迷失的老美

It all seems like a great idea at first doesn’t it? Why piss away all that money on extra luggage, or air freight? With the mail service, you might be even more worried if you are shipping anything large, and the sticker shock can really hurt.

You go off to USPS, UPS and Fedex to check pricing…. all service to China is ONLY air-mail, and as such means that it costs a few hundred bucks to ship… ouch.  It’s just personal effects, a few things that you really care about, but the rest… mostly junk.

Then the realization hits that you *could* mail it, but you would have to have it sent to a friend’s place, which would introduce more variables into the mix that you really could live without, and if you lug it with you as checked, good luck fitting it all in a taxi or hotel room..

So… the notion of sea-freight hits.   An LCL of 1 cubic meter for $164 to Tianjin? It sounds like a steal, but it’s not and here’s why.

The port will only allow bonded companies to handle your shipment.  They pay out the ass for trucks that are registered and allowed within the facility… and they have minimum charges (don’t bother checking around, they are all 3500RMB).  And as a fun side, they are only going to deliver to you personally.  In order to avoid getting hit for duty on everything, you must be a resident here, and that shipment must go to you and only you.

THC and Port charges… say hello to another 1784RMB, this is not negotiable and is what it is.  If you needed time to finish getting everything settled for your residency, you are going to get hit with storage charges as well… another 1086RMB in my case.

Quarantine/customs inspection: 400RMB.  Flat fee, non-negotiable.  This is what they charge to look at the packing list and decide….

Customs duty.  Despite being a resident, and this being personal effects, there are certain items which still get hit for duty.  Mainly electronics, furniture and appliances… in fact, here’s a nice rundown:

Duty Guidelines
• Furniture – 10%
• Books-10% (for returning Chinese)
• CDs, VCDs, DVDs –RMB30 per piece. (may be subject to customs screening)
• Alcohol – below 12% @RMB50 per bottle
• Alcohol – above and inclusive of 12% @RMB250 per bottle
• Foodstuffs – 10%
• Electronic luxury items – 20% – see below for examples

So, this adds up fast, as the dutiable prices don’t distinguish between new and used items, broken or intact.  There is no leeway at all here, no bargaining and receipts for actual price of the item make 0 difference to the outcome.  That $268 monitor you bought on sale is $732 as far as they care and they are going to hit you for $150 on it…. the same as if it were a laptop.

So, as you can see by now, it ain’t cheap and my 7 year old laser printer ends up costing me 600RMB… enough to have just bought a new one.  My glass and steel L-desk (made in america) which does not exist here in any serious way only cost me 100RMB in duty though, and that’s reasonable as I only paid $35 for it…. and was the primary reason I went with sea freight in the first place.

So, in the end I got sapped for 8270RMB on this side, plus the cost of the palletized box (another $50) and the ship cost ($164) for a grand total of $1425.  The only reason I didn’t just abandon the shipment was because of the other goodies inside.  Rather than deal with excess baggage fees (which are definitely not reasonable anymore), I filled that cubic meter box as full as it would go with literally everything I could….

To have repurchased everything here:

Printer (a good one)- 1000RMB (optional), Monitor – 3500RMB, Bike lock – 1000RMB… leaving me with a budget of about 3000RMB to replace all my good clothes, a columbia coat, and other irreplaceable keep sakes, not to mention a desk… which was the whole reason I did this in the first place!

Excess luggage would have been a better deal, as it would have worked out to approximately $11 a kilo, minus the giant box, about 80 kilo total, 3 boxes for everything.  $880 in baggage fees and no one at customs caring… leaving me with an interesting task of storing it all for about a month or so.  The 8270RMB figure was unknown to me, so it sounded insane.

Shipping via fedex or USPS…. somehow ends up more expensive.  Shipping via air-freight… would have been smarter (and about half the cost).

The lesson to learn from all this is simple.  When shipping an LCL to China, do it via air-freight, and when it comes time to declare items for customs, be vague as all hell while leaving one or two items sitting there for them to suck a little tax on.  As long as they get some, they are basically happy and satisfied, trying to skirt by with none at all…. not gonna happen.