All she mentioned was that since the restructuring of the company, that was the policy. I don't think she really knew why. She said they were operating with a "small" staff now. I read between the lines on that one that maybe they didn't export because they didn't have a shipper familiar with export anymore. There is a very small difference with invoice paperwork(country of origin to be stated on invoice and no taxes charged) and if you ship via USPS, you usually have to go take the parcel to a Post Office yourself.(UPS & FedEx pick up and do an export manifest for you, but SS stopped using UPS/FedEx to ship to Canada 3 or 4 years ago for some reason unknown to me and would only use USPS going north, resulting in some higher shipping costs and longer in transit times for me-but I was OK with that).a1gutterman wrote:I understand your frustration and can knot understand the "why" of it either. Did she explain their reasoning?
As I was composing this I thought of an incident last Feb?/09 when SS was restructuring. I saw some SS items on eBay advertised as brand new in the boxes. They appeared to be listed by a member of SS's ownership family. Under the shipping criteria it was stated they would only accept bids from the USA and would only ship to USA addresses. I sent an email through eBay asking if they would allow me to bid and stated I would pay via a confirmed PayPal acc't in USD and would pay all extra shipping costs, thus no unusual risks to a seller. I have done this with other eBay sellers in the past if their item was attractive enough to me and 95% of the times they get back to me with a "Sure, no problem" and a friendly comment or two reply. This time I got a prompt reply- one word- "NO". I watched the auctions and noted the 2 or 3 items I had the most interest in all sold for less than I was going to bid for them. Maybe they equate exporting with importing, ie: "BUY American" policy. Or maybe they have been burned by a shady business practice of some Oriental supplier and don't trust any foreigner any more. Whatever?
DTM