The latter days are here

[flemmings]

So yesterday, see, I come home to find an utterly unexpected package from kinokuniya in my front door, as described here. And I open it all happily and blah blah. Seems I could have lost a hand or something so what a good thing I didn't read The Star before opening my kinokuniya package.

Equally, amazon.jp books arrive today. $16 of GST on five volumes whose combined price is about $30. GST is 6%. How did they arrive at this figure? I shall squint at the numbers but I bet it was by adding in amazon's shipping costs. OTOH Fedex only charged me $7 handling. OTOOH this is still being screwed right, left and centre and I say the hell with it.

Comments

[stormcloude]

Oh, those covers make my tummy churn. :(

Those import costs are ridiculous. I know that Amazon US is starting to list Japanese books, can you try putting the isbn numbers into Amazon.ca to see if they'd get them or would they still charge you the import fees?

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

In fact, it wasn't just the shipping costs. That included, my total was $66CDN. Squinting at the label I see 'Value for tax purposes- $266.' They added $200 to the value and then themselves calculated the GST on that sum- for books whose value was $28. Have written them an email asking just WTF is going on. But I'm pretty sure they always do that, because the one other time I had to pay GST I couldn't reconcile it with the cost of the books even with shipping.

I can start asking amazon.ca but I doubt they have that much in the way of manga. Nice if they did- GST is calculated only on the cover price of the book. Still it seems more sensible to go through book1 or even flipping Kinokuniya in NY with their 10% markup. So a manga from there costs me $12. I'm not paying $8 a volume for shipping, which is what this order averages out to.