Working Hard To Make It Easy

We’re working on the EU shipping import duties and handling charges to get shipping to Europe back on again. I think there’s a solution in the pipeline but there’s still some technicalities to sort out in terms of fulfilment.

I’d like to make it as friction-free as possible and get all charges built into the checkout price so no one will have to pay at the door and it’ll be as transparent as possible.

When people talk about the pressures and pleasures of running your own business, it’s rarely said how much of your time is absorbed by pointless but unavoidable bureaucracy, In this case caused by Brexit. I don’t remember them mentioning that, do you? Idiots. I doubt they even knew about it themselves. They are hardly astute thinkers

So I'm hopeful that’ll be sorted before the Christmas trade kicks in, such as it is. It’s making everything more expensive of course and pricing people out of the market. It’s all so mean-spirited. I look forward to the day all these extra charges are removed by non-foolish governments. The annoying thing is everyone knows tariffs and import duties restrict trade and are bad for economic growth but those responsible for their introduction are too proud or ignorant to admit they believed something stupid. so double down on them as a policy and pretend they’re beneficial in opposition to the clear, naked facts that they’re not. They lie and dissemble all because they aren't big enough to say they were wrong, even though everyone
knows they are. Pathetic.

It’s even more crazy that you have to enter where the t-shirts are made for the tariff for that country to be applied. But of course little is that simple. Gildan shirts are made from USA-grown cotton, the fabric is constructed in Central America,cut and dyed somewhere else that I can’t possibly know (how could I?) and printed in the UK So you tell me where it was ‘made’? All to impose a random figure on the shirt based on its value. The funny thing is, it varies from batch to batch, so you have no idea the batch the wholesaler has sent you, is from the Central American route or Bangladesh but both areas attract different tariffs.

Who’s even checking a packet like ours in customs to make sure the country stated is where it actually was made - how do they even know where this particular shirt was made? And there must be millions every day. It’s unworkable on single shipments and someone should have the balls to admit it.

It’s as though they’re pretending International trade is like it was in 1850 and comes across oceans in tea chests, not just some punk-ass hippy like me sending a Robin Trower t-shirt to someone who lives in the middle of nowhere.

I look at the modern world in bewilderment that something so simple as mailing a shirt, could have purposely been made so difficult. It speaks to an ugly, narrow, selfish, ignorant mind that has no appreciation of reality.

So you end up feeling you are fighting the governments, as well as competitors in order to trade at all. And it really doesn’t have to be like this way. The fact that people have deliberately made it like this, it’s not an accident. Drives me nuts. Imagine having the idea to make lives actually more difficult and expensive when you don’t have to? It’s malevolent. It’s the politics of mendacity.

I mean, what we do is as simple make-and-sell business possible but it feels like we are drawn into a web of big business that obviously we’re not part of, classed the same at a company that makes aeroplanes or sinks.

Anyway, I don’t know why I’m telling you this, it’s not your concern really but just to make you aware, this whole t-shirt thing  might seem very simple but it’s anything but. You have to work hard to make things easy and even after 24 years it’s never been harder.