I remember decades ago hearing stories of motorcycle racers going to japan to get a honda RS125, put it in their luggage and bringing it back to the US.

They are small race-only 2-stroke motorcycles, not sold in the US at all.

Japanese stationary - and I am not kidding.

Labor-intensive products. Custom suits, leather jackets, etc., are so, so much cheaper in places with lower costs of living. For individual items, flights might make it a toss-up, but on the scale of an entire wardrobe, flying to Turkey, having a bunch of tailored clothes made up, and then flying home would definitely work out.

Weirdly for me: IKEA. I’m within ~240 miles of an IKEA in Canada and an IKEA in the US.

While they’ve started to inflate some items to meet currency conversion rates, some items are still cheaper for me to purchase in Canada directly and bring back to the US.

For instance, even at small scale: one BILLY bookcase, article number 205.220.46, is $90 CAD (~$65.70 US) at IKEA CA and $79 USD at IKEA US.

YMMV coming back across the border but in my experience I just got waived through the border every time I told them I was “just coming back with some cheap crap from IKEA”.

Inside the European Union, traveling to other places to buy things from there would only seldom be profitable, when considering the travel expenses.

On the other hand, I frequently buy things from online shops located in many of the EU countries, because very often for various kinds of things that I want to buy I find the best deals in different countries. There are no extra expenses but shipping, so it is frequent to order things from far away, because at a local shop near me they would be more expensive than buying from another country, even with the added shipping.

There are small suppliers in Hong Kong who sell refurb enterprise drives at less-exorbitant prices. I've had good luck with this over the years. I stuck with reliable, well-known models like the 4TB HGST, 16TB Seagate Exos (X16), etc.

I used to get them with a year or so of warranty remaining, though last order I got units that must have been from a bulk OEM purchase and weren't warrantied through the manufacturer.

Regardless, I've had good luck this way and failure rates have been within expectations. I started with a few different suppliers to mix inventory in case one source turned out to be a dud, then eventually consolidated on a single supplier who does a great job and has consistently delivered good drives. This method has worked for me for over a decade. Definitely easier than flying around countries, and in my case cheaper than if I'd physically gone to the US like this guy.

> Flying to the USA is a bit risky right now.

Please be serious.

Most places with heavy duties/tariffs also intercept mail and apply said duties/tariffs (and sometimes just seize everything).

not really, they paid import duty

People have been doing this forever.

What’s more interesting was when people were doing this with software sold physically; IIRC Adobe creative suite was so expensive in Australia that it was cheaper to fly to the US and buy it

I remember when Adobe Creative Suite came out (I think?) and Australian said that a first class flight to Los Angeles and the American price were less than the Australian price. Hoping Bruce or Sheila [1] Cunningham [2] can chime in

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNBy1D1Y0h4 damn I was only familiar with the audio; this aged extremely poorly.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Cunningham's_L...

Well, that's assuming he wouldn't have used the points for a different trip otherwise.

I bought a custom couch from Lithuania and got it shipped to the Netherlands after trying a certain brand in a local showroom. The brand is based in Belgium and does some manufacturing in Poland. They even shipped it for free because I met a minimum spend threshold.

The NL dealer wanted €5k but Lithuania wanted €2800 for the same exact couch so I then convinced myself it was worth it to pay for a fabric upgrade. Since its made by the same Belgian company, the warranty is identical and valid across the EU.

I guess you could say I’ve successfully assimilated to my new adopted home in NL and now I hate to pay full price for almost anything!

~2012 was the same thing. The usd was very low compared to eur, but the apple store sold things in ~same value in eur + tax. So you could legit buy an airplane ticket (not even a low cost, regular line was ok), visit NY for a weekend and buy a macbook, come back, and end up paying the same amount.

Brazilian customs figured this out awhile ago, be too obvious and you’ll get one hell of a fine.

Please read this

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton...

A brazilian coworker bought a suitcase on his trip here (circa 15 years ago) and then bought a playstation and an xbox to bring back.

yeah, this applied to any pricier laptop or DSLR, though warranty could be a problem

He declared the import and paid the VAT.

No duty, only VAT. https://www.trade-tariff.service.gov.uk/commodities/84717050...

Not just Apple. Around 2010, I bought a tripod and head from the US. Had it delivered to France, paid all import duties and taxes and VAT (I single out VAT because, since taxing is the national sport, it's levied on top of the other taxes, which are also levied on shipping a big hunk of metal). It was around 25% cheaper than buying from a local store.

Here's the kicker: the tripod and head were both produced in Italy. So it was somehow cheaper to ship them halfway around the world and pay import duties twice than to buy locally with no import duty (since it's the EU).

It's been true (maybe still is? Haven't checked) for quite awhile; people I know would always hit up the Apple Store when visiting the USA and return bearing gifts, because the price savings was quite noticeable.

Is your time and car free or do you want to make the trip anyways?

I used this but inverted, the tailor flew to a few European cities and we met him in a hotel room.

He then flew back to Thailand and send the suits.

India, too! The suit I got for my wedding was custom, way cheaper there than here. I need to go back and get a second jacket some day.

Luxury fashion also tends to have large price differences based on exchange rates and tax.

Before the Great Recession, Europeans, particularly Brits, were flying into NYC with empty suitcases. It helps that NYC has a sales tax exemption for clothes items under a certain amount specifically to facilitate this.

That certainly used to be the case. My dad used to get his suits made in Hong Kong all the time although that became less economical relative to other locations. I don't really wear any of that type of clothing any longer.

Akihabara in Tokyo also used to be a bargain for electronics but I'm not sure that's really true any longer that I've noticed.

Travelling to a no sales tax state for large purchases. Sales tax is roughly 10%, state with no sales tax is 150 miles away for me.

Doing the math, 300 miles round trip, 30 miles per gallon, $4/gallon for gas, if I'm buying something that costs more than $400 I get a free trip to other state.

Downside is that you're only breaking even for the time, but if you're making a $1,000+ purchase then it's definitely worth the time for me to make the trip.

In the 1980s, a friend got his start by buying packaged software in bulk from the US and reselling it in Europe. The retail price differences were large enough he made bank on it.

It's called arbitrage.

Eventually, other people figured it out and the prices leveled out.

Arbitrage opportunities crop up all the time.

If shipping then yes, customs got stricter thanks to Shein.

If flying then you can bring up to 1000 USD of stuff tax-free every 30 days. On top of a personal phone and watch. Plus 1000 USD of stuff you can purchase at the duty-free shop once you land.

Wow, that’s just being terrible at smuggling.

These stories usually have some non-trivial factor that is missing in the article. In this case there's a small visible red flag: the two tourists are British but traveling on B visas, rather than using the visa waiver program. Why? Well according the DHS they both have multi-year overstays in the US.

This doesn't justify the detention they went through. But it also means the lesson of the story is not "random tourists are being detained".

The Guardian is complete propaganda - without exaggeration every single article about this issue has been utter lies.

See this for more balance https://x.com/DHSgov/status/2025975226002018309

Now I am curious, Understand that I am from the states, and consequently have zero intuition as to what a VAT is. But... the hard drive importer is directly using the HDDs and as such is not adding any value to the item, why are they paying a value added tax?

If I had to guess it is probably on the value that could have been added to the item.

A lot of it is tax fraud, with the new clothes in that suitcase not being properly declared when imported.

I was in Akihabara in Tokyo and other places end of 2024. Prices were nearly US priced but in Yen more or less. No real bargins. Only thing they had going was unique stuff you can't find at all in the mass market garbage we got going on in the US

As late as 2012-2015 it was still extremely cheap to get suits in HK, but I'm sure that's no longer the case.

The last time I did it, I bought fabric for $60 USD at Joann's, flew to HK, and gave a guy the fabric for a suit. The suit cost $45 USD to make.

Some states have that as a "you should/need to declare that as a use tax."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_tax

It's likely poorly enforced, but it's on the books and it's a complicated one to track. It was more of a concern when internet sales didn't collect state sales.

There's also Simplified Sellers Use Tax lawsuit that was recently in the courts.

The article clearly says only Bill had overstayed, not Karen. "Bill’s US visa had expired; Karen’s had not.".

The B2 visa seems to be because the length of the trip exceeded the ESTA limit, "over two months", perhaps the original plan had been for a longer trip.

Yes, because a DHS statement, published on Twitter of all places, isn't going to be propaganda. I can't think of any instances of them blatantly lying even against their own video evidence in, like, at least a week. /s

It’s just the name for sales tax. Why is there a tax on sales, isn’t a sale a discount? Then is the sales tax negative because it’s the tax on the difference between the full price and the discounted price? You’d probably end up with a refund for buying the thing, unless your state has no sales tax.

Yea, the idea is that the VAT effectively taxes the added value in each step of the value chain because there's a limit to how much you can charge for an item or service. E. g. a 25 % VAT does not necessarily mean the goods become 25 % more expensive; most of those 25 % would have been profit for the reseller, intermediates and manufacturer if it were not for the VAT. Perhaps a little contra-intuitively, a high VAT keeps prices down and business efficient because every intemediate is indirectly taxed even though the VAT is only charged to the final consumer.

Much of the "cheap retro games" from Japan are just the games that were more popular there like Paper Mario 64.

It's hard to really properly track these things but over the three trips I've made to Japan over about 12 years. Id say the price rises have been entirely in line with currency and retrogaming inflation.

I.e. I'm not sure it was every as good value as people thought.

I did buy quite a bit over a decade ago but again those were Japan only carts (that wouldn't even run in PAL without a mod chip but would run NTSC-U).

That said it is so much more touristy now I'm sure any arbitrage opertunity would be sweeped away same evening.

Japan is now also making domestic only console versions (at least for switch 2 and I think with PS5 on the cards).

Again this might lead to people thinking consoles are cheap in Japan but these are Japanese only consoles designed to revive the economic doldrum they are in.

A certain version of JP Zelda Link to the Past is needed for speedrunning and “legally” running randomizers. It was far easier and cheaper to find in Tokyo than online.

I think, latterly, my dad was getting them made in Seoul and I had some clothing made there and Singapore as well. But I had admittedly not been in HK for years and years and didn't really need suits in any case.

When a publication only publishes the "oppresseds" point of view without ever publishing the other view then it is by definition propaganda. The Guardian has been incredibly consistent in this over years now.

Sales tax is actually very different beacuse it is usually either cumulative and added to each part of the chain, or only the last one; whereas VAT is deducted in all but the last part of the chain.

That's whataboutism. Doesn't change the fact that The Guardian _is_ propaganda.