🚀 go-pugleaf

[In article <2008@laura.UUCP>,
     klute@heike.informatik.uni-dortmund.de (Rainer Klute) writes ... ]

> This raises the question how much fee I had to pay if I would
> receive a cheque or money order from a foreign country (here:
> anything outside Germany). Recently I got an Euro-Cheque from
> Austria made out in DM (Deutsche Mark) and I had no additional
> costs with it. Probably it is different with cheques from, say,
> Canada or the United States. I shall try to find out and post
> the results here.

The expense comes on the sender's end.

A couple of years ago, on Rainer's recommendation, I bought the DRI
Resource Editor from Merlin Computer GMBH, Eschborn, FRG. The price was
22.50 DM, which converted to about a third of the U.S. retail price of the
Kuma resource editor, the only one available here at the time.

Merlin asked for a Eurocheque in Deutsche Marks. It cost me 12 dollars or
so in service charges just to get a bank here to issue the check! And I
had to wait almost an hour for this "service."

Since then I've found that you can buy International Reply Coupons, which
can be converted into local stamps, at any post office. They're the
optimum solution for most small exchanges.

(Actually, my wife and her mother routinely buy perfumes, tulip bulbs,
etc., from companies in France and Holland that accept personal checks
made out in U.S. currency. Those firms apparently have no trouble cashing
the U.S. checks.)

> Oh, and there is still the very cheap possibility to put some
> banknotes into an envelope and hand it over to the snail mail
> for delivery. Obviously this is not the most secure procedure
> but for $15 (the Arcgsh Shareware fee I ask for) the risk may
> be bearable.

Absolutely right -- although I think $15 is a rather steep tax on being
too lazy to type the commands to ARC. :-) 

-- 
   Steve Yelvington at the (thin ice today*) lake in Minnesota
   UUCP path: ... umn-cs.cs.umn.edu!thelake!steve
   
   *16 cars through the ice so far this year! Yes, you, too, can
    have that sinking feeling....