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

[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.