We are no longer shipping any merchandise to the European Union.
The reason is the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR). A bureaucratic monstrosity that treats a one-person merch shop the exact same as Amazon. No minimum volume. No real exemption for micro-businesses. Ship one single package to France, Germany, Spain or anywhere else in the bloc and you suddenly owe registration fees, authorised representatives, reporting duties and ongoing costs in that country. Multiply that by 27 member states and the numbers become absurd.
Hundreds of euros per country, every year, just for the privilege of existing in their system — before you’ve even sold anything. For a small independent seller this is not “regulation.” It is a deliberate barrier designed by people who have never run a real business and who could not care less if every small shop disappears tomorrow.
This is the European Union in its purest form: a machine that claims to protect the “single market” while systematically crushing the small actors who actually make that market function. The big corporations laugh, hire compliance departments, and keep going. Everyone else is told to shut up and pay, or leave. So we leave.
The entire project has become a self-serving bureaucracy that expands its power by inventing new rules no ordinary person can reasonably follow. It pretends to care about the environment and the little guy while creating exactly the conditions that only the largest players can survive. It is anti-competitive, anti-small business, and increasingly anti-democratic in practice.
An institution this detached from reality, this hostile to independent enterprise, and this addicted to control does not deserve to exist in its current form. The European Union should be dissolved. The member states should reclaim the ability to make simple, proportionate rules instead of being force-fed this endless, destructive legislation from Brussels.
We will not play along. We will not bleed money and time to satisfy a system that actively works against people like us. Until this bureaucratic empire collapses or is forced to change, we will not ship a single item into the EU.
If you’re a customer inside the bloc: we’re sorry it came to this. The decision was made for us by people who will never feel the consequences.