ok, so i’m on ebay.com and i find the HH-53 by Revell that i am interested in and the guy wants just over $60 for it and that i should contact him about shipping if it’s outside the USA, which i do.
the seller comes back with a quote from USPS of $108.85 for shipping! wtf is wrong with USPS to charge that ridiculous price to ship something to the UK, i mean shipping is almost twice the price of the kit ffs. i knew things were bad but not that bad when it comes to buying stuff from the USA, i really hope exports aren’t something America relies on if shipping is involved.
the good news is i found the Revell kit here in the UK for £40 so i guess i am going down that road this weekend
Welcome to the modern world! Ever since the mid-2010s (BREXIT-related?) any form of international shipping has become ridiculous. And that’s even before the recent tariff wars! A quick google suggests you’re looking at a very large box, and costs escalate by size…
I bought some very OOP and nearly unobtainium 1/24 vintage car models on ebay.
Old Monogram, MPC, Revell that were not for sale in the EU.
Not a big box.
The kit cost over 50 USD and the postage was higher and then came the Swedish customs handling fee + VAT (no tariffs, just the fee to figure out that there wasn’t any tariff and add the 25% VAT which gets calculated as 25% of item price + shipping.
Shipping through ebay also adds some profit for ebay so straight USPS might be cheaper.
It isn’t the world, it’s the USPS. They charge astronomical prices on everything, even domestically, and yet they lose billions of dollars a year and have to be government subsidized. They have a very strong union. They pay ridiculously high wages and lucrative retirement packages. Their employees sit out on the loading dock in lawn chairs and read magazines all day. They carry beer coolers in the trunks of their cars and get drunk at lunchtime. The mail carriers stop at home in the middle of their route for a nap and mail doesn’t get delivered until 5 PM. This is just some of the incompetent behavior I personally know about, and there’s a lot more. And they pay these guys like royalty, so that’s why all the prices are up the butt ridiculous.
Remember when they wore uniforms and would get out of their little vans to walk up to your front door and put it in your mail slot or box next to the front door?
Generally, we’ve enjoyed good service from USPS. It should be pointed out that as expensive USPS international shipping is, couriers like DHL, FedEx, UPS are much, much more expensive. We deeply regret this. Thanks to high international shipping costs together with ridiculous, moronic tariffs, we’ve lost most of our international customers this year which is a third of of our revenue. And the price of the materials we use to create our products is now much more expensive.
To add to USPS woes, yet another one of the USPS’s largest trucking subcontractor’s announced it is going out of business, effective next month.
Link:
Sounds like USPS and Canada Post business models are absolute mirror images! Absolutely absurd expensive pricing and slow as molasses mailing anything by CP.
Wow!!! Don’t know where you live, but here in SLC USPS is phenomenal. Our letter carriers are first rate and one of the guys in the model club works at the SLC distribution center and says they are top notch professionals. He’s ex-US Army and knows lousy outfits when he sees one, and USPS SLC is not one of them.
That being said, I can’t speak to the USPS pricing policy.
