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The joys of a strong dollar


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2016 Jan 9, 10:51am   5,174 views  9 comments

by Bellingham Bill   ➕follow (2)   💰tip   ignore  

In other news I ordered

and ten of these:
and 2 cases of 20 of:

from amazon.co.jp today. They don't ship any of that to the US, but there is a packaging forwarding service in Tokyo that will turn the boxes around for ~$15.
Air shipping via the post office (delivered by USPS) will cost another $45. Allocating the ~$60 in shipping costs among the 3 products results in the headphones costing $85 (current amazon.com cost $110), the 10 green notebooks for $4.25 each (I last paid $5 in-store when the yen was around 80 for them, and online now they're $7 - $12 each.) The gum is going to come in at ~$1.60 a pack, it was ¥110 a pack when I was buying it in Tokyo 15 years ago (it's awesome gum)

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1   Bellingham Bill   2016 Jan 9, 12:01pm  

Capitol One is great on the FX, too. Amazon was offering 113 FX but my card gave me 117.3, the actual exchange rate right now

2   Bellingham Bill   2016 Jan 9, 1:00pm  

My next purchase is going to be a case of this:

http://goo.gl/EBAEYn

beef consommé crisps -- so f-ing tasty ¥1980 for 6 is $2.80/ bag (240g is 8.4oz), about what a family-size Ruffles is at e.g. Walmart.

The box itself would cost $30 to airmail via SAL, adding another $5/bag (they're good but not that good).

Maximum USPS airmail box size is 275cm (length + cross-section perimeter) so I could cube up the 50 x 20 x 30 cm case into a pack of 4 with weight of 7.6kg and dimensional size of 240cm [60 + (50 + 40) x 2]. Airmail (~1 week) but postal airmail is $125, which is actually $5 more than just sending via SAL individually . . .

Guess I'll have to figure out something else to combine the order with, potato chips are great on the weight front but I'm also paying to ship a lot of air . . .

3   mell   2016 Jan 10, 8:24pm  

Xylitol and Stevia are among the healthiest sweeteners, but the usage of Xylitol has been suppressed in the US by the Aspartame/Acesulfame/Sucralose lobby. It is more widely used pretty much everywhere else.

4   Patrick   2016 Jan 10, 9:14pm  

Bellingham Bill says

amazon.co.jp

but it's almost all in japanese! http://www.amazon.co.jp/

how do you find what you're looking for?

edit: ah, they do have this: Would you like to see this page in English? Click here.
but it doesn't seem to change that much about the site...

5   FortWayne   2016 Jan 10, 9:26pm  

Ironman says

My next purchase is going to be a case of this:

I've been buying mine at gun shows, really cheap reloaded ammo. For target practice you can't beat the price anywhere.

6   Bellingham Bill   2016 Jan 12, 8:51pm  

I think if you close the page after you click the change to english and reload, you'll get the shopping controls at least in English.

7   anonymous   2016 Jan 13, 4:50am  

What's with those notebooks? Why are they better then the ones at the dollar store?

8   Bellingham Bill   2016 Jan 15, 7:10am  

errc says

What's with those notebooks?

Good question!

Mainly the ruling is at 6mm, so you get 34 lines on a ~10" page vs. college-rule 33.

The narrower size (8") means less wasted space horizontally.

Cheap paper has fuzzy rule printing, but this printing is razor-sharp.

The paper quality is great too.

And all the rings make it secure but you can still tear out pages if you need to.

9   Bellingham Bill   2016 Jan 15, 7:13am  

So shipping cost came in at $95.

The capitalist way to allocate this is by weight, everyone pays their own freight.

The socialist way allocates by price, from those with ability to pay.

Interestingly, on a hunch I guessed that if you average the price % and weight % of each item, these averages will still add up to 100%:

So the notebooks are $5 apiece, the gum is $1.70 per pack . . . not bad.

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