Buying in the States was Re: HP analyzer probes

At 02:26 AM 6/30/04 -0400, Der mouse wrote: BS! You've been watching too much television trash! Americans DO NOT have that attitude. They have a more integrated society that includes more races and regilions and foreign visitors and immigrants than any country that I've ever been to and I've been to a LOT of them. I HAVE a Canadian citizenship and I've lived and worked in Canada as well as several other countries and I'll be happy to discuss the differnces with you if you'd like! Even with the problems here I'd rather live here than any other country that I've been to! But to get to cases, the big difference is that for the most part we have common customs, common practices and a common language which makes it simple to do business between states. For example I can ship from Florida to California just as easily as I can ship to the next town down the road. Canadians can't say that! You even have customs duties and sales taxes when selling things from one province to another. In fact, most states in the US reguire that you collect sales tax on items sold. However if it's going to another state then you are not reguired to collect tax so in some ways out of state sales are even easier. The opposite is true in Canada and most other countries. You also have to do everything in two langauges (by law, no less!). Europe can be maddening to deal with! Every country has different rules about what size and weight packages you can send there. Futhermore you can't use some shipping classes to some coutries. For example you can't send Global Priority Mail to Italy. EVEN more, if you want to insure the package then you can only send it certain classes in some countries. Within the US you can insure any package of any shipping class. Something else that most Europeans aren't aware of is just how big this country is! (Yeah Canada is bigger but less than 10% is really populated). We don't need to deal with foreign countries. I don't mean that in a negative sense but what I mean is that we can find everything we need here (including plenty of E-bay buyers) without the hassles of foreign currencies, languages, quirky shipping regulations, customs duties, etc etc. For example just last week I found two books that I wanted to buy from a dealer in the UK. By the time that I went through the hassles and money conversions and getting the money to them, paid shipping, dealt with customs, etc etc it was going to cost over twice as much as the sales price. I gave up and bought the books in the US, it ended up being cheaper and a lot less trouble. All I had to do here was to pick up the telephone and call them in Massachusetts (at no charge), give them my credit card number and address and told them what I wanted. The books arrived yesterday (all three are first editions of the MIT Radiation Lab books). There were no fees to pay and no forms to fill and and zero hassles. speaking of hassels I guess I can throw in one barb here. I have found that service in some European counties and in some places in Canada is LOUSY! They act like they're doing you a favor to wait on you or to sell you anything. They only thing that I can says about that is that they would not have a job long here with their attitudes. French Canada (Montreal specificly) was particularly interesting. They REALLY push the French language there and they are required by law to greet you in French and to try and initiate the conversation in French. I found that they frequently refused to speak English to other Canadians from outside of Quebec since they expected them to be able to speak in French. But if you let them know that you were an American most of them would happly speak to you in English since they didn't expect Americans to speak French. AND if you let them know that you were from Florida, many of them couldn't do enough for you! It seems that they all dream of retiring and moving to Florida :-) Joe and the potential market is seen as so small as to be