bunn

 The Shop on the Borderlands sells many things to many countries. Up till this year, our position on import duties and tariffs has been, more or less:  'if you want to  buy it, we'll post it: you are best placed to look up exactly what the country you live in charges for importing the things you've chosen to buy, and the postal service or courier will sort that out for you for a small fee'.  I'm sure this put some people off buying from us, but it was fairly clear to customers (we gave them warnings about it) and very easily manageable for us.

Then Mr Trump decided he was going to Tariff All the Things at extremely short notice (like less than a month!) 

In an attempt to make the filthy Foreigner (ie, us) pay rather than the US citizen, he insisted that not only would there be no exceptions for small parcels, but anyone who bought stuff from outside the USA and had it posted to them, would be billed at least $80 unless the seller prepaid the tariff.  

So suddenly we had to try to work out what the US tariff was going to be for everything we sold so we could charge and post appropriately.  This was complicated by the fact that tariffs are not based on where the Shop is based, or where the company that designed and commissioned the product is based, but where the physical object was made.  So, for example, some D&D books are printed in the USA, but some are printed in China, and some in Belgium.

And there's no way to predict where a specific book was printed, without taking it off the shelf and rummaging through it in the hope that it will have  'printed in Lithuania' written on it somewhere (Lithuania is a bit of a hotbed of RPG printing...)  Some books have no indication where they were printed at all, so you have to guess.  Some of our stock is 50 years old. Doesn't matter.  We still have to declare where it was made. 

Anyway, we did that for all the 12000ish Things in the Shop.  And we gave them all international product classification codes (which is how you declare you're selling dice and not books for tax purposes, for example) 

And we did it twice, because the first solution we had didn't work. (It was a quicker job the second time since the data was in and just had to be moved, but still. ) 

So, I tested ordering various products and they seemed to be getting what we thought was the right amount of tariff/customs fee appearing on them. Then we got a pleading email from a hopeful American, unable to find the thing they specially wanted in the USA, so we let them order - a book printed in the UK. They got charged the amount we expected by Royal Mail, 10% tariff plus 50p admin, and a week later, their book had reached them!  Hurray! 

So it all works now, right?  IF ONLY. We got another pleading American email, so we let that guy order too, and in a surge of confidence, turned off our message saying 'sorry no orders to the USA for now.'

But.  We put US Order #2 through the Royal Mail system, for three books made in Italy, and... RM charged us 50p admin fee for doing the duty for us, and nothing more.  But they were printed in Italy! Italy has a 15% tariff! 

So we rang Royal Mail, and said: why no tariff?  And they said: Oh it's fine. Tariffs don't apply to books.  

So we rang off and reinspected US Order #1, which was definitely a book, and definitely printed in the UK, and for which we were definitely billed 10% of the value for the tariff a week and a half ago.  And boggled. 

(I might not have got all the terminology 100% right, but I'm increasingly dubious that anyone has got this 100% right) 

Update:Parcel #1 had got tangled up in the massive update project and went out with the HS code saying it was a boxed board game by accident. So I think we're OK sending books without billing tariffs for them. Or, I hope so...

Hmm.  I need to work out where I'm going to put photos now.  I did try sharing them across from my Google account, since that's where my phone puts photos anyway, but I kept finding things were unexpectedly locked. I really hate the way that Google likes to hide options in the most unlikely places, presumably in case people should actually find and use them.  Maybe I should go find my old Flickr account. 

Anyway, this post is not about that.  It is about the Great Storm that came rolling in from the west on 18th Feb, which the Met Office christened Eunice, which sounds genteel.  It was NOT GENTEEL. 

Proceeding up the estuary at about 80mph, Eunice blew the window at one end of our sun room in, then it came INTO the sun room and lifted the roof off, jamming it vertically against the wall of the house. Poor Gothmog kitty was in the room at the time, but fortunately she ran to the door, and Pp managed to whiz in and grab her.  

For several hours the sunroom roof was wedged upright against the main house roof, while my various sketches and bits and pieces that were in that room got whirled away into the Cleddau, and we wondered if it would break all the windows as it bounced against the wall.  Fortunately, it then exploded, raining bits of itself all over the surrounding area and nearly slaying an incautious neighbour who had ventured outside wondering if the worst of the wind was dying down. Luckily, it just missed him. 

The insurance company was overwhelmed with people trying to claim, I think, and was very little help. They told us to ring round to try to find someone to fix the broken rooves locally that they could pay, but of course everyone was doing that.  Fortunately, our neighbour Yvonne, who seems to have 99999 useful cousins, has a cousin who is an architect, and was in touch with a small roofing contractor who seems to have absolutely zero 21st century presence.  He does hand-written quotes, has no email, and barely even answers his phone.  BUT that was fine, because it meant he actually had time to arrange to come fix the missing tiles on the main roof, which finally happened today, and to quote to replace the blown-off roof, which is planned to happen over the next two weeks. 

 Unfortunately, in the meantime rather a lot of water has run through the sun room into the rooms underneath, which we were getting converted into additional shop storage and a place to keep the canoe, and were SO CLOSE to being finished. 

The Canoe itself flew over a 4foot fence to visit the nearly-slain neighbour.  We haven't been over to get it back yet.  It seems like tempting fate to move it back outdoors to the place it took off from. 

Gothmog is now in residence in our bedroom. Thankfully, her litter box issue seems to have resolved, so I think maybe that was a medical thing that the antibiotics have helped with.  She seems quite happy now. 

Fankil the no-longer-missing grey kitty is living in the living-room.  A lot of his fur has fallen out and having been super sweet and cuddly and delighted to be home, he's now going through a bitey phase. I think the steroid injection & the lotion the vet gave us is helping him, but I am really not sure how much longer we can keep him in one room, he really wants more space. 

Nenya and the dogs continue to be fine, though Nenya is annoyed that she has been excluded from rooms she considered her own, and would also like the sun room back and is a bit shouty about it. 

Still, things are moving forward. As interesting times go, the war in Ukraine makes anything in the UK feel very small.