Part 67

To protect the manufacturers of stainless steel products in this country, the Customs Bureau instituted a campaign to halt such sharp practices and to educate foreign manufacturers to the fact that they cannot mark products with the word “stainless” unless they meet the very severe test required for the use of this word. The shipment of cast-iron flatware was refused entry, and inspectors were alerted to guard against any such shenanigans in the future.

THE MIDDLE MEN

Mr. and Mrs. John Smith of Lima, Ohio, were strolling through the streets in Florence, Italy, enjoying their first European vacation, when Mrs. Smith noticed a beautiful, hand-blown glass bowl in the window of a small shop.

“John!” she exclaimed. “There is the bowl I’ve been looking for. It would be perfect for our Christmas eggnog parties. Let’s go in and price it.”

They stepped inside the shop and a clerk brought the bowl from the window to a table where Mr. and Mrs. Smith could examine it more closely. It was a lovely piece of glass and obviously the work of a fine Venetian craftsmen. After admiring the delicate etchings on the glass, Mrs. Smith asked, “How much is it?”

The clerk said the bowl was one of the best pieces in the house and that it was priced at $75.

“My goodness,” Mrs. Smith exclaimed. “That bowl would cost double the price at home. It’s a good buy.”

Mr. Smith said, “But how will we ever get it home? We can’t lug it all over Europe with us. We would be certain to break it.”

The clerk interrupted, saying, “Pardon me. You don’t have to worry about getting the bowl to your home. We will take care of everything for you--the packing and the shipping. And we will insure it against breakage. We ship hundreds of purchases every year for American visitors.”

Mr. Smith asked, “How much do you charge for that service?”

The clerk shrugged. “There is no charge for our service, sir,” he said. “There will be a small shipping charge which you can pay on receipt of the package, but as for the trouble of packaging and handling the shipment from here, that is merely a part of the service we give our customers.”

“We won’t be back home for another three weeks,” Mrs. Smith said. “What will happen if the bowl arrives before we reach home?”

“You need not worry about that,” the clerk said. “I’ll hold the bowl for several days and then ship it so that it will not arrive until after you have reached home.”

“Well, that seems simple enough,” Mr. Smith said. “As long as you can handle this for us, then we’ll buy it.” He pulled out his wallet and paid for the bowl. Then he carefully wrote out his home address in Lima, Ohio.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” the clerk said, smiling. “The bowl will arrive soon after you get home.”

As the Smiths left the shop, Mrs. Smith said to her husband, “Well, the Italians certainly do make it easy for the Americans to buy something and send it home. I had no idea there would be so little red tape to sending a purchase home.”

A month later Mrs. Smith was at home when the telephone rang. It was a long-distance call from New York. A strange man--someone she had never heard of--asked if she had ordered a glass bowl from a shop in Florence, Italy. He explained that he was a Customs broker, the bowl had been consigned to him, and he was prepared to clear the package and forward the shipment if she authorized him to do so. He explained there would be a nominal fee for his services in getting the package released from Customs and forwarded to the Smiths in Lima.

Mrs. Smith was so flustered she told the caller she would have her husband get in touch with him. What was this strange man doing with her bowl? The clerk in Florence had said he would take care of everything, and now this broker was saying something about having legal title to the shipment and that she would have to pay a fee to get her bowl shipped to her. He had explained that she could come to New York and arrange personally for the Customs clearance if she wished to do so.

Mrs. Smith telephoned her husband at his office and told him about the call from the broker in New York. She gave her husband the man’s name and his telephone number in New York.

And then Mr. Smith exploded with anger. “It’s a gyp deal of some sort,” he said. “I am going to call the nearest Customs office and see what this is all about. We didn’t tell that clerk to send the package to anyone in New York. I don’t know how he got into this picture. There’s something funny going on and I’m going to find what it’s all about.”

Within a short time, Mr. Smith learned--by checking with a Customs officer--that he was not being gypped. The broker in New York was a legitimate broker, licensed by the Federal government to act as a clearing agent for merchandise arriving in the port of New York. The call that had been made to Mrs. Smith was a routine call, because the package containing the bowl had been consigned to the broker in routine fashion either by the shipper in Florence or by the carrier which brought the package into the port of New York.

Mr. Smith asked why it was that Customs in New York could not forward the bowl directly to him without going through a broker. That seemed the easy way to handle the shipment without all this red tape and the payment of a fee to some stranger whose name he had never heard before this day. Mr. Smith declared heatedly that he didn’t have time to go running off to New York for a $75 glass bowl. As a matter of fact the bowl wasn’t worth all that trouble and expense. He and his wife wanted the bowl and they wanted it as quickly as possible.

The Customs officer explained that unless Mr. Smith or his wife went to the port of entry to clear the shipment with Customs--or unless they authorized the broker to act as their agent--the bowl would be held by Customs for five days. Then if it were not claimed, it would be sent to a warehouse. It would remain in the warehouse for one year, and if it had not been claimed within that period, then it would be sold at auction along with other unclaimed packages. The officer explained further that Customs was not authorized by law to act as the forwarding agent for anyone--except in cases where a shipment valued at less than $250 was received by mail from an overseas point.

“Now, if you had shipped the bowl by mail,” the Customs officer said, “it would have been delivered to your post office and you could have obtained its release with no difficulty at all.”

Smith retorted, “This is a fine time to tell me I should have shipped by mail. All I can say is it’s a hell of a way to run a railroad.” He slammed down the phone, cursing Customs and all of the government’s red tape. Then, reluctantly and angrily, he called the strange broker in New York and authorized him to clear the glass bowl. Thus the day was ruined for Mr. and Mrs. John Smith of Lima, Ohio.

The story of Mr. and Mrs. Smith is not unusual. Similar cases occur daily throughout the United States as returning travellers discover that they could have saved themselves worry, time, and money by familiarizing themselves with the Customs procedures governing the importation of foreign purchases into the United States. Had Mr. and Mrs. Smith taken the time to read a few relatively simple instructions--available to travellers in pamphlet form--they would not have gotten into the difficulty they did.

In the first place, they would not have accepted the glib assurance of the Florence clerk that he would take care of everything. Instead, they would have instructed the clerk to mail the glass bowl by parcel post, marked as a “tourist purchase.” When the package arrived in New York, the post office would have turned it over to Customs in routine fashion for examination. An examiner would have verified the contents and its value and then returned the package to the post office to be forwarded directly to the Smiths in their home town. If any duty were due, it could have been paid to the postmaster after filling out a simple entry form. No broker. No delay. No red tape.

But this is what happened to the Smith’s glass bowl after it was purchased in Florence: the clerk turned the package over to a forwarding agent with no special instructions. The agent routinely consigned the shipment to a broker in New York with whom he had been doing business for years. The bill of lading was made out to the New York broker, which meant that when the package arrived in New York, the broker had legal title to the glass bowl because it was consigned to him.