Posted by lexandstuff 21 hours ago
I've shipped electronics and Laptops for Work quite a bit, and OP is right, the system is broken, it stays this way because a lot of corrupt individuals benefit from this mess. However, OP showed a degree of Hubris here, a mistake lots of us make when dealing with foreign countries, just because it works this way here, so it should work that way in XYZ.
OP would have saved themselves lots of time and money if they'd asked Django what the best way to get that laptop shipped to them was. Lots of Ugandans in Austria ship things back daily; they just do it differently, simply hand it to someone travelling back home, there are people travelling back daily, willing to help or just pay a shipping agency a small amount and they'll handle everything.
This is a good act of charity and I applaud OP for that; however, the first mistake they made was Google "How to send a laptop overseas" , a message to Django, asking the best way to get them the laptop would have saved them time and money.
We all fall into this trap of giving people in need what we think they need instead of asking them how best we can help. Local knowledge goes a long way.
All in all, I applaud OP, not many of us would have done this.
That said, we did collaborate on it - at the very least I needed to learn his address before sending.
Neither of us have ever sent or received a package in Uganda. It was a learning experience for both of us.
For me that is absolutely stunning. Dude I would give you a big hug if I could.
While the comments are suggesting this story is about a disaster it feels like a massive feel-good story. I don't think anyone here will understand but there are tears in my eyes right now!
I grew up in Ghana in the 80s and I can pretty much guarantee that a package that looked possibly slightly valuable would no way go more than 2 steps in the postal system then.
I know that was decades ago and Uganda might be completely different but this story is still messing with my head in a way I can't explain.
(I'm from a 3rd world country and have seen it over and over again.)
I am the first to acknowledge that I know very little of how things works outside my country. The only reasons I know that is with many failures. When I lived abroad sometimes people feel talked down to when you as an rich outsider tried to understand things. I do not understand the culture or the reasons for things. It did not help asking in because I did not know how to ask the right question.
- he is from neighboring DRC, not Ugandan;
- based on his description of his travels, he lives in the overwhelmed Kyaka II camp, and was probably recently displaced due to the M23 campaign;
- he was probably already enrolled in the course before being displaced, so a young full-time student, probably not even aware of how the system work in his origin country.
My bet is that he just said to ship it to a drop location in Kampala and that he would find a way to get there to retrieve it.
In the end, the Hubris was probably not on OP's side, but on Django's side, thinking he could get a laptop shipped to him while avoiding entirely the camp's organization. Although he did manage it after all...
And yet, this was still a very generous gift and perhaps even greater value in sharing the experience and starting these discussions
Why would you think it's hubris? People know what they know, and extrapolate. If all you've ever known is streets with numbers for each unit being used for giving directions, you'll probably assume it's the standard. So you wouldn't even know to think "hey, do other countries use something else?". So a Costa Rican "300 meters south of where the church used to be" would be a surprise, and you'd only know it if you've been there / researched it / someone told you.
Yhere are things part of your daily life you don't even question why they're like this and if they can be another way or are indeed different in other countries.
So even though you’re almost funny, you’re still taking sh*te.
I order things like band merch from Europe and have never had a problem receiving in the UK.
They used Royal Mail for shipping, on the way out Royal Mail are the ones handing it to the next country. In that case it seems to be a Royal Mail fuckup. It didn't touch the Finland carrier until it reached Finland.
Just a general note that things didn't generally run well in the colonies for natives under British rule.
I'll concede they ran well enough for a privileged few who were closely aligned with the British .. but that was not a representative slice of the whole.
There's no doubt this laptop would've been delivered frictionlessly if Uganda had never suffered under colonial rule :) And who knows what the UK would be like..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orania
>The town was founded with the goal of creating a white ethnostate for the Afrikaner minority group, the Afrikaans language and the Afrikaner culture through the creation of an Afrikaner state known as a Volkstaat.
>All jobs, from management to manual labour, are done by Afrikaners; non-Afrikaner people are not allowed to live or work there.
>The town's monoculturalism and monoethnic philosophy rejects the concept of baasskap, where the White minority exploited Black labour for economic gain, in favour of a model of strict Afrikaner self-sufficiency.
>The town has grown at an annual rate that was estimated at 10% in 2019 — faster than any other town in South Africa.
>The population increased by 55% to 2,500 from 2018 to mid-2022, and to 2,800 in July 2023.
>In 2023, the town council announced plans for the population to grow to 10,000 as soon as possible.
I'm honestly tired of the bullshit anti-colonialism ideology. These people are so "racist" they purposefully tie their hands behind their back to avoid exploiting black people to prove how they are superior that the standard anti-colonialism rethoric is just a thinly veiled self-hate ideology at this point.
So if Scientologists or some other cult built a potemkin village in Wyoming and pumped it with investment, and the town's balance sheets looked better than surrounding communities that didn't get their investment, you'd endorse the cult ideology too? Or at least denounce its critics?
I encourage you to question where you read that framing, because that's a racist stance that doesn't stand scrutiny even for a minute.
With the current Zeitgeist people just feel more confident, expressing it now again.
But imagine you are a colonizer (or your family got rich because if it). I guess you have to believe that, to still feel righteous.
America is de facto run by the descendants of colonizers. How much control do Native Americans really have over its governance?
They know the thicket of rules and petty fiefdoms, what rules apply and which don't, what to pay and to whom... Regular post just acts as if everything works by the book - and that doesn't fly. Use word-of-mouth to find the good couriers, trawl through your local community of people from the destination country - it is a very common service, so you'll soon find a good provider. Test it with a couple of low-stakes deliveries and you'll have a solid channel.
Meet your guy in a metro station, or find the shop in Barbès that smells like a marketplace across the Mediterranean, hand over your package with the recipient's name, destination city (Addresses ? Where we're going we don't need addresses !), your phone number and the recipient's phone number scrawled on it with a felt-tip marker (make sure they are Whatsapp numbers), pay in cash, don't get a receipt (lol) - and there you go !
Operating in Africa will soon tire you if you attempt to force European ways. Going with the flow (with appropriate caution - a nose for issues, borne from experience, is invaluable) works and makes the experience enjoyable !
On multiple occasions I've shipped things with the Nova Poshta service to units very close to the front line. In some cases they're getting picked up at Nova Poshta shipping outlets so close to the front lines that FPV drones are a genuine risk.
It just works. Nova Poshta has a nice app. There's complete and accurate tracking, you can easily redirect shipments on the fly to different locations and even different people, and they have package lockers everywhere. The staff are very friendly and go above and beyond to help out. I once showed up at a Kyiv branch with four used truck tires covered with mud, without any packaging, and said I needed to get them to a unit in Sloviansk, a town 20kms from the front lines. They handled everything for me for the equivalent of ~$30 and they showed up the next day.
If Ukraine can manage shipping at scale in the middle of a war, WTF is Africa doing? Why do you have to rely on sketchy shit like trusting random airline passengers getting some extra cash on the side? You can't have a modern economy without good shipping services.
I'm reminded of the time I visited both Kyiv and South Africa in Febuary 2024... Cape Town and Johannesburg had more scheduled blackouts than Kyiv, even with Russia actively trying to destroy the electricity grid. The GDP/capita of South Africa is higher than Ukraine!
Rule of law is critical infrastructure.
Also, South Africa isn't sub-Saharan Africa.
I agree 100%
> Also, South Africa isn't sub-Saharan Africa.
Indeed. Which made me even less impressed by my example of power outages. South Africa clearly has a massive political problem with corruption; they have the money and technology to keep the power on.
Culturally it's a mix. There are a bunch of people from black African areas who are culturally African and then a bunch originating from Holland and England who are culturally European. It's changed a bit as to which lot run different things.
Delivering to frontline towns is on brand for them as much as delivering from Amazon with a proxy address in US. They make things happen
But comparing Ukraine and African countries is more like apple and oranges.
Ukraine is by large a European country which culturally is much more similar to Poland or even UK.
Because it was always portrayed in the west as corrupt or insignificant was just more caused by living under soviet or russian shadow than a reality.
Nova Poshta was already an established business well before 2022 war started, but even without it, government-owned Ukrposhta was always rock solid going decades back. Theft was happening ocasionally by workers but at a rate comparable to any other western country. DHL, FedEx was operating also for a very long time and the biggest problem with them was the need to pay the import duty tax on expensive items, which you can avoid when shipping with Ukrposhta.
Asking someone who’s going that way already to drop it on their way is inherently efficient in some circumstances.
Once there’s remuneration, it’s not a big jump to making the trip just for that. Add an app and the gig economy is born.
1. Never underestimate developing countries' governments' willingness to absolutely bend their people over to extract tax revenue (and then their corrupt representatives extract bribes on top of it)
2. Django's gratitude and positivity in the face of all of it is an inspiration. I suspect I and most everyone I know would be in tears and would have given up in exasperation halfway through his quest. We are so spoiled in the West.
Many of the NGOs have strict no-bribery policies, else they would not receive support from bodies like the EU (which is the biggest humanitarian donor on the planet).
In some cases the choice may be between "letting people starve" and "feeding people but the local warlord extracts some benefits" but these are rare and only the worst crisis contexts (think South Sudan, DRC).
that is not what happened for example in Gaza. UNRWA sent billions to Gaza where that aid was hijacked by HAMAS, and even when the aid was distributed to people outside of HAMAS, HAMAS directly controlled the distribution of that aid. And i don't see UN operating any different at the other places too.
Or like Rubio said:
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/10/24/unrwa-is-subsidiary-...
"U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) of being “a subsidiary of Hamas” "
Debates
Use of Hamas to undermine the Palestinian Authority
In an interview with Israeli journalist, Dan Margalit in December 2012, Netanyahu told Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Netanyahu also added that having two strong rivals, this would lessen pressure on him to negotiate towards a Palestinian state.[10] In an interview with the Israeli Army Radio in August 2019, Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel from 1999 to 2001, said that Netanyahu's main strategy is to keep Hamas "alive and kicking" in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority, even at the expense of "abandoning the citizens [of the south]."[41] In an interview with Politico in 2023, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, "In the last 15 years, Israel did everything to downgrade the Palestinian Authority and to boost Hamas", before adding that "Gaza was on the brink of collapse because they had no resources, they had no money, and the PA refused to give Hamas any money. Bibi saved them. Bibi made a deal with Qatar and they started to move millions and millions of dollars to Gaza."[42]
At a Likud party conference in 2019, Netanyahu said: "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas ... This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank."[43][44] Netanyahu responded to the accusations of funding and strengthening Hamas by calling them "ridiculous".[45] In an interview with Time in 2024, he denied of giving support to Hamas and said that it was one of "many misquotes" attributed to him.[46]
Gershon Hacohen, former commander of the 7th Armored Brigade and an associate of Netanyahu, said in 2019 in an interview: "Netanyahu's strategy is to prevent the option of two states, so he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it's an ally."[47][48] Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right lawmaker and finance minister under the Netanyahu government, called the Palestinian Authority a "burden" and Hamas an "asset".[49][50] Allegations of Israeli support for the creation of Hamas
Yuval Diskin, former director of Shin Bet from 2005 to 2011, told Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in 2013, that "if we look at it over the years, one of the main people contributing to Hamas's strengthening has been Bibi (Benjamin) Netanyahu, since his first term as prime minister."[41][51] In October 2023, former Intelligence Chief of Saudi Arabia, Prince Turki Al-Faisal, accused Israel of "funnelling Qatari money" to Hamas.[52]
On 19 January 2024, Reuters reported that Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, said while receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Valladolid that "Israel had financed the creation of Palestinian militant group Hamas, publicly contradicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has denied such allegations." and that "Borrell added the only peaceful solution included the creation of a Palestinian state. 'We only believe a two-state solution imposed from the outside would bring peace even though Israel insists on the negative,' he said."[53][54][55] Borrell also described Israel as having "created Hamas", but immediately continued saying that "yes, Hamas was financed by Israel to weaken the Palestinian Authority".[b]
Professor Avner Cohen, publicly acknowledged that "Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation" and that Israel had "encouraged them as a counterweight to ... Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah."[61] David Hacham, who worked in Gaza as an Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military in the late 1980s and early 1990s stated, "When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake. But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results."[62] Similar statements have been made by Yasser Arafat. For example, in an interview with Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera in December 2001, he referred to Hamas as a "creature of Israel".[63][64] Use of Hamas as a tool to disengage from peace talks
Shlomo Brom [he], retired general and former deputy to Israel's national security adviser, believes that an empowered Hamas helps Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu avoid negotiating over a Palestinian state, suggesting that there is no viable partner for peace talks.[10]
The question here is who made Gazans prefer HAMAS over PA? And why would HAMAS and PA be enemies to each other instead of allies?
HAMAS mostly exists in Gaza.
Therefore UNRWA perhaps sustains HAMAS by delaying the indiscriminate mass murder of Gazans through manmade famine.
I don't really see how this would make UNRWA a subsidiary of HAMAS even if it happened to be true that the existence of HAMAS was predicated on the existence of UNRWA.
In practice, the only way to prevent this aid from reaching HAMAS is to prevent it from reaching anyone in Gaza.
>UNRWA sustains life in Gaza.
and that doesn't seem true to me. Looking at pre-war Gaza - it seems that the regular Gazans have existed on their own, not much affected by UNRWA. There were businesses, trade, construction, some worked in Israel. Look at pre-war satellite photos - how much solar panels were on roofs there. I remember some Gazans even started to appear here on HN. And there was HAMAS fed by UNRWA. Removing HAMAS from the equation, there pretty much wouldn't be a need for UNRWA.
Shouldn’t people stop helping further entrench these shady practices?
If Ugandan decision makers know the people will effectively always be underwritten to receive some bread and water… no matter what happens…
Then what exactly is stopping them from piling on more and more nonsense?
One example is the Canadian charity One4Another which performs surgeries to reverse some common birth defects in kids and babies in Uganda. They're not trying to feed the world, they're not interfering with the local economy; in fact they're employing doctors and nurses to perform a one-time intervention that changes the life of thousands of kids a year in the catchment area of their facility.
Obviously there are things that a group like this can't do but a massive NGO can, and that's great too, but for what I have to give, I feel very good about the impact per dollar of this.
Edit: my point is just that bribery and blackmail aren't the same as Global Northerners treating charities as synecures.
Anyway as I say it's not everything but I thought it seemed relevant to the GP post talking about NGOs and charity efficiency.
As a Brazilian with a love for electronics and DIY, I feel this pain every day.
two of them started cloning cpus designs (8080 and 68k iirc). they sold well all over the (1st and 2nd) world (still no local market). until one company did a publicity stunt lying they had a full mac clone (it was an actual mac, but they did have something else).
then apple and others pressured the US state department, which pressured the brazilian gov with tarifs on oranges (most of the new elite created in the millitary coups were now big land owners and orange was the cash crop). They were so afraid of the tarifs that they closed both factories as requested, and added the import tax as a good will gesture on top!
and many (30%) brazilians today think another military coup will sort things out
I wish we replace this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Duke_of_Caxias with a statue of a smuggler bringing computers from paraguay (they where sold two streets down this statue). It is much more heroic and positive outcome symbol to the country than some old military nobody on a horse.
I'm a US citizen so it wasn't that bad for me unless I needed replacement parts without physically traveling to get them. We would just trade gifts of laptops with people when anyone was going to the US, but nothing in new packaging. At that time IIRC there was a $500 limit on how much Argentines could spend on a bank card outside the country for the entirety of a trip abroad, and obviously cash controls to prevent taking cash out and import controls on anything you brought in. The normal pattern for rich Argentines was to go to Miami and open a US bank account, then use that to buy stuff and bring it into the country in your suitcase. Fueling that US bank account was where things got very interesting (and also was the best use case I've seen for cryptocurrency, where someone in BsAs would take your cash, buy local Bitcoin with it, send the Bitcoin to their partner in Miami, who would change it to USD and deposit it in your bank account there). It was a clever economy.
being a developing country or not is orthogonal to what you have described. The top developed nations have one or more of these issues.
Someone may say "a tax or fee is just a legalized bribe to the state!"
Which, sure, you could look at it that way, but it's codified and predictable and that lack of surprise is extremely valuable.
And if you bypass their abuse, you're a "smuggler", shamed on by the press.
This can happen in the West too.
I volunteered at a homeless shelter, and we helped those who had lost everything get important documents like their Social Security card and s state ID, and the bureaucracy was atrocious. Sometimes we literally had to beg a senator's office to help.
At least they didn't ask for bribes, but I wonder if that would've made things easier.
I asked another Dutch co-worker to help look at it. We pretty much couldn't make sense of the last letters. No idea what he had to do next. We joked that if we got that much corospondence we would flee the country.
A few months later he moved to Canada.
If there is anything characteristic of developing countries’ taxing systems, it would be how short reaching and inadequate it is. Many of these countries’ governments are corrupt, sure, but these small revenue extracting schemes are about the only way they can collect “taxes” at all.
Until now, items below 150eur (bought by private citizens) were not a subject to customs, and some time ago not even for VAT if below 22eur. From july 1st, it's becoming painful, in slovenia for example, 3eur per TARIC code + customs fee + vat.
So, for example you go on alixpress, you buy a silicone phone case for 1eur, a screen protector/foil for 1eur, a phone "sock" for 1eur and a stylus for 1 eur (+whatever shipping, often free).
A few years ago, you'd pay 4eur and get the package. Then they implemented IOSS, so aliexpress has to report the 4eur order to EU, and they charge you 22% VAT on that, so you'd pay 4.88eur directly to aliexpress and they'd pay the tax. Ok, a bit more expensive but doable, unless you want to go outside of eu and order the stuff there and just bring it in with you.
And now? Since they're 4 different items, that's 4 TARIC codes, and that's 3eur per each separate item, so that makes 4eur for items themselves, 4x3eur for customs (16eur together with the item price), then you pay VAT on the full price (including customs!), that makes it 19.52eur + whatever the post office decides to charge for "processing" (used to be ~4-5euros, but usually avoided by aliexpress shippers).
So, instead of 4euros, you'll pay 20-25euros for the same thing, the government taking 20 euros of tax on 4euros of items (even less total worth, aliexpress + chinese shipping has to earn their share too).
I mean sure, they want you to buy locally from dropshippers, but it's still cheaper than that, or from amazon, which will probably be the biggest winner here, and it's not even a european company.
I'm not saying it's perfect, it's not how I would have done it if I was a benevolent dictator, but there are good reasons for it.
So, back then, i'd pay 1eur and get the case (a bit later 1eur+vat), or 4eur (+vat) for all the items. I'd have money left over, that I could spend at a local restaurant, where other people would get paid, for cooking and serving me a meal (and farmers before that). (i won't give the "save to buy an apartment" example, because none of the EU states is actually doing anything to make that peossible for normal people, quite the opposite).
And now I either pay a lot more money to the government (and get notting more back from them), pay a lot of money to a reseller/dropshipper, and get the item a week earlier than from aliexpress. There will be no european phone case company to take over that business, the just 'stuff' will be just more expensive, and we, europeans, will be able to afford less.
And yes, I know, aliexpress will adapt, they'll build warehouses in EU, and iphone cases will be shipped from romania or hungary or somewhere, but they'll still be more expensive. And that's just phone cases... if you have an iphone, you'll find them in aliexpress warehouses locally. But what if you want custom electronics only found on aliexpress? Some niche esp32 board? Some salved controller for a retro computer? Can you count on aliexpress storing those things in EU too? Or will your other hobbies become much more expensive too?
How long will the white man be blamed for every single thing happening in Africa today? Will a century be enough? 200 years? More?
Aren't Africans adults with agency who are ultimately responsible for the state of their countries?
Read more about the history of the continent.
Running away seems a valid option. Europe seems a good place to run to. Who would have thought.
If I look at a country like Zimbabwe, it’s in worse shape than when it became independent and the West had not interfered. If anything it supported it with development funds.
Zimbabwe, we’re talking about the one that had China, USSR and SA providing weapons and training up until the end of Rhodesia around 1980? Then IMF/World Bank imposed market liberalization in the 90s, then sanctions from 2002-2024?
Truly, can’t understand why they’d be in bad shape, must be all their own fault. My brilliant white brain thinks it must be something genetic, if you know what I mean, nudge nudge wink wink.
As for Zimbabwe, nobody forced them to ally with the USSR and China. That was their decision. As was their agreement with the IMF.
It’s not great to infantalize nations like Zimbabwe and act like they have no agency. They fought for their independence, got it and made their own bed.
Oh, interesting, because you're treating time and ethnicity, as the only factors in economic development. If you take a country full of Ugandans, and a country full of Singaporeans (the countries in your theory are the same of course), and terminate "colonization" (which is the same thing everywhere) at roughly the same time, if the Singaporeans do better, that means the Ugandans are... stupider? Less good at capitalism? What's your full, stated theory here? Can you please say it outright?
Anyway, you're ignoring a lot of other relevant factors. The two countries decolonized at roughly the same time, however Singapore is a tiny maritime city-state, whereas Uganda is a large, landlocked, agrarian country, and its agrarian economy completely taken over by cash crops.
Btw it's also a bit bizarre that you're just saying, "Africans." Africa is a huge continent with wildly different ecologies and economies across it. Regardless, Ugandans do indeed have agency, and that agency is the same as anyone's agency: operating within the constraints into which they were born.
The ones that do it though are all religious institutions so their goals are more social/moral rather than economic or geopolitical.
It is also quite sad that the western NGOs, which all have their own very functional and heavily subsidised delivery channels, keep it to themselves, instead of making it available to the general public and businesses of the countries. Their monopolies on efficient import is weird and counter productive.
For every dozen people mailing in a laptop, there'll be someone mailing in guns. They don't want that liability. It would damage their ability to do what they do.
Shipping things overseas is such a convoluted process. My wife wanted to send a company Christmas gift bundle (literally just company merch and some candy) to two Filipino employees. One of the workers says that only DHL reliability delivers to her so I help my wife with getting a shipping label. Holy shit, I'm just sending a tshirt, mug, and some pens. Why do I need to list out the contents and their international categories like I'm trying to send a shipping container full of rifles? Also addresses for people living in villages in PI are weird, the address was relative to the town hall. Luckily the other person lived in a gated community with a more familiar address formatting. Finally I figure everything out and she buys the label and pays the tariffs (more expensive than the gifts but it's too late now). Luckily there's a DHL near my work so I go to drop off the two very carefully wrapped packages. Of course she wraps both like an actual gift with cute tissue paper and of course the DHL agent has to open it and inspect it, ruining the care my wife put into the wrapping. Overall the experience was mind boggling bureaucratic. Sending via USPS would likely have been a bit easier but the warning of unreliable local mail was concerning. The next year, she just had the CEO send them an extra bonus instead.
However, there's definitely a sunk cost aspect to the operation. After the first failure to send it through Australia Post, I became determined that Django was going to have that MacBook.
But yeah I had the same question: OP said that ChatGPT initially produced words that turned out to be sensible, but not where that later screenshot came from
> At the post office, a friendly staff member confirmed it could be sent, helped me package it up securely
It's actually at least half a case of not blindly trusting AI, and pressing until a positive answer is given:
> I asked ChatGPT how to send the laptop, and it gave me a spiel about finding a reliable freight service or courier.
> (Later) I should have listened to ChatGPT.
Is that representative of the pricing? 550 000 USh is the equivalent of 145 USD, which is a lot for a 2011 13" MBP with a HD drive! That will be quite slow...
1.5 years ago I sold a 13" 2012 MBP with 500 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM on the used market here in Norway, and I couldn't fetch more than 90 USD... Half the value in the SSD itself?
And a 13" 2015 MBP with 256 GB and 16 GB RAM and new battery(!) I only managed to get 200 USD for, even though I'd tried for months for higher prices
So it seems like there's some market inefficiency here :/
Hope Africans see these Europeans true colors
Also makes me grateful to live in a developed nation where we can take shipping for granted.
You don't think the "friend" of this hardware shop owner wanted to see if someone manages to track it down to that holding place before nicking the parcel? Plausible deniability at every step: the shop owner didn't know (might get a cut but you don't know that), the deliverer can say they just didn't have time to come for it and deliver it yet, and only by Django tracking it down, did it make it to him
However, in my experience, "ordinary" parcel shipping (like DHL) won't do this shipping either any more: You have to switch to the express ones (like DHL express, UPS, FedEx) even if you don't intend to do any express. The difference is easily 40€ vs 400€ for shipping a shoe box!
If you ship anything slightly larger then a shoe box and slightly more expensive then a notebook, think twice whether you don't want to accompany the freight with a seat in the commodity class in some airplane. It can easily be cheaper.
The threshold is zero in my experience. I volunteer with a small non-profit publisher, and last year we shipped a few hundred magazines to Europe but with the wrong customs labels. These are black-and-white technical journals shipped in clear plastic, so even with missing labels, they very obviously have almost zero value.
But because we had the wrong customs labels, about half of them were held at the border and our members had to pay the duties themselves, since it was too late for us to pay them. I think that one member had to pay almost 20€: 0.20€ in VAT, plus 19€ in "fees". We sell the issues for $4.50 each (plus shipping), so it was quite a surprise when we started hearing about how high the fees were.
This isn't due to inexperience either, since we've shipped ~1k copies to Europe every year for over 40 years. But we had just switched shipping providers, and our new provider had just written "magazine" as the label without any further details. For the next shipment, we added a proper customs code and prepaid the duties where possible, and that seems to have solved the problem.
Fedex informed me that my laptop was stuck in customs. This wasn't a pay-a-fee-and-get-your-stuff kind of stuck. I couldn't pay any amount of money to get the laptop out. I had to find a local import partner which could take weeks or months to do just to get this stupid computer out of customs. And that's assuming they didn't destroy the laptop before I could claim it. There was literally no way for me to just pay some big ol' tax to get the computer.
Eventually I asked if I could have the laptop shipped back to the USA, and they were happy to do this. So I shipped the laptop from the USA to Mexico, from Mexico to a friend's place, and then I bought my frienbd a roundtrip ticket to Mexico to enjoy a vacation on the condition that he brought my damn computer with him.
> Before leaving, I asked him whether he even knew what was inside the package.
> He answered very casually that he had no idea and that he did not need to know.
> I then asked whether he at least knew which company had entrusted him with the delivery. He replied that it was simply "a friend" who had asked him to temporarily keep the box until someone came to collect it.
> I switched it on briefly, and that was actually the moment when the hardware shop owner himself suddenly became excited[...] Seeing the Apple logo appear on the screen, he immediately smiled and said something along the lines of, "Ah… a MacBook is a MacBook. Apple is still Apple."