I'm never buying a book from the US again. The reason: Canada Customs. I purchased a book on line through Abebooks. The seller got my payment and sent me the book by Global Priority mail. It still took 3 weeks to get it!!!! I asked a friend about this (he does a lot of eBay business) and he said that the problem lies with Customs. Grrrr

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The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. ~ Ernest Hemingway ...

Well sheesh. Why not say you won't buy a book internationally again then?

not to single you good folks out :-p

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The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. ~ Ernest Hemingway ...

The problem isn't so much internationally, I've ordered books from the UK that arrived only one day less quickly than books I mail-order domestically.

Stuff from the US, though, can take a while. The problem isn't so much customs as it is the methods used to handle duty collection. There's a company that does nothing but accept your packages on the US side, pay the duty on your behalf based on the reported value of the contents, cross it, then remail it. Then you get the bill for the duty, plus their fee for covering it, which is often more than the duty itself. It also adds no less than four days and many miles to the shipping.

UPS is nice in that they do their own brokering into Canada, and that seems to be rolled into the shipping fees. Receiver only pays the duty on arrival, if there is any.

But I'm betting customs isn't actually the problem. LeastICouldDo.com (technically SFW, but consider it PG-13) was shipping book orders a few years ago. The orders to the States (from Canada) that went through a certain package class ("Media"?) that US Postal offers arrived a full 4-6 weeks after all other orders arrived, including overseas. Including Australia. Needless to say, LICD doesn't ship books through USPS anymore.

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Sounds to me like LICD is going cheap and sending things by USPS's Fourth Class book rate. If that's the case you get what you pay for. Yes it's by far the cheapest way to send books and other media, but also the slowest since Fourth Class only ships when there's room. If LICD would give people the option to send the books by First Class or Priority mail I'm willing to bet that they'd get there a lot faster. The shipping would cost a bit more, but it would be more reliable. The problem isn't the USPS, it's the cheapskates at LICD.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

I have bought stuff from 'Countdown' in the US (ok, not books!...), on several occasions and there haven't been any problems. ok their shipping costs are a bit steep, but deliveries pronto and baby is happy.

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clear skies

Eta C, that's more than a little unfair. The problem with that shipping option wasn't evident until it was much too late to do anything about it.

Canada Post's shipping options, except Same-day Air (which is actually done by Purolator, a separate private courier), all apparently hand off to USPS at the border. Canada Post says 8-10 days for its slowest ground option to the US (and has no trouble at all doing 3-5 domestically). If Canada Post is being told one thing while USPS is doing another, then LICD is just as much a victim as their clients were.

Why would LICD assume that the USPS shipped slower than most 3rd world countries do? Especially considering they're supposed to be competing (if nominally) with UPS.

LICD corrected the shipping problem within days of the massive delays becoming apparent. They'd officially switched to UPS, come to think of it, before I'd even gotten my own copy.

Next year's book mass-ship went well, by all reports.

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O.K., this is possibly a Stoopid American question, so please forgive me...

Is it possible there is some Commonwealth reason that imports of the UK wouldn't have to be taxed/duties/whatever? That would explain why UK good come in faster.

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Carl Matherly

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Timing, maybe. Books don't seem to be subject to import duties in Canada. I'm not sure they ever were.

Computer hardware was subject to duty at least until NAFTA kicked in, so I'd get hit with brokerage delays every time I wanted a specific part I couldn't get locally. But that only accounts for a day or two, and I've never tried to order hardware from the UK.

I think Banquo hit the USPS snail mail thing rather than the customs brokerage. The brokers were never that slow in my experience.

Once the package is released to Canada Post, it's two or three days no matter where it's going.

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Do you have any evidence that that was indeed the case? I'm quite sure that Canada Post knows about media rate.

And the thing about media rate is that it's very helpful for certain things. I have several enormous boxes of books that I have to ship to Ohio soonish. (My best friend has moved back there again.) Sending them UPS or USPS regular rates would be pretty prohibitive. There are maybe a dozen of these boxes, too. I don't know how much lower media rate is--I haven't looked into it yet--but it's a lot. I don't know when the boxes will get there, the USPS doesn't know when the boxes will get there, and neither does my best friend. But they will, and it'll be way cheaper than any other shipping method.

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"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Some, although some of these options weren't available (or weren't clearly advertised the last time I was in the post office mailing something to the states a few years ago. (For what it's worth, I shipped Xpresspost.)

(Sorry, the formatting doesn't seem to have survived well.)

The 11 days one is the slowest rate Canada Post advertises with signs in their outlets. The rest are buried a bit.

They mention links to their rates guide, but the links don't say much more than "call us or visit us in person". They certainly didn't say 6-8 weeks. (Although those mail-order commercials that were so common in the 80s do make a lot more sense now if they were shipping from the states.)

I'm not saying there isn't a need for media rates, but there's no special reason Sohmer would have been told that ahead of time. I've certainly never heard of "media rate" before Sohmer brought it up. Canada Post certainly never mentioned it when I was sending stuff.

It's certain that Sohmer was indeed offering the least expensive shipping option, but it's also certain he didn't have full information when he offered that rate. If anybody wants me to track down that thread, let me know. You can judge for yourselves.

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A new miracle technique, we apply homeopathic methods to achieve scientific efficaciousness
for dilutions WAY beyond Avogadro's Limit. It's New! It's Fresh!
It's Placebo^[tm] Brand Power Drink! *[Use as directed. May increase kidney function.]

This might be a dumb question, but how does that work, exactly? Canadians receive something in the post and they're charged a duty before it gets delivered? Does the postal carrier collect the money?

Canadians owe duty on most imported goods, which is due and collected at the border. The duty is mainly aimed at commercial mass importation, not so much personal imports. There are waivers for certain kinds of goods, as well as personal exemptions for travelers that kick in if you're out of country for certain lengths of time. The US charges import duty as well, and have their own rules for personal travel exemptions. The Frontier Duty Free Association provides a current summary of the regulations in both directions.

Now, the fact that duty is due on import causes an obvious problem for mailed packages. As I explained above, to solve this, there are companies that have been given a mandate to advance the duty and cross packages on your behalf. Most carriers, Canada Post included, won't broker for you.

If a 3rd-party broker imports the package for you, they'll send it on and invoice you separately. They're apparently not allowed to hold the package until you pay it. UPS brokers import duty themselves on a 'charge on delivery' basis. I suspect they do retain or return packages for non-payment, but I've never gone out of my way to find out for certain. Grains of salt are required.

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for dilutions WAY beyond Avogadro's Limit. It's New! It's Fresh!
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I've been buying second-hand books from the US for many years.

They take a bit longer to arrive, all right, but there are great bargains,
especially if you buy several in one shipment...

If duties become too high then it might be profitable to use a print on demand service in Canada. Then when you order a foreign book, the seller would send it electronically to the service which would print one copy and mail it to you. No physical object would cross the border so there would be no duties. Even if it were a bit more expensive than paying the duty, it might be worth it for the faster delivery and more satisfying to evade the tax.

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Life is like a box of chocolates. All of your choices are bad for you.

Import duty actually works out to a bit less than getting hit with the federal and provincial sales taxes you'd pay through a print-on-demand service in Canada.

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New! It combines the power of science with the gentleness of your mother's best intentions!
A new miracle technique, we apply homeopathic methods to achieve scientific efficaciousness
for dilutions WAY beyond Avogadro's Limit. It's New! It's Fresh!
It's Placebo^[tm] Brand Power Drink! *[Use as directed. May increase kidney function.]

Well, pardon me, but I found the USPS bashing to be a bit unfair as well. If something is shipped fourth class it's going to take forever to arrive. If you want it overnight send it Priority or Express. You'll pay for it, just as you do with UPS. Did LICD every try to send something that way? Did it take forever? I don't know. From what I could tell from your post they sent it fourth class and were "shocked, shocked to discover" that it took a while to arrive. That's not "3rd world service," it is, IMO, a company acting irresponsably by not checking what the media rate actually means and now trying to pass the buck. Sorry. No sympathy from this end.

P.S. Eta C is not a postal employee nor does he play one on TV. He's just a not-so-humble physicist. Forgive him his ego.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

So, Eta C, is it your position then, that if you were to ship something to Canada through the USPS, you would necessarily know the details of what happens after the hand-off to Canada Post, or would you trust that the USPS and Canada Post have already worked out the logistics to their mutual satisfaction? The former is not a reasonable position. The latter is.

Sohmer made a mistake, just the once, in offering that rate. He did not have sufficient information, for whatever reason, to rule out that option. Nor, apparently, did his American clients who chose that shipping option from the several he'd listed (including overnight). If his American clients walked into that trap, I don't think it's reasonable to castigate a first-time canadian shipper for not recognizing what "media rate" means filtered through a non-USPS explanation.

You might also want to re-read my initial post with a bit less chip on that shoulder. I wasn't castigating USPS specifically for media rate, I was commenting solely on the fact that parcels shipped "ground" from Canada and advertised 8-10 days to the US can apparently end up on media rate without the shipper's knowledge. As far as I remember, LICD now ships UPS ground to the states, and it's been working well for them.

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New! It combines the power of science with the gentleness of your mother's best intentions!
A new miracle technique, we apply homeopathic methods to achieve scientific efficaciousness
for dilutions WAY beyond Avogadro's Limit. It's New! It's Fresh!
It's Placebo^[tm] Brand Power Drink! *[Use as directed. May increase kidney function.]