Keeping It Personal

A little while back I was looking at some of the great stuff being put out and distributed by Concrete Jungle Records in Germany. After a bit of internal debate, I selected a few choice items and made a payment via their PayPal option. Unfortunately, I hadn’t clocked some of the small-print, namely a €17 postage charge for non-German orders (as opposed to €4 for internal) and a 5% PP premium.

So a day or two later, I get an email from Matze, the guy behind the operation, asking me to send quite a bit more money (my order was about €33 including, I thought, the postage etc). So I mailed him back, pointing out that it wasn’t really clear that there were additional charges, that I thought the shipping costs were excessive compared to many other distros I used, and that it was unfair to slap charges on PP users when the other payment options probably incurred bank charges anyway. I was polite about it, as Matze had been in his original mail, but I cancelled the order.

Anyway, a while later I get another mail from Matze. He told me that the €17 charge included insurance (which I didn’t know, and made it far more reasonable), but that he could send uninsured mail for only €4. Now, I’ve rarely had a problem with stuff disappearing in the post (like any postie wants to damage his hearing, image and sanity that badly by nicking the kind of stuff I listen to), so uninsured post is what I always go for. Even when there has been a problem, I’ve always managed to sort it out with the relevant postal service. So he’s changed things around and €4 is now the standard charge for worldwide orders (with insured as an option). And orders over €100 are now post-free, so if you club together with a few friends it becomes a proper bargain.

And he also said he was removing the PP surcharge, again a welcome surprise.

The end result is, I’ve now placed an order for over €50, spending what I would’ve paid for shipping on a very classy antifa t-shirt.

Could you imagine having had this kind of chat with the head of Sony or Warner or any other piece-of-shit major label, or even getting a personal response in the first place? I know you probably don’t need telling but – SUPPORT THE INDEPENDENTS. They really are doing it for the kids, young and old.

OP’s opinion: