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Originally Posted by melw
Just got mine back. It was a warranty repair. The video driver chip had failed.
The interesting thing was that it was repaired and returned to me. I was some what surprised to find the pid was the same.:-)
I was quite shocked to find that UPS wanted over $60.00 to ship from California to France.:-o
The post office was cheaper and slower.LOL
I am very happy to have it back. I was going out of my mind trying to read from paper books. I like to read over lunch. Much more difficult with a paper book.
Mel W.
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In my experience shipping around the globe, Fance and Italy have the slowest customs processing for postal shippments on the face of the earth. The problem with UPS/FedEx are they charge "brokerage fees" on both ends of the deal. Well, maybe they don't on the US end any longer but always on the other end. The receipient pays a fee for UPS acting in essence as a customs clearing house as well as paying any duties/VAT owed by the receipent. That is the reason UPS can get items faster by a week or more, into France and Italy. Shipping to these two countries usually takes 12-18 days over 70% of the time. And that is using Express Mail (EMS) or International Priority...no difference between the two services.
As a counter example, I can ship to Russia and Ukraine and it takes maybe 2-days to clear customs as a rule and last year 95% of our EMS deliveries arrived in under 7-days. Japan, pretty much there is at most a one day delay. Items I ship there arrive in around 5-days max. Of course because of the value and items I ship I set our policy to use only EMS...except to Italy where it makes no difference at all only more problematic from an insurance POV.
Another carrier worth considering, though not cheap, is DHL. We have had excellent results with their international and domestic services when we needed to use them. Unfortunately they are not doing US domestic shipping any longer...
Something to think about, sending something 9,000-12,000 (or whatever the real number) around the globe for just $60 is not that expensive for the service.