Sunday, October 03, 2010

Toys and stuff ordered

After regularly keeping track of products at ThinkGeek's webshop for years now, I finally decided to take the plunge and order a few items - some simple toys - those that fascinate both older kids (the ones with gray hair) as well as normal kids. At my first attempt, I was quite taken aback by their order verification process - and in fact, I canceled my order. However, a little bit of Googling revealed that this was a normal process. And after mustering courage, I ordered again. And went through their order verification process.

Of course, I am paying through my nose for the delivery to India. Even though these might be available in India, I did not have the patience to spend time looking where it might be available. It made sense to pack as many items into a single shipment as possible, since the DHL Express shipment to India is itself about USD 35.

And, as some study recently pointed out, online shopping probably results in more environmental hazard than brick-and-mortar shopping. So, the items manufactured in China go to the USA only to be shipped back to India (via an airplane).

It remains to be seen what shape the items arrive in. A couple of decades ago, anything shipped to India had the reputation of being opened up and flicked at the arrival port. Not to mention taxed to death.

Onto the interesting items actually: Apart from a few silly items, one of them is a mini remote-controlled drone  and the other a doodle track car. Check out the interesting videos here and here.

And since DHL offers a web-based online tracking mechanism, its quite easy to see where the shipment is at any point in time.

Can't wait to get those items however worthless they may be.

1 comment:

Rajani said...

If you want more stuff, you could send us the list a couple of weeks before our next india trip :)
- Rajani