Stupid UPS!!

So my brother and his wife (bless their hearts) are a bit naive and don't grasp the nuances of international shipping to me...

SIL thinks it would be lovely to send me an umbrella from the MoMA for my birthday at the end of the month. Not knowing how long it would take to get here, she has it sent via expedited air mail from UPS. So UPS comes knocking on my door asking me for £22 COD to deliver my birthday gift. Of course, this is all a surprise since I wasn't warned it was coming. Luckily I'd been to the bank the day before and had a £20 on me! (To his credit, my bro quickly sent me the cash to cover it and apologized profusely.)

Still pissy, though, that I had to pay £11 VAT on an umbrella (plus on the expedited shipping, I've since learned) and then an £11 "brokerage fee" for the privilege of letting UPS pay that initial £11 for me when my gift cleared customs.

So all in all, this is one damned expensive umbrella... USD$48 for the umbrella, who knows HOW much for expedited overseas courier shipping, then another ~USD$40 for the VAT fiasco. It had better be a REALLY nice umbrella (can't open it until my birthday in a couple of weeks, I've been told)!

Shipping has become ridiculous back home!  My grandparents just mailed me a box and it was about $70 for 9 pounds!  Gah, I gag every time I think about it   I would have cried if I had sent it that way...poor thing, I hate UPS and US postal service-not their fault the prices went up but geez!  and Happy Birthday early

Ughh! Dont get me started on the high price of shipping stuff. Last christmas, my aunt, bless her, went around to all my family members houses and got the presents they got for me and DH and shipped it over.. she spent about $60 in shipping for one medium sized box AND it took 2.5 months to get here. I didnt get it until the begining of february. The tracking said to was stuck in NJ airport for nearly a month.

THEN i picked up some jam and biscuits to send to all my grandparents at the farmers market for christmas. Called UPS to get a price for shipping them after I bought them and they wanted £50 per box!!!!! It was only 2 jars of jam and 1 packet of biscuits. All my grandparents are divorced as well, so they were going to 4 different addresses. No way was I spending £200 to ship some stuff worth about £20.  So, I brought all the jam into work and sold them to my work mates. 

I always used USPS for shipping stuff to the UK it's still not cheap but way less expensive than UPS and it usually only takes a couple weeks max except around gift giving holidays =)

I shipped a box via USPS to Edinburgh over 2 months and it is MIA, I can't even explain how frustrated I am. 

I won't use UPS anymore. A few months ago, they left a package for my address with my neighbor. The package wasn't addressed to me, but I knew who the person was and had a forwarding address. I called UPS and asked them to come pick up the package, explained I had a forwarding address which they could use or not. Their reply was that they had done their job in delivering it to the address on the package and they wouldn't pick up or forward it! That's some customer service...

Coincidentally, I had a similar incident with a package delivered by DHL. They happily picked up the package and forwarded it.

I use the USPS flat rate boxes to mail stuff over now. It cost about $37 no matter how much it weighs and almost always gets there within a week.

But does the person I'm sending it to have to pay taxes and stuff on it?  I always mark that it's a gift on the customs form.

Gee, not surprisingly, HM Revenue & Customs gets this question frequently and therefore has a FAQ here, specifically to address why I have to pay an arm and a leg to receive a gift in the situation I listed in my original post. How helpful. The VAT is charged depending on the value of what you're sending. Key, though, is that it needs to be sent between two individuals. Anyway...

I have sent a letter to my family explaining all of this. It sucks that you can't ship via surface anymore using USPS. That's why everything costs so much now--it has to go airmail. Airmail = airplanes = fuel surcharges. Such is life!

And thanks, Swelch2 for the birthday wishes! I decided to be bad and open the brolly early, but I said I'd open it when it rains. Of course, we haven't seen more than a sprinkle since the damn thing arrived. Life teaches us many things... Patience is a lesson I receive frequently.

As someone who once worked with FedEx, the high cost of sending anything international goes primarily to customs.  To send a simple letter within the US costs around $25 for overnight.  For the same letter to go to Canada, $48.  For it to go to the UK, it costs $90.  That's also the same for it to go to China, Japan, El Salvador, Germany, Sweden, Russia, etc.  The cost breakdown is about 35% to customs (that's $30), 35% to actual cost (fuel, equipment, etc), and about 15% to salaries.

Happy (upcoming) Birthday AngelaK!

Personally, I always found UPS to be quite expensive.  My family use USPS.  I just got a package last week from my Mom it weighed in at just under 19 lbs and was a pretty big box, but it only cost her about $80.

I tried to mail my mom some biscuits & sweets last year via Royal Mail and they wanted £50, because it weighed just over 2kg.  The ladies in the post office were nice enough to try and get me the best price (one of 'em's friends with SIL, so she's helpful).  They said if I got the weight down to under 2kg it would dramatically bring the price down.

I usually ship my X-Mas cards over for all my family (spread over the states) in one lot to one of my parents or a sibling and they then send them on or pass prezzies out accordingly.

Good luck informing the family for future reference!