That's true. He's a good guy, and a fellow collector I've interacted with for more than a decade. Takes good photos, too. I guess I was responding more to the tenor of other posts, or maybe just doing a general vent since threads like this pop up so often. I totally agree with the sentiment that the quality of the USPS service has tanked while prices have skyrocketed. Over the last 6 months, it has actually gotten much worse, with packages that used to take 5-7 days taking 3 weeks. So all of that I can totally sympathize with. I'm just out of patience with complaints about filling out customs forms and having to go to the post office, not to mention the slightly xenophobic "foreign bogeyman" sentiment which often creeps into these discussions. Or maybe I'm getting more and more irritated with the longstanding sentiment that the US is at the center of the world, and all the other "foreign" places are tolerated but not quite up to par. Not saying that is showing in this thread, but it is out there. Anyway there's good advice in the this thread about shipping options. I hope whatever shipping problems SoS and others have can be sorted out.
I was personally joking about not shipping internationally, I still regularly do it and will of course do it for friends on the board here. If you are deep enough into this hobby shipping internationally is unavoidable anyway because sofubi collectors are still a relatively small global community. But I literally have problems 1 in 3 times when I ship internationally via USPS here in the US. I was personally joking about not shipping internationally, I still regularly do it and will of course do it for friends on the board here. If you are deep enough into this hobby shipping internationally is unavoidable anyway because sofubi collectors are still a relatively small global community. But I literally have problems 1 in 3 times when I ship internationally via USPS here in the US. A lot of it depends on your local office. If you have competent folks where you live it can be okay. I have four different post offices in close proximity and not a single one of them can reliably ship internationally. And I'm not talking about long lines or filling out forms, I'm talking about the package not reaching its destination. That is 100% the fault of the US Postal Service in my experience, because the package never even makes it out of the US. And as far as I can tell, Andy, Japan has one of the best postal systems in the world in terms of reliability and accuracy, so maybe it's a bit easier for you to ship internationally in the sofubi motherland? I think I am also just dealing with exceptionally incompetent workers where I live for whatever reason.
