Kilts and Customs Duties - An Example

[ForresterModern]

Love it. :-) I guess if L Ron H could do it, then XMTS "Worshipful Society of the Kilt" members start queuing here...

High priest: Ham?

That's the spirit, Nick. Bishops, Steve, Jock, MacoRath, and depending on which religious model we wanted to use we could start drilling down a whole list of titles for almost any member. Presbyterian or Calvinist would probably historically appropriate, but I will leave that up to the historians of the group. What say ye, Todd?

jeff

[KiltedPilot]

I'm afraid the fact is that we pretty much refuse to send anything of value into Canada that way now, since the rate of 'loss' got to quite ridiculous levels.

Interesting experience Nick.

I was born in UK, and moved from UK to Canada a handful of years ago. I still have a lot of family in UK, sending letters, cards, presents. I have multiple bank accounts and credit cards etc in the UK. I continue to shop online at some of my favourite UK stores.

Thus, over the past few years, we've probably received over 1,000 letters from the UK, and 100-150 parcels. Never has one disappeared, or even been particularly late. Delivery time for Royal Mail/Canada Post parcels is from 2 days to 10 days, and about 6 days typical.

I also receive a lot of parcels via Canada Post from Japan, US, and Europe. None has gone missing.

As briefly mentioned in the other thread, when in the UK (and for a while afterwards), I used to run a small mail order business that sent 8,000 to 20,000 parcels from UK to North America per year. Canada Post never gave me the slightest problem. Rarely did USPS outright fail to deliver, but occasionally parcels took an unusually long time.

Hence your experience seems surprising to me. You might want to request information from the large membership of this forum to see if your company experience is repeated, or something related to your local Royal Mail facilities, etc.

I fully agree with you that there are many tradeoffs between delivery methods -- I often prefer FedEx for my business needs. Different factors favour different shipping methods. My only debate with you is that import costs ARE a manageable factor as well, and a huge one -- something you appeared to dispute.

Mike

[Fit2BKilted]

As a Canadian, I know this issue intimately... I stopped employing UPS entirely after I received an item valued at $72 and was charged $78 in "Customs & Brokerage Fees". The reason for this is that the Canadian regulations on couriers are vastly different than those imposed on Canada Post (the "national postal service" which is an independent Crown Corporation), and other National Carriers, like USPS and Royal Mail... It doesn't help that UPS appears to be using this fact to defray blame from its draconian brokerage-fee racket (because other carriers, like FedEx, don't apply such ridiculous charges for similar items).

I also learned that items entering Canada with declared values less than $20 are not subject to duty/taxes regardless of the carrier.

I made a posting about Canada Customs Tarrif Exemptions a long time ago here.