Be Excellent To Each Other

Since opening my store I have had a few American people ask what '£' is, what it means when it says to check the 'current exchange rate' and someone asking me to change all of teh prices in my shop to dollars because Britain is so small compared to America that it makes no sense for shops to trade in £. If I change the currency in my shop she will deign it worthy to buy something from me.

No matter how much I tried to explain to one person about the exchange rate they couldn't quite get their head around the concept that there existed more than one currency.

Recently I had an email that asked: "Hello - it says on your shipping page that you 'ship worldwide' - does 'worldwide' include the United States?"

How did so many people grow up so very ignorant of the world outside their own country?

A related funny video. Well, funny, but very sad, also

You should have replied telling her than when she's less ignorant then you'll deign her worthy of a proper reply, but unfortunatley she'll never be deigned good enough to buy anything from your shop.

"Hey! Yorf carged me twize muther hubber!".

Tell them £1 is worth $5470 as it's close enough.

Or, change all the prices to Yen.

Oh my.

She's right, though — having your pricing in GBP is the only thing stopping me from ordering items of Mimi goodness. It just doesn't make sense. What the hell is a £ anyway? And broccoli, too, for that matter.

Dinysaur bones were made by the devil to fool the non god-fearing folks to get to thinking that God wasn't da man!

Dinysaur = new favourite 'word'.

Further to Pod, I hope you haven't replied to her yet. If you haven't, don't. You'll never succeed against such idiocy.

On a somewhat related note, I hate it when I go to buy something from an online shop and find everything outside the US is classed as 'Rest of World' with astronomical fucking shipping. Because it will, of course, cost the same to ship to the UK as it will to ship to some forgotten village in Africa or the South Pacific which falls under the same Amero-centric umbrella.

Ella ella. Ehh ehh ehh.

My wife often runs into problems buying stuff on eBay, from Merkins who have no concept that USPS's $9 worldwide envelope will cost $9 to ship, worldwide.

Also: She was once asked when in Buffalo, how long it would take to drive home to England.

*stabs MeatyAngle in the face*

I only truly deserve that if it's the 'you could be my Cinderella' remix.

Well it does.

If you use the UK Post office it costs exactly as much to send to Main Street USA as it does to send to anywhere in Africa.

It could well be the same the other way round.

In the past I've had a couple of people just ignore the £ altogether and pay me the figure in dollars instead - that doesn't get them very far though.

Also, If I have an order from the US for anything region-locked I always email them first because nine times out of ten, they don't realise that some stuff won't work on their consoles without it being modified.

After agreeing to cancel a woman's order recently, she said that I should have mentioned that the game she wanted wouldn't work on a US PS2 - my site is uk-based, is a .co.uk domain, has uk in the slogan and the game was listed in the UK PS2 games section (I have a separate one for US games to make it simpler) - I shouldn't have to put 'IF YOU ARE READING THIS IN THE US THEN YOU WILL NEED A MODDED PS2 TO PLAY THIS' but maybe I will, just to save hassle.

See, that is WRONGY MCWRONGTON of 12 Wrongton Flats, Wrongo Street, Wrongville, West Wrongshire.

Delivering to a city (in fact, scratch that, anywhere) in a developed country like anywhere in the EU should could massively less than what it would cost the mailman to hire a team of oxen to drag him 200 miles to Destitute Farm, Nowhere, Indonesia.

Unless there's some entirely reasonable explanation that I'm missing out on*

*which, knowing this place, someone is about to pull out of there arse and make me look entirely foolish.

I'm not saying it's not wrong, but if there's no point blaming the online store when they're most likely just charging you the real costs.

The Royal Mail use a 3 region system just to speed things up.

It has sadly been relegated to second place of new words I've encountered tonight by the rather inspired "shitegeist".

I'd laugh, but Sterling's getting the tar kicked out of it on the worldwide market now. $2 = £1 > $1.75ish = £1 of late.

Just before my holiday in the US.

Fucking awesome, that.

Sigh.

After the shenanigans on Wall Street last night I wouldn't be surprised if that reverses.

I doubt it. With constant "the UK's heading for recession" stories, markets aren't considering Sterling a safe bet at all. The scary one now is the Euro—€1.26 to £1. Give it two years and it'll be on level pegging. Still, good job we didn't join around €1.40, eh? Gnh.

Of the currencies I keep track of, about the only thing seemingly taking a caning worse than Sterling is the Icelandic Krona (currently ISK160 = £1), but I bet that'll rally before my wife and I go there in December.

@The Rev Owen—I sympathise. We skipped a holiday this year (good timing, what with the worst summer I can remember) with the plan of going to the US next year. Already, it's looking pricier, and if the rates fall to around $1.60 = £1, our plans are going to need revising somewhat.

But the press in every Western country is running that story about their own economies. Papers everywhere love nothing more than a good "WE'RE DOOOOOMED" front page, and the shit storm that started off with the sub-prime nonsense in the US is as good as any the financial journos have had in years. So we're not alone in that respect.



Quite. It's been a steady decline against the Euro since it came in though, so I'm not sure the current climate has anything (too much) to do with it.

£? "Pound?" Oh, you mean #! It's a button on the phone keypad.

Eh?

*goes off to look*

Oh, blimey. We're about to find out just how protectionist US capitalism is.

Robert "Random Intonation" Peston was almost unable to speak when reporting on it this morning on Today, such was the level of DOOOOOOM contingent upon this particular happenstance.

Ditto. And I found out on Friday that my bank charges nearly a fiver for every tranaction abroad, looks like I need to rethink how I take our spending money!

Which bank is that? And is that credit card or withdrawals?

I've booked a trip to the US for later in the month, y'see, and watching the pound plumment is making me feel queasy.

When are you off there, Jasmine?

Pre-paid mastercards charge something like 1% on foreign transactions so could work out significantly cheaper. If you aren't off for a little while it might be worth looking into those.

I'm with Lloyds TSB and 'the bloke in the bank' said that was on both current account and credit card (although I shall double check it in a minute).Both The Post Office and the new Abbey Zero card don't charge for use overseas, but I applied for the PO one a couple of months ago and go turned down because of my credit score. I've just applied for the Abby one, so we'll see.

Which bit are you off to Kern?

Damn! I guess I should start thinking about changing it.



I'm landing in DC and my current plan is to tour Virginia on another war-between-the-states pilgramage. You?

Also beware:

Taken from the Lloyds TSB website.

Nationwide's Flexaccount is the other option - no extra charges, withdrawals at the prevailing exchange rate (and no shenanigans there, any time I've used it) whenever you take money out.

For the credit card:

Thanks JBR, I'll keep that in mind.

Jazz: Open a Nationwide Current Account and bung yer sponds in there before you go away. Using the Visa Electron card has no cash withdrawal fee or foreign percentage sponds fee, so is your best bet. No need to worry about credit rating either if you don't want an overdraft.

Edit: JBR beat me, touché

Thanks for the above. It's been a while since I last reviewed the terms. Heigh-ho - the Kern Bankruptcy Project continues.

That one annoyed the crap out of me when we went to the US last year. To the staff's credit in M&S, we were warned of this charge and directed to the cashpoint outside to do a cash transaction.

Just spoke to my mate at Lehman Brothers. 25000 worldwide redundancies apparently.

This is one of those times where an American bank account is a scary thing to have. Esepcially if it's in a bank that is supposedly very vulnerable . It's the death of neoliberalism and everybody is invited!

Mimi, change your prices into MimiPoints and people have to buy MimiPoints to spend at your shop. Except they can only buy them in a quantity where they'll always have some left over, no matter what combination of things they buy. No more confusion £s or $s oe anything like that. Everybody wins!

I agree with Nirejhenge. For example, a DS case would cost , whereas a pair of earrings would only cost .

Hehe, yes, Monkey points - then it's not real money you are spending, right?

shopping in the ukwas cheap for me last month, 1.23 euro/pound, yeah!

I'm somewhat surprised that there hasn't already been an online shop (on the Web, as opposed to Xbox Live and others of their ilk) that do this.

Or perhaps there are, and I've just not heard of them because they're as popular as Leonard Cohen.

Ooh, it's all much closer to home than that. From Money Morning last week;



The argument is that they can't afford to lend to one another and are being propped up at the mo by the extended credit agreement from the Bank of England. Said Bank is meant to be "the lender of last resort" not "the lender that keeps the system jigging along for as long as possible". There'll be some gnashing of teeth in some institutions here, have no doubt.

A Monkey = 500 Portraits of 'Er Magesty.
A Pony = 25 Clams.

Well established Londoner currency units.

A milliMonkey is therefore equal to 50p, which is a reasonable minimum unit of currency anyway, since it will buy you about one penny sweet These Days.

Bloody hell. Bush used a four syllable word!

I assume he pronounced it "Rsssnt", naturally.

What he should have said was:

"In the long term, I couldn't give a shit as I've only got another four months in office."

What he actually said was that he was saddened to hear about the demise of Lehman brothers..his thoughts at this time go out to their mother as losing one son is hard but losing two is a tragedy

Also not to worry as if they press up, up, down, left, left, right, right, up, down they'll get another continue anyway.