TL;DR I didn’t make it in time. Fuck you Trump!
Edit: For those asking, this was https://www.irvwpc.com/ Please support them if you can.
Honestly; I’m impressed they both messaged you and gave you options.
Usually you wouldn’t find out until the mailman is demanding payment for the package he’s holding hostage in front of you.
I was surprised too! I guess Canadians hold up to their reputation 🙂👍
Yeah, Canadians are good people. I like them a lot.
Canada has all sorts of people, like every other country. Canadian mining companies are awful in Mexico, negotiating draconian concessions from corrupt governments, which allows them to extract minerals very cheap while ignoring environmental laws.
I understand that corrupt politicians are to blame, but Canadian businessmen can be surprisingly impolite and exploitative.
Canada as a nation has a concept of common good.
America is obsessed with the idea of not helping the poor because it fucks up the incentives and they’ll get lazy.
I think we all know which is more moral.
AtkinsRéalis (known as SNC-Lavalin at the time) is a Canadian construction company that was at the centre of a huge scandal in Canada. They were caught bribing the son of Libian dictator Gaddafi to get a contract to build a prison, allegedly for political prisoners.
While the Justice Minister was having this company prosecuted, the Prime Minister (Justin Trudeau) demanded that she give AtkinsRéalis a slap on the wrist and a deferred prosecution agreement. When she refused, she was driven from her position.
Canada’s government has a history of propping up bad actors like this, and goes out of their way to support several oligopolies that run significant chunks of the Canadian market. Bell/Rogers/Telus own most of Canada’s mobile and internet offerings, Loblaws/Sobeys/Metro own most of Canada’s grocery stores, much of Canada’s produce and meat are controlled by cartels, etc… The maple syrup cartel is very powerful and wealthy and yes you’re reading that right, there is a maple syrup cartel and even a maple syrup black market.
One special mention goes out to the Canadian Real Estate industry, which is full of actual crooks all over the place and just disgusting. Did you know in Canada it is legal for a real estate agent to represent both sides of a purchase? Agents also will refuse to work with any of the bargain agencies that charge less than the standard 2.5% commission, basically locking them out of the industry. This crap is part of why housing prices have bubbled so hard, and together with price fixing by landlords they have managed to keep Canadian housing prices at levels so stupid homelessness has increased several times over.
Canadian people are often too fixated on not being seen to be a problem, what some call “politeness”, to the point they won’t even stand up for themselves. That unwillingness to protest or try to change things has allowed this to happen for a very long time. Because of this awful “politeness” many Canadians are even cheering on new laws limiting union action.
tl;dr Canada is a banana republic and Canadians are cucked
I heard of how nice Canadians are, but where I live, all the Canadians I met so far are a bit of douche. Maybe it is just coincidence on my part, or the nice ones stay in their country.
Or if everyone around you is an asshole then …
Is the USPS even equipped to collect customs fees? As USian I’ve never paid an import fee as an end consumer ever in my entire life. All of this is so stupid.
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You never had to pay it because there was a longstanding rule called “De Minimis” which exempted all items under $800 from import taxes.
I can understand why they’d want to get rid of this… It was very generous and often meant that buying goods from an overseas supplier was cheaper than buying the exact same items from a US-based supplier. For example, I’ve bought MikroTik hardware from a Latvian supplier (Getic) because it ended up noticeably cheaper than buying from a US store.
Most countries have duty-free thresholds that are much lower, around the equivalent of $50-100 before taxes and duties are applied. The US limit used to be $200 until 2016.
In Germany the threshold is around 200 Euro, more precisely up to an import VAT of 10 Euros, where the state can’t even be bothered with the paperwork. 150 for import duties, though that doesn’t apply to alcohol, tobacco and perfume, unless everything is under 45 Euros and both sender and recipient are natural persons and no money has been exchanged.
You don’t want to completely abolish thresholds as you don’t want to spend more money on collecting taxes and duties than you collect. The general strategy of the financial police seems to be to make paying duties as inconvenient for private citizens as possible, they’ll hold back the parcel and you have to go to them, probably a couple of towns over, and fetch it in person. The smart thing to do when buying from alibaba or such is to choose shipping from a EU warehouse as then all the import stuff has been dealt with by the seller.
We still do have duties within the single market, btw, because different taxes on alcohol, tobacco, etc. Relevant mostly for ølvikingar.
protectionism doesn’t work tho
I agree, and don’t think there should be any tariffs.
Having said that, a US store that has to pay sales tax is never going to win over a foreign store that doesn’t have to pay sales tax. Even after shipping, the exact same product will likely be cheaper to buy from the European store.
If you buy something from Europe under the de minimis exception, there’s no tax applied at all. European countries/companies usually don’t tax buyers from outside the EU, and the US doesn’t tax it either.
Applying the same tax for both US and international purchases makes sense IMO. This is what Australia does: The sales tax rate is 10% across the whole country, and foreign stores that sell to Australians have to collect 10% tax and send it to the Australian government. Collecting taxes at the point of payment, even for foreign stores, avoids customers having to pay taxes separately when the package arrives in the country.
Props to whoever this company is. This is one of the best bits of customer service I’ve seen in years.
Solid boundaries, clearly communicated. Giving the customer a choice without hurting their own bottom line. I agree. Excellent handling of the situation.
This should be the standard lol. Who you dealing with, the mafia?
Pretty standard business practice for the U.S. is “The Customer Can Always Get Fucked.” There’s a lot of money that’s basically just been stolen from me because I got tired with fighting the company to just ship me the thing I paid for, and I either bought the thing somewhere else or decided I didn’t want it anymore. Most companies don’t even actually have customer service, just chatbots or outsourced chumps who only seem to exist for Americans to yell at, because they have no authority to do, view, or fix anything.
I mean technically it’s not the company’s responsibility. If you’ve ordered something and they’ve sent it in a reasonable time frame and it just gets charged extra on entry. It’s not the company putting the price up, it’s your own government, so you don’t really have a recourse.
I may don’t know how the law works but I believe (at least in my vountry) if you agree on thr conditions you can’t pull a Darth Vader and alter the conditions after signing/ordering and paying.
Now if there is a clause that states otherwise this may change.
But I agree, at least they are open and upfront with it.
Doesn’t matter on their end. If they wanted to they could ship it and let it get held up by customs with a demand to pay the tariff to release it.
Import duties are not always part of the agreement.
They didn’t change the rules, there is now a charge by the government on it getting delivered, not by the company.
I would change “not always” to “practically never”. Every e-commerce site I have ever used warns you that you are responsible for import duties if shipped internationally.
They are not changing anything. They are warning the customer import charges wil incur if the purchase proceeds. They gain nothing and stand to lose a sale.
Tariffs? Oh right, import taxes. Fuck Trump.
Ew…I don’t even want to know what cheeto based sexual diseases you’d get from fucking trump…
I worry it’s a lot, and many different varieties. They may be thunder-doming in his body as we speak, with only the injections from the pre-teen blood banks he has trapped in the basement keeping everything at bay.
Fun fact: he’s powered by syphilis - keeps him crazy but it keeps him going.
drug induced dementia, and incontinence.
And most of the media went right along with wording such as “tariffs on China” rather than than “tariffs on US buyers”
They should just call them import or sales taxes, the average person doesn’t get tariffs.
MSMs are totally complicit because the owners of these msms are trump supporters. CNNs and the others are just fox-lite.
Hey, at least the company seems decent and understanding. I just hope stuff getting more expensive will change the minds of some Trump supporters that aren’t completely braindead yet.
Both of them?
It is inane that one of the options is “just hold on for a few days and see what happens” and that it is a viable option at all. Government is in shambles.
This is 100% because of Trump’s flip flop ways. Fuck this guy and his MAGA cult.
There’s only one thing businesses hate more than tariffs and that’s uncertainty. They would be happier with the tariffs being definite, than this maybe existing and maybe not existing on a almost daily basis.
Because even if he gets rid of the tariffs, he’ll try this again in a few weeks once he’s forgotten about all of the push back and has randomly decided that Canada is still shipping drugs into the US. Because fentanyl can’t be made in the US, everyone knows that.
He’s stupid but not that stupid. He doesn’t even care where any drug originated from. He surely slotted “hot-button drug name” into place and blamed Canada because he wants to put pressure on them.
One of the few things in his entire life Donald has learned and been able to apply is the US Republican playbook for blame-throwing.
He’s stupid but not that stupid
I’m very certain he is that stupid
“Additionally, the $800 exemption for low-value goods has been removed.”
I didn’t even know such a thing existed, it’s not something reported on the news.
So every product will be hit with the tariff raising prices, and not just expensive products getting the tariffs. Yikes!
This is what allowed Temu and Alibaba and Wish and the like to happen (their business model was to send every single product as a single package worth under 800$, leading to enormous shipping times and waste etc., but they don’t have to pay import taxes).
damn!
And it’s not even this government’s first big unambiguous fuck you to the common people.
All the business owners voted trump and now they’re crying about free trade 😂
I hope they all fucking starve. I mean it won’t happen but I can dream.
Good thing there isn’t hundreds is miles of unprotected border to snuggle across.
Hmmm… sounds like I need to be spending more time at the border. Question: do we get to choose who we snuggle with or is it like a first come first served situation
Question: what would happen if lots of people swarmed right next to the border without actually crossing?
We’d have to snuggle with our fellow Americans. That would be weird.
That’s a lot of snuggling
Its a little bit of sexy snuggling that could happen anywhere and any time!
Wish the company name was included. They seem to have their shit together.
Me too. I’m on the right side of the border and would happily order from this company if they sell something I need.
Soooooo, what happens if you drive to Canada, buy something, and then drive home?
You’d have to declare it and pay any import taxes on it, same as you would have had to do before the tariffs.
CBP website still says personal exemptions of $200 per person exist if you’ve been out of the USA for 48 hours or more, but who knows if that still applies with the trump bull in the international trade china shop.
“You may still bring back $200 worth of items free of duty and tax. As discussed earlier, these items must be for your personal or household use.”
The way I read it you don’'t have to be out for more than 48 hours. It’s really not phrased very clearly though.
If you cannot claim other exemptions because you have not been out of the country for at least 48 hours, you may still bring back $200 worth of items free of duty and tax.
Smuggling?
Your butt will be probed for illegal immigrants, drugs or car parts
They don’t even bother with your car trunk anymore, that’s too obvious. Straight into the anus they search.
I cant wait until the European/Mexican/Chinese parts that I order from the USA that always arrive with a customs declaration of Origin:USA … starts biting me in the ass because of their ignorance.
the better option is to just stop doing business with American shops. and thats what I’ve chosen, the USPS and Canadian Postal service are both such shitholes, that I have legitimatley recieved stuff from the UK, Poland and Denmark faster than I’ve recieved stuff fom Illinois and Iowa , in the orders I’ve made this year. For small things too.
Any time an eligible item crosses the US / Canada border, a 25% tariff is applied. This is how the US does it, so this is what the Canadian government is copying.
This is terrible for auto manufacturing, where various parts cross the border multiple times between raw materials, loose parts, assembled parts and assembled vehicle. Every time those parts or materials cross either border, it gets tariffed 25%.
I believe if your item comes from the US, lands in another country, gets re-labeled and then enters Canada, it won’t be tariffed, but don’t quote me on that.
How do they define “an item”, because couldn’t a bunch of people get together and order stuff from outside the US and then just have it all delivered in one big box? Are they going to open every box to make sure that there’s only one item in it, how do they know it’s not just one big item?
For example if I order one washing machine then that’s one item but if I order various parts for a washing machine then that’s lots of items, but technically the washing machine already contained those parts that were considered one item
The tax is on the value , if you declare your washing machine has value of 1$ then the tax would be labelled accordingly but that would be a fraud.
Hence if you order parts of the washing machines you would have to declare value of the individual part and it would be taxed accordingly.
Does anyone actually know why we are putting tariffs on Canadian goods?
Because Trump thinks he’s Putin and wants to annex Canada.
Because Trump has a toddler’s level of understanding of how international trade works, along with a toddler’s tendency to throw tantrums when challenged.
Because Trump is a Russian asset intent on causing as much destruction to the USA as he can.
Align the US with other partners
My theory is that they want to control the North-West Passage, which due to climate change will become a high traffic trade route. Something currently dominated by Panama (which he also wants). So they’re putting pressure on Canada now.
Greenland is in a similar situation but I think there may also be oil and such there as well.
Because trump is a fucking brain-dead narcissistic man-child moron? What more explanation are you expecting?
Trump says it’s because China, Canada, and Mexico are bringing fentanyl in.
He just changed his reason to “Make America rich again”. Apparently he forgot about the drugs thing.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/trump-order-tariffs-steel-aluminum-b2695793.html
It’s a tax increase which can be (and is being) mis-portrayed as something that the seller pays, when in fact it’s the buyer that pays it.
In practice what Trump did was institute the equivalent of an additional 25% sales tax for all Americans when they buy goods manufactured in Canada or Mexico, but because this tax is usually payed by companies (which do most of the importing) and most people aren’t at all familiar with how Import/Export works, he seems to be getting away with portraying it as a tax on Canada and Mexico.
(The concern of those countries is not that they pay more - which they don’t - it’s that a selective “sales tax” that only applies to products they export to the US makes their products less competitive on price when sold in the US, hence they will sell less which is bad for their companies)
I’ve seen some theories around that the purpose of this significant increase in tax is to pay for the tax cuts for the wealthy that the Republicans are passing.
Hold off. Kraznov is getting so much shit he is going to walk it back, so he says. Can’t trust him any more than a rabid bat though.
But this will make the cost of eggs go down!/s
I bought a bunch of electronics from China back in December. No regrets.
Trump is a Russian asset. America will fall within a year. Russia and China will expand their territories freely until Europe is ready to arm itself.
