ROS Swag - Jackets Edition (Deadline June 27)

Alright, I talked with a few postal people and I’ve figured out all the custom logistics required for most of the world (have customs labels and figured out how to afix them outside, thanks for the note @Martin_Guenther). I think I might have some additional work for some middle eastern folks that ordered, but EU and Asia Pacific have been figured out (assuming your country is accepting mail due to COVID, which apparently some South American and African nations aren’t).

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Remember to pay or arrange something with me before June 27! If you do not pay/discuss with me prior, your order may not be fulfilled. I’m not made of :moneybag: :moneybag: :moneybag: to front $2,000 worth of merch.

As much as I want a jacket, I don’t want 5 boxes of jackets consuming my apartment for a year :laughing:

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Anecdotally, over 50% of the world’s insurance regulation was written in German. Is why my self-driving bus wasn’t allowed to drive onstage at IFA Berlin🙄

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Well - it’s not “commercial” in the sense that I don’t intend to re-sell the items; instead, they are for my personal use. But it’s still commercial in the sense that I get a brand new item in exchange for money; it’s not an unsolicited gift. There are certain exemptions for gifts, but please don’t tick the “gift” checkbox on the customs forms. Chinese sellers routinely do that, and unsurprisingly the customs officers have caught on to it.

(Small correction: it’s the American importer who would have to pay those taxes and duties.) I googled it for 20 minutes and couldn’t find the answer to your question. Some sites say that items for personal use up to a certain threshold (I read $2,500 somewhere!) are free to import into the US. If this is true, I’m now jealous - in Germany, that threshold is 22€.

Paying customs duties and import taxes is the norm worldwide, outside of some free trade agreements (like EEA within the EU, NAFTA between USA, Mexico and Canada and so on). There was supposed to be the TTIP between the EU and US, but then this happened:

I personally was opposed to TTIP anyway, but that’s another story.

Combining shipments may even make it worse. In the case of Germany, if the value of goods + shipping exceeds 150 €, there will be an additional 4% of customs duties (on top of the 19% import turnover tax).

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Goeff mentioned to me its $2,000 for US to Japan as well, so this seems like mostly a policy with EU, not the US (not that we lack policies that irritate the EU, I’m sure). After $2,000 I totally get it, that’s high value imports, but 22 Euros is laughably small. Including shipping means I could only ship you an empty envelope.

“boost the EU’s economy by €120 billion, the US economy by €90 billion and the rest of the world by €100 billion … assault on European and US societies by transnational corporations”, my neck’s hurting from whip last from that summary.

So in short:

  • Non-gift
  • Customs form affixed to the outside

are the major take aways here. There’s still fees to be paid on delivery / pickup but not much I can do around that. I’m working with a distributor directly (so not something like Tee spring, but the people that sell Tee spring their shirts) so there’s no option to have them do end-to-end shipping to get around it by using EU stock, they all come to my door in a few large boxes for me to sort -> pack -> ship. Believe it or not, even with the import fees, for most countries I think it’ll be cheaper. Those end-to-end places take a massive margin (garments would have been 30%+ more expensive).

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It’s a Japanese thing. The US is completely uninvolved. Anywhere in the world to Japan (except maybe some sanctioned countries, I suppose) gets the same treatment. I’m not certain it’s $2000 but it is significantly high enough to not be a problem for everyday Amazon.com shopping. Certainly it’s over $500.

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It’s an EU-wide regulation too, and not specific to the US.

I was also under the impression that Japan’s limit for mail imports was 10,000 Yen @gbiggs. Looks like there is a 200,000 Yen cutoff when entering the country and for simplified tariff calculation when receiving packages though.

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Hi,

I would like to purchase this swag. I am from Bengaluru, India. Kindly let me know the cost and procedure to order.

Thanks

Please see the order form in the links above, instructions are in there

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This is quickly getting very off-topic, but I feel the need to clarify two things so that this doesn’t come across as some anti-American policy:

  1. The 19% import VAT has nothing to do with the US specifically; all non-EU countries are treated the same. The reason that it doesn’t apply to other EU countries is the European Single Market, so for the purpose of taxation and customs duties the EU is treated as if it were a single country. Also, VAT has already been paid for products from other EU countries, so they don’t get any preferential treatment from this policy.
  2. More importantly, the reason that this 19% import VAT exists here and not in the US is that all (?) EU countries have a VAT, while the US has a sales tax instead. In the end, “it taxes the same people and businesses the same amounts of money, despite its internal mechanism being different” (Wikipedia). In the EU it has to be paid directly on import, while in the US it’s only paid during the final sale to the customer (alternatively, it has to be reported as use tax by the customer). Wikipedia has a summary:

Now let’s get back to discussing the great jackets that you made! :eu: :heart_eyes: :us:

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Haha thanks for the clarification. I was poking fun at my own government but I appreciate the specificity!

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The Jackets look awesome!
I just noticed that the ROS logo on the jackets has only 6 dots instead of 9. @smac it a design choice or a mockup issue?

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Yes, I will have that fixed. I’m shocked that me nor anyone else pointed that out until now!

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Updates

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well, 9/9, you got this one right :joy:

That would have been a hilarious misprint. Years later snowballs into a formal change of the logo to only 6 dots :laughing:

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Should have gone for 18. It’s ROS * 2, right?

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Quick last call: Last orders in by tomorrow at Midnight San Francisco time. Any orders after that point will need to be directly confirmed by me.

Hi @smac - Greetings from Denmark and thanks from the initiative.

I hope I am reading the time-zones correctly and that the deadline is not up yet, because I just ordered a jacket and the paypal should have been processed already :slight_smile:

Yup, you are fine. You have another 12 hours to submit an application and 36 hours to submit a payment.

We currently have 42 orders of which 10 still need payment. I know @Katherine_Scott likes metrics so here’s some:

  • We have orders from: USA, Saudi Arabia, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, Mexico, Taiwan, China, Germany, Japan, South Korea, France, and Scotland
  • Assuming I don’t get absolutely destroyed by shipping fees, we’re on target to raise ~$300 for our goal of designing a navigation2 logo! That’s enough to hire a cheap designer on 99Designs.
  • Exactly 50% of orders are international relative to the US
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