on top to collect UK taxes.

Some UK small companies such as ITA, (Chris Meddings) are living with this business nightmare and has said it is adding 1/3 to the price of each book, so European Customers are disadvantaged.
IF he finds a European distributor, then he will have no profit.

Personally, I had been Covid Lockdown buying from Europe, Czech republic, China, Hong Kong, Japan, & Australia (!) before 2021 to avoid this uncertainty, not now, until this settles down.

Itā€™s a consequence of the mess we are in, because the government were incompetent, ignorant, and uncaringā€¦
This was left to New Yearsā€™ Eve 2020 to legislate for, when they had 4+1 years to do this properly, with the ministers in charge not even bothering to go to Europe to negotiate.
Remember that the UK Clown-in-Chief famously said ā€œĀ£*** Businessā€

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