Dear friends,

we want to tell you a story.

We opened this online store years ago as a support to the Surfer Joe Summer Festival, to help spreading the word about surf music and give some visibility to modern and classic artists who are part of this scene. Differently from others, we have opened a regular business and declared the income for it. We kept track of our stock, we developed our online system, we have been carefully making invoices and tried to make everybody happy the best we could. Our markup on the records has always been between 2 and 5 euros in the average, not even considering the cost of packaging materials and our time to account, prepare, develop, pack and deal with logistics. We have paid unreasonably expensive customs fees for all imports most of the time.

Starting January 1st 2021 postal services worldwide have changed a bit, introducing the same import/export rules of the express couriers, with a way more complicated method of declaring goods at customs and increasing therefore the costs, not just in terms of tariffs but also and especially in the time needed to arrange the shipping of a simple thing like a CD.

Today, March 17th 2021, we went to the post office to ship one record to USA. We were used to have a commercial account with the Italian Postal Services that allowed us to ship easily, at least wasting little time, but the system has not been functioning for the past 2 months. So we continued to carry on anyway and we have physically gone to the post office to ship. The record packed was 400 grams and already the 17-18 euros quoted to the customer were outrageously expensive, ridiculous, but we cannot choose a non-tracked service (for just 3-4 euros less) since there would be good chances of never receiving that package. We got charged 26.90 euros for this package. Just one 12" vinyl. We have lost a lot of money on this, but to the eyes of the customers we are expensive. We cannot change it: we have to pay taxes and the postal service, making almost nothing for our work.

It is absolutely pointless to carry on this project. So, due to this offense to us as a business and to the customers, we shut down immediately the Surfer Joe Store. We have no more time to waste with postal and shipping services.

We recommend that you buy the records at the shows rather than online, when possible, since this is a direct and immediate support to the artist who is probably on tour and possibly already has high expenses.

This is all so wrong. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Bye,
Lorenzo Valdambrini / Surfer Joe

P.S.: if you want to know what we have still available in our stock, please send us an email to info@surferjoestore.com.