> Catherine Driscoll wrote:
>
> >http://www.catholicshopper.com/products/madonna3.html
> >
> >How appalling is it that they don't ship outside the states?
>
> Damn, I retract my previous wonder at the web. How provincial. Isn't
> Catholicism more universal than new age skincare products?
>
well the catholic church always did specialise in adapting the local to its own ends, and this kind of statuary really doesn't have a significant market in Australia
but still, how hard could it be to add an extra shipping cost...?
it's probably some 'don't tread on another franchise's territory' thing -- given that the church is hyper aware of itself as a money-making enterprise it probably has clear rules about which market belongs to which group
i could have brought joe's jesus-nodder, which i also liked, but they had a ridiculous minimum order policy and there was nothing else there i wanted
it's just unfair the rest of the world needs blasphemous religious kitsch as well
another factor, i think, is that Australia has an extremely high rate of internet usage -- it used to be the highest, but that may be out of date -- and is geographically very large -- and so online ordering is pretty popular here
apparently not with the catholic shops, though, which either don't do online stuff at all or don't do overseas orders either; the CC here is pretty retrograde not that you'd want anything they sell anyway, yours is that much better