Making a list, checking it twice

Sending holiday gifts across borders and trade wars.

Photo by Alexandra Zelena on Unsplash

Today is Black Friday. Yes, even in Germany — though it mostly exists in that virtual no-man’s land of online retail, not in brick-and-mortar stores.

(It’s also called ‘Black Friday,’ instead of the German ‘Schwarzer Freitag,’ in in open acknowledgement of its status as an American import.)

As the purported first shopping day of the Christmas season, this time of year is particularly stressful for Americans in Germany looking to send gifts back to friends and family. Well, unless they are very good at planning ahead.

( And I am not.)

International shippers require packages to be mailed very early to make it to a destination outside Europe by December 25. DHL, which operates Deutsche Post’s package delivery service, requires parcels to be mailed by November 26, for standard delivery - by December 3, if you pay for premium service. Christmas cards can be mailed as late as December 6.

Every year, my good intentions of sending handmade ornaments found in one of the many Christmas markets, or carefully wrapped parcels of treats from Rausch Shokolade, and delicious stollen and lebkuchen from Lebkuchen Schmidt, run headlong into my industrial-grade tendency to procrastinate.

Fortunately, many Berlin shops, including those mentioned above, offer international shipping, which has saved my Christmas lists in years’ past.

But this year, uncertainty over U.S. import tariffs and elimination of the de minimis exemption means many German businesses have suspended shipping to the States. And major carriers like DHL currently aren’t accepting business parcels to the United States, either.

“After August 22, Deutsche Post and DHL Parcel Germany will no longer be able to accept and transport parcels and postal items containing goods from business customers destined for the US,” a notice on the company website states. “Key questions remain unresolved, particularly regarding how and by whom customs duties will be collected in the future, what additional data will be required, and how the data transmission to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection will be carried out.”

Packages with goods less than $100 in value and sent from a private individual to a private individual are not affected by the change in U.S. regulations and will still be accepted for shipping. Retailers and individuals who want to ship items over $100 in value can still use DHL Express shipping, the company notes.

So, provided I get my shopping and wrapping act together, I should be good.

Maybe.

Some people have still reported issues with getting any packages - commercial or private - delivered to the U.S.

“I was going to ship Christmas presents to family members and the guy at the local DHL shop (in Germany) told me that everything that’s been shipped to the USA recently has been returned to Germany,” a Reddit user recently posted on the forum r/expats. “He didn’t know why. Has anyone else had trouble getting packages through?”

This may be because gifts from private individuals are still subject to extra screening to make sure businesses aren’t trying to evade the new rules, DHL’s customer site advises. Or, it could be because the packages and customs declaration were not filled out correctly.

So, it looks like I will probably be doing a version of what my family has been doing when they want to send gifts to us from abroad. And that’s buying gifts online that are sold and shipped from within the same country.

In my case, I will be buying American from U.S. companies already getting squeezed by the impact of import tariffs on their material supply chains.

Customs cut both ways

We have been using that workaround for gifts sent from our family in the States because Germany has its own system of customs duties that are due on imported items - and not just by commercial businesses.

Most expats here have had the experience of someone sending a package from another country and a delivery person collecting the customs duty before handing over the package.

I’ve heard that before postal workers were authorized to collect the duties, they would just leave a note in your mailbox telling you to come to the customs office to pay for it.

Now, the package shows up at your door, but the person delivering is supposed to collect the money.

I once paid about 12€ to receive about $20 of Halloween candy my parents had mailed to my kids. (I still haven’t figured that one out. Candy isn’t listed as one of the exceptions requiring a VAT payment on any list I have seen. And the package was marked as a gift.)

One year, a package got returned to sender because I didn’t have exactly 7€ and the carriers can’t make change. (I just had a 20-note and no advance notice that someone was sending me something. They are supposed to leave your package at the post office and you can go there later—when you get exact change—and pick it up. But the guy never told me where to go.)

What we’ve been doing instead is to have the kids make Christmas lists on Amazon.de (not .com!), for example, and my parents to buy gifts that will ship from within Germany. I think this works with several other online retailers, too.

Some smaller German online shops are not set up to take non-EU payment methods, however. So, if you shopping from outside the EU, be prepared to shop around.

So, no imports means no import duty, and it’s all good - if a little impersonal. I know my mom doesn’t love not getting to personally pick out the things she sends. But it has worked out ok …. so far.

If you’re new to Germany, here is a link to more information in English about what customs fees may be owed on packages shipped from outside the country.

And, beware of text messages claiming to be from the Zollamt (the customs office)! Brieann at Red Tape Translation realized too late that she was the target of a phishing scam.

Gift Ideas

If you’d also like to buy holiday gifts for people in the U.S. from American companies, here are some links to get you started.

➡ This crowd-sourced gift guide from Virginia Sole-Smith at Burnt Toast.

➡The Good Trade’s list of 11 Amazon Alternatives for Sustainable Online Shopping.

➡Writer Thomas H. Brand’s Ethical Christmas Shopping Alternatives to Amazon.