By: Images Money
Know what’s always been next to impossible to do here? Shop for clothes for my husband.
I swore the next time we needed to buy anything for him, we’d buy online from US sites, since we know they actually cater to his size.
Although a lot of retailers won’t ship to New Zealand, or charge an arm and a leg to do so, NZ Post has this service called YouShop that gets around this. Basically, you sign up for an account. You’ll then get a US address that you can tell retailers to ship your order to. That address is a giant NZ Post/YouShop warehouse. Once your package gets there, NZ Post/YouShop will notify you, and tell you exactly how much it will be to ship over to NZ (and repack the parcel if, say, it’s been lazily/wastefully packed).
Making use of this, I ordered a few things from Dickies and a few things from Target (with help from Sarah!). Here’s how it shook down, roughly:
- 3 x Dickies pants, plus a bunch of packs of socks to get the order over the limit to qualify for free shipping within the US
- 4 x T-shirts from Target – the corny kind T loves, eg Batman, Star Wars, Flash and Iron Man
Total: approx $NZ150 for the items, plus $70 for shipping = roughly $220 in total.
If we were to buy 3 pairs of Dickies in NZ, that alone would add up to about $210. They are about $70 a pop! On the US Dickies site, they are US$30 at full price (we got them on sale at a discount), or about $NZ35 – literally half the cost.
And that’s before accounting for shipping within NZ, either.
So for the price of 3 pairs of pants, we got a bunch of shirts and socks as well, delivered to our door.
You may not be perfect, America, but you sure do cater to people who need to buy stuff.
