Customs SUCKS

Those bastards have had a package of mine since the 13th. The content of which has 156 lasers. I am getting paranoid I am never going to get my damn package. Has anyone ever had their shit held by customs for so long. Those sons a bitches better reimberse me for the ass load of money I spent on fast shipping.

In my experience, if anything is held for that long, they have either sent it to be destroyed/inspected or, they are still disassembling your stuff.

digital_blue said:

In my experience, if anything is held for that long, they have either sent it to be destroyed/inspected or, they are still disassembling your stuff.

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A package like this one would not be destroyed right away..they should send a letter saying that if you want to claim it and you have certification for the >5mw you have X amount of days.

Correct me if im wrong but im pretty sure that is how they handle these type of things in customs..

The 13th, as in 1 week ago today?

I've definitely had a package in customs for longer than that. Plus, if it's USPS, they're bad to not update the tracking info immediately. For instance, I had a single laser coming in from Canada say on USPS.com that it was in customs for over a week, and then still say it was in customs 2 days after it was delivered. It ended up being a total of 8 days at customs for that one single laser

1 week isn't a problem, don't panic.

Customs once detained my package(a large transformer) for two days. I ended up with "wind it yourself" transformer. Damn bastards decided to unwind all 2000 turns of enamel wire in an attempt to find something...

What dirty fuckers for unwinding your transformer. That's messed up. I am guessing they wont check all 157 lasers. We'll see. I let you guys know how this unwinds?

These days, I'm weary of ordering anything that is too easily "molested" by customs. As for my transformer, I ended up spending 6 painstaking hours carefully rewinding it myself.

Last year I had a customer who had stuff held up in customs (he was in Australia - their customs is the worst IMO for everything!) for about 4 months! They didn't destroy or confiscate anything, just held onto the package and contents (not a laser) and it took the poor guy forever to get them to release it. If you're in the US, it's hard to say - luckily I've never had anything held up (that I knew of) that I've imported here.

Not to sound insenitive or dick-ish, but 156 lasers in the same shipment?!

Damn, son!

I would file that under "T", for "Tempting Fate".

At the risk of seeming paranoid, I've always refrained from ordering "questionable" items in quantities large enough to generate extra attention (or really hurt if I lose it to customs on either end). Absinthe (back when it was illegal) one bottle at a time out of Switzerland and France, Russian antiquities (it's not exactly legal to export anything over 70-years-old out of Russia) at less than 5 lbs. per parcel, uranium ore samples out of Ukraine at under 100g, and other items "of interest" in miniscule enough amounts that it doesn't even register as a 'blip' on the customs radar in the originating or destination country.

And good luck with the whole reimbursement thing. That's about as likely as Oprah delivering my free two-piece-and-a-biscuit in person.

If it's an issue of customer demand, and you want to save some money with a quantitiy discount so you wait until you've got a lot of orders in, do a little more work on your sales projections so you can order your stock in advance of purchase and save a little on your shipping. That way, you actually have the lasers on-hand when the order is made and increase your customer satisfaction by shipping the lasers out right away (thereby increasing repeat patronage and word-of-mouth advertising among your client base -- further decreasing any chance of being left with surplus merchandise).

And, if that's not the case, :wtf: do you need 156 lasers for, anyway? Party favors?

Well I do sell them and for me to keep the cost down of shipping it is more practical for me to order 150 or so at a time. Usually I have overlap so that I am not out of stock of anything ever but this time customs screwed me. I have not posted any for sale as I do not have them but rather I am waiting. It is basically like customs is taking money out of my pocket though for every transaction that I am not making. I am not a very happy person right now.

Ah! Now I see.

Yeah, customs sucks moose c*ck.

Yeah, customs sucks undoutably.
It's not that they want money; here we only pay taxes if value>22€.
It's cause that here they are at the arse-end of nowhere!
It costs me nearly 1 hour with the tram or 2 Liters of fuel to get there - one way
for most of my DX orders i so pay more than the package is woth
and now after my 100€ sled order they seem to hold every damn package of me...

yobresal said:

Well I do sell them and for me to keep the cost down of shipping it is more practical for me to order 150 or so at a time. Usually I have overlap so that I am not out of stock of anything ever but this time customs screwed me. I have not posted any for sale as I do not have them but rather I am waiting. It is basically like customs is taking money out of my pocket though for every transaction that I am not making. I am not a very happy person right now.

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Did you file the paperwork with CDRH to import them legally?
If you didn't, they are doing their job.
Steve

Lasers under 5mW do not require any paperwork for the CDRH.

yobresal said:

Lasers under 5mW do not require any paperwork for the CDRH. As for the 3 100mW lasers I would rather them just take those stupid things destroy them and hurry up and send me the rest of my package.

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Is the 5 mW a approved device with a accession number?

Steve

These people don't know sh*t about anything, even less about technology (yes this is one of my most hated topics, you'll see me giving a strong opinion... sorry, can't be neutral here ) so they end up destroying everything or just making you pay a sh*tload of cash for stupid things. My experience here in Argentina is kinda different, customs officers VERY often steal stuff ("Hey look at this new camera! I need one for my cousin's birthday..." "-Here you go! Have a new 4GB memory for it!") and nobody ever gets what they ordered. That's if you don't get the package. If not they just destroy it for fun, because they don't care (I've seen my packages being thrown around the customs "office" as if they were potatoes). And don't you dare say ANYTHING to them or they're more likely to spit on you while you get the receipt of a 50% tax on anything you bought (50% on the price they THINK what you have inside costs, which might even be higher than the original price).



Ohhh.......this feels so good...