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Since parcel delivery has been unreliable since the outsourcing of delivery to our local K-Citymarket supermarket, I've been trying to use parcel-pick-up shipping methods instead. There are 2 corner groceries within a 10-minute walk of home, each next to its own bus stop, and between them they get at least 4 of these (including the infamous Smartpost automats, whose mishap from the previous link has now been rendered impossible because the websites now display the private automats in the dropdown list when you order from them, hallelujah). A lot of websites from within Finland offer more than one of these, because not every corner grocery has all of them.
So that means that I try harder to find online shops inside Finland to order from now, where in the past I often ordered from the UK or Germany by default because they're so big & hence have a wider range of well-designed large English-language webstores (the difference in shipping cost is usually not extreme, although UK ones are less likely to offer international shipping at all)*.
But today was the first time I started to order something from a domestic shop and then changed my mind because they didn't have any pickup-point options. This is... unheard of. It's bizarre. It's not like it's a tiny little shop, either. It's quite large! I feel like I've time traveled to 2005 with their webshop! I'll have to find more Spøt from one of my other 8 Finnish yarn shop bookmarks...
*Which may slightly reduce the shock if they slide out of the EU soon... though not for me, because I'm deeply attached to three different UK-based fountain pen & ink shops and I've only found one likely EU replacement and their website's not as good. Unsurprisingly the situation is quite different when it comes to yarns, although afaik only Great British Yarns has all the Jamieson's of Shetland and Studio Donegal yarns which I want acres of... Finland is a big knitting and yarn-consuming country, so there's a pretty solid stock of good speckled hand-dyed colors from indie dyers like Hedgehog Fibres (Irish), The Uncommon Thread (UK), Qing Fibre (UK), La Bien Aimee (French), & Finnish Aurinkokehrä, Handu, Kettu Yarns, Louhittaren Luola, Lanitium ex machina, and Silmusolmu. Much more surprisingly, there's a Helsinki salon that carries several great indie nail polish brands of which I am a long-time dedicated fan, even though she's much smaller than the UK shops that do that (so small that she hand-signs every packing slip "Thanks! - Satu").
So that means that I try harder to find online shops inside Finland to order from now, where in the past I often ordered from the UK or Germany by default because they're so big & hence have a wider range of well-designed large English-language webstores (the difference in shipping cost is usually not extreme, although UK ones are less likely to offer international shipping at all)*.
But today was the first time I started to order something from a domestic shop and then changed my mind because they didn't have any pickup-point options. This is... unheard of. It's bizarre. It's not like it's a tiny little shop, either. It's quite large! I feel like I've time traveled to 2005 with their webshop! I'll have to find more Spøt from one of my other 8 Finnish yarn shop bookmarks...
*Which may slightly reduce the shock if they slide out of the EU soon... though not for me, because I'm deeply attached to three different UK-based fountain pen & ink shops and I've only found one likely EU replacement and their website's not as good. Unsurprisingly the situation is quite different when it comes to yarns, although afaik only Great British Yarns has all the Jamieson's of Shetland and Studio Donegal yarns which I want acres of... Finland is a big knitting and yarn-consuming country, so there's a pretty solid stock of good speckled hand-dyed colors from indie dyers like Hedgehog Fibres (Irish), The Uncommon Thread (UK), Qing Fibre (UK), La Bien Aimee (French), & Finnish Aurinkokehrä, Handu, Kettu Yarns, Louhittaren Luola, Lanitium ex machina, and Silmusolmu. Much more surprisingly, there's a Helsinki salon that carries several great indie nail polish brands of which I am a long-time dedicated fan, even though she's much smaller than the UK shops that do that (so small that she hand-signs every packing slip "Thanks! - Satu").
