I shipped out some (belated) Christmas gifts to a friend of mine in Canada yesterday. It amazes me how much paperwork is involved in sending stuff that, were I just driving it to Canada, would be simply be dealt with as "No" in response to the "Do you have anything to declare?" question.
Further, the chick at the UPS Store kept trying to downplay item values, even though I know it's not going to come into play because I'm nowhere near the "customs limit" for gift value.
UPS: What's this?
Me: Chocolate
UPS: Value?
Me: About eight dollars.
UPS: How about two?
Me: It's really eight.
UPS: I'll put down two.
Me: *sigh* ... whatever
Ordinarily I wouldn't use Brown, I swore off of them, but my "I'll pay for good service" thing only goes so far... The other carriers only offered overnight solutions (in the $80 for shipping range) as opposed to ground service ($14-15 range)... (although I discovered later, FedEx could have done it as a ground service, it just didn't appear on my rate-quote tool because I hadn't fed it the right arcane checkbox combination or something like that)
How can there be so much paperwork for something that doesn't actually meet the minimum valuation that you have to worry about for import? Who thinks this stuff up, the Department of Bureaucracy and Red Tape?
I normally use the USPS for shipping low weight items to Canada. If the box only weighs a few pounds (5 pounds costs about $16-$17), it would probably cost the same amount as UPS to ship "air mail", which will take b/t 3 and 7 days to get there. Their customs form is uber-easy to fill out too, once you've done a couple. (And I've done a lot more than a couple!)