US in not EU

The USA is not part of the EU. This has some funny implications, like the fact that I have, technically speaking, imported goods from the USA to Germany, which makes it even funnier, as Germany is not my homeland. So instead of getting the package directly to my desk I had been officially summoned to the duty office to clear the consignment. This resulted in a not very short trip by U-bahn to Garching-Hochbrück. (check it out on a map!)

All this by a single Amazon.com order, mere two books, $53 including shipping and handling. Well, there is German Amazon, but because of the exchange rate (USD is cheaper) and the price difference (books were cheaper is USD, even ignoring the exchange rate) I went for Amazon.com instead of Amazon.de. [The difference, excluding shipping and handling, was whopping 40%, and settled at 25% after shipping and handling fee was added]. For those interested - the duty for books in Germany is 0% and the V.A.T. [referred to as Mehrwertsteuer here] is 7%, but… one doesn’t have to pay anything if the amount due is below 5€.

The problem was, it took 6 weeks for the books to arrive in Germany. What is worse is that it took 3 weeks before they were dispatched, even though they were available and would have been shipped within a day or two if I were in the US. This is despicable, I think Amazon pushes more expensive shipments this way. However, the books were unavailable at that time in Amazon.de, so it didn’t matter much.

Today I placed another order with Amazon, but it was German Amazon this time. Having considered the price difference (only $5 in favor of Amazon.com) and near-instant shippment of Amazon.de it was a no-brainer.

I just wonder how I’m going to get all this stuff back to Poland… ;-)