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Comment by m0xte | Hacker News Reader

I’m in the UK. I can see this is going to mean a huge chunk of products disappearing from amazon here. A lot of stuff I order comes from Europe. So supply chain problems for months here we come!

Fun times ahead. And no I didn’t vote for this shit show.

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At least now you get to keep those 350 million GBP a week. /s

I really wish someone bothered to hold his feet to the fire on that one. He just got to chuckle and shrug it off, and the reaction from most seems to be “lol oh that’s our Boris”

Bit difficult when they control the press.

The way my British friends told me, nobody really took the brexit vote seriously and treated it like a Lord Buckethead, Boaty McBoat Face joke.

At least until the mic dropped and the consequences of their joke vote became clear.

There were people on the TV the next morning all "I didn't think my vote would count" or "I just wanted to tell the government to stuff it".

They confirmed they wanted Brexit in the last elections. They had no excuses when Boris was elected. If that is what people want, that is what people deserve.

That's more a consequence of our terrible electoral system combined with the most incompetent / most poisonous opposition leader ever.

From the outside it looks as if Brexit is at most slightly unpopular, so it's not unimaginable to believe that in fluctuation we might occasionally find it to be the marginally popular position.

Euro elections had Farage beating Lib Dems, 2017 had Tory win too.

Fear of Corbyn was a factor, but so was the “get on with it” sentiment

> Who is the greater fool, the fool or the fool who follows him?

Obi-Wan Kenobi

Some of that comes from the political deadlock that came out of the referendum result. Once the process got hard, there was a feeling of "just make this pain stop!" and the result was the 2019 election.

I do recall some conversations (with Leave voters, no less!) where it was felt the government shouldn't have wasted our time asking us. It's not the public's job to understand the details of international relations, yet it was foisted on the people. In spite of that, the government got it's answer, so just do it!

I took it seriously. In my social group, the bigger problem I saw was delusional Lexiteers. They're due to get literally nothing they said wanted out of Brexit.

I hope one day we can rejoin, and it doesn't break the UK into pieces, but right now I can't see the Union surviving.

Yes! I encountered these "Lexit" guys too and couldn't believe what I was hearing when they were telling me about how they voted Brexit and why, it just seemed incredibly naive.

For a lot of people it was a protest vote. They knew Cameron wanted them to vote one way so they did the opposite, it was a vote against the status quo.

For other people they genuinely believed the scapegoating the UK media had done for 20 years+

For others, a minority, they thought that this was a way of pushing the EU to reform some of its more silly practices (like moving parliament around for no reason)

Moving parliament is a political compromise, not unlike the 1790 compromise in the US

The EU would strongly prefer to stop this silly moving practice but France vetos against it.

Yet the pro-brexit party is still in power, so it seems the majority still wants brexit or at least isn't willing to put their money where their mouth is.

Give it time. Much like the average smoker, the regret doesn’t really kick in until you’re well up shit creek without a paddle.

At the point of the 2019 election stopping Brexit wasn't really on the table - no major party was against it. Labour had a vague message that was not anti-Brexit. Lib Dems may have technically been anti-Brexit but have no trust (is "no Brexit" the same as "no tuition fees"?) and have fewer seats than even the SNP (oh and their leader lost her seat).

The public were basically given no choice in 2019

I'm still waiting for him to fill the much promised ditch.

Whoever his PR people are did a bang-up job on Social Media /SEO by making him say he likes painting little buses as a hobby. This displaced the previous top results for the search term "Boris Bus" (i.e. the bus with the 350 million GBP lie). It was very "Black Mirror".

I don't know if that ever worked but searching for "Boris Bus" right now on DDG or Google yields mostly results and images of the infamous campaign bus.

The campaign was specifically timed at a crucial point in time when Johnson was jockeying to be the Prime Minister (June 2019). Search engines have a recency bias, and that story made it to all British news sites.

Actually if you prorated the demand from the EU in term of exit payment to the length of the residual budget, you were well over 350m pw. And that's before the big €700bn+ package that the EU is cooking right now which will dwarf those numbers.

I love that you felt you had to point out you were being sarcastic.

The opposite will be annoying as well: I sometimes order products from non-European companies which use UK sellers as their official resellers for the EU. They will probably need to find new EU resellers outside the UK.

Yes. Of course the same applies not just to resellers, but also to companies properly located in the UK. I order quite frequently from Rapha and Wiggle and hope they'll have EU-based fulfilling in place.

Same here. I order quite frequently from Rapha and Wiggle and hope they'll have EU-based fulfilling in place.

Not saying this isn't bad for the UK, but this is one of the very real consequences of opting out of the EU.

But perhaps this might break some of the Amazon dominance and make way for other options - that would be a real benefit.

That's what happens in Switzerland. See payot.ch, galaxus.ch, and ceedee.ch. Local jobs for local purchases. Nice concept.

Also: the products are more expensive, which is what it costs for your neighbor to have a job and not unemployment.

Galaxus’s is expanding in Germany. I think there are other semi specialised retailers like Fnac , interdiscount, Mediamarkt that have local shops and shipping.

Amazon solved a fairly large problem with retailers here. They were shit and abusive to the customers. It’ll just slip back to the status quo again if we lose amazon dominance I hate to say.

I’d rather prefer it if that wasn’t the case for ref but I know British culture well enough to know that we’re lazy and selfish.

>Amazon solved a fairly large problem with retailers here. They were shit and abusive to the customers.

So what's all this 'comingling' thing about then? I assure you that if AMZN becomes dominant, customer service will get worse not better. Bezos is not a charity.

>I’d rather prefer it if that wasn’t the case for ref but I know British culture well enough to know that we’re lazy and selfish.

Substitute 'Romanian' for 'British' then ask if your racism still sounds OK to you.

I doubt it.

As for your second point, that’s possibly the worst straw man I’ve ever heard.

You can order stuff from amazon US from the UK (and sometimes even through the UK website). Plus lots of vendors based in China. I wouldn't overdo the implications of this change.

What percentage of those products are made in the EU? Asking as all I've brought has been made elsewhere and imported and wehoused in some EU country as import/duty wise it is one border so once in the EU, it's free to move.

Also many things I buy seem to buy from Amazon ship direct from China!

But fun times ahead, just remember to laugh ;).

It’ll be fine. Switzerland isn’t in the EU and doesn’t have amazon. Instead amazon ships for free from .fr,de,it and include the reduced vat etc so you don’t have anything extra to pay when receiving. Me for returns they cover the actual shipping costs back to their warehouses.

You left out the part where most items on amazon don’t ship to Switzerland. The probably only item with free shipping is books.

Do you live in Switzerland? Only a fraction of what’s listed on amazon.de or amazon.fr will ship to Switzerland. Pretty much no electronics will ship to for example. The China loop hole was closed recently so that alibaba and the like are now unavailable. Often you just have to suck it up and pay “Swiss” prices from a local reseller.

And swiss prices are absolutely outrageous. In addition to lots of taxes and duties on certain goods, labour prices in switzerland are sky-high, so visiting a retailer there is usually more expensive than a short shopping trip to France/Germany/Italy...

I don’t think there is duty on most things. VAT is 7.7%. What jacks up the price is retailers thinking « this is Switzerland, people are used to pay through the nose so why not make an extra 20% »

What irks me the most is companies that have no presence in CH but who will ship to CH, and when you go to their website everything is 20–30% more expensive compared to their .de or .fr store (where vat is 20%!). Even though shipping is extra, and it all ships from the same warehouse in Germany or Ireland. Like misterspecs, or revolutioncycles.

Electronics are cheaper in Switzerland

I’d say a third of the stuff ships. Sometimes I can find the item locally for a comparable price, but sometimes I’m SOL. It could be better but it also forces me to reevaluate how much I really need something, and reduce on clutter.

Which isn't too bad on electronics (including camera equipment and such) where Swiss prices are quite reasonable.

Now for the rest...

Switzerland is in the single market. The UK loses access to the single market on January the 1st so that comparison doesn't stand up.

In this case, I'm not convinced that it's people in the UK in particular who'll have trouble ordering things from Amazon. For historical reasons, the UK has a disproportionate amount of Amazon logistics infrastructure compared to most other EU countries and I think they've even been fulfilling European "sold by Amazon" orders from the UK warehouses. If anything does affect the supply of goods from UK Amazon it's more likely to be disruption of shipping into the warehouses.

that made sense while UK was in the EU now amazon may opt to move more operations/warehousing to the rest of the EU to cater for the larger market of the two. either way it doesn't mean UK will not be receiving the same products as before, just in smaller quantities to cover UK-only demand.

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