UK Bombers — Crazy Customs Tax on GB Hoodie?

Hey guys,

Just had an outstanding balance of £12.30 in customs charges from Royal Mail on what I believe to be my GB hoodie. Is that consistent with other user's experience? Wouldn't normally mind too much but it's basically added about 50% onto what I paid for the item in the first place if that's the case. Seems crazy, but just wanted to double-check. Cheers!

I thought all that stuff got charged at the point of purchase, that's been my experience when buying t-shirts from GB and getting the Bombcast poster.

£8 of that was Royal Mail's handling fee.

Unfortunatly that is about right.

Any non gift item greater than £15 is chargable at uk VAT (20%) and then the gready bastards at ROyal Mail charge £8 as a cost of collecting that VAT.

The hoodie is about £22 when you convert so that would make it about £4.40 Vat + £8 handling charge would make it about £12.40.

Gifts under £40 are exempt from this so next time get someone in the states to buy the hoodie on your behalf and ship it to you as a gift.

That's unfortunate. I was pretty sure most of the merch coming from GB was marked as gift at some point or other, but maybe I'm mistaken. Cheers for clearing that up, duders!

Hoodie protectionists.

I believe this applies to just about any country outside North America.

I remember one time when I got hit with import tax after grabbing some Blik Mario vinyls from the US. The note inside was actually piss-taking in tone too, basically stating that "all the savings I made purchasing this item are now lost as you have to pay us our money now".

Bloody import tax.

@Lashe said:

That's unfortunate. I was pretty sure most of the merch coming from GB was marked as gift at some point or other, but maybe I'm mistaken. Cheers for clearing that up, duders!

It might or it might not be so marked - doesn't really matter as customs are not quite that dumb. If you are unlucky and they assess your parcel then anything with a commercially printed label is going to be ruled out for gift exemption. That gift thing last worked consistently about 10 years ago.