Indeed, that's a good point Pjotr; "topping off" the shelves surely is prohibitively expensive from outside Oz to within. From the US, the first 50g now costs us >$6 of postage, and that's before we pass along the costs of a tare that can survive and a banker's friendly input to the minimum price of the smallest of goods. 100g = ~$11 all-in. But the next $5 buys you >300g, and strangely thereafter the USPS doesn't further discount per unit of weight, so I'll assume they're keen to mail parcels more than half a pound and less than 2 1/4. Things have changed a ton with the rates since we began (back then, they had a small extra charge for ounce #1, and then it was completely linear for the first 32, though they did make you buy successively larger chunks of weight range at once).
Ya'll's problem is you're so damn far from everything, and especially the epicenters of these types of goods, that everything's going by air first and boat second, so your indigenous resellers need more allegiance than any anywhere. Here in Northern Florida we in Jacksonville Beach are technically upon a long (~30x1.5 mi.)island aside of the mainland US, connected by 5 bridges. South of that fifth bridge is a spit of land called Vilano Beach, and they have not much more there than some housing, a hotel, a bar, and a Publix supermarket. If those folks have half a brain, they sure as sh*t better be patronizing that Publix every chance they get, even though we can be sure that >99% of the Vilano Bch residents work off of that tiny thing and pass many a fellow Publix and other supermarket on their returns home from work.
We endure the same things sometimes with the items we import, because we mostly deal with small EU makers, and you can't move a small box and order without getting soaked competitively in the various shipping/banker/duty overheads, so you must await enough dearth of stock of the brand, no matter who in the infield's been off the pitch and for how long, until we can launch another ship.
I love soft Italian soaps; that's what I cut my teeth upon. When my wife and I went to the Cosmoprof tradeshow in Bologna 4wks back to hunt for new Europeans wares to hawk, we had 2 days extra in Bologna to shop, and in a dusty corner of an out-of-the-way perfumery I found a soft cream for which I paid a completely absurd 40 Euros - that's $56 USD for a 150g tub that likely didn't cost a Euro to produce, but when you're in the business and it is a brand you've never seen or heard of before in a snobby shop in Italy and you'll be gone in 2 days, you pull the damn trigger. Has a picture of a Canadian mounty on the front, and says "Pino Mugo". It is the finest soft cream odor I've ever put to nose, an overwhelming authentic pine signature (didn't think I even liked pine too much, and neither did my wife, whom extolled the stuff's supremacy from outside the hotel bathroom merely from being in nose-shot of the maiden voyage) and it is a terrible pity (and testament to how much great goo comes from Italy) that both the firm and this particular formula became deceased in 2010, with no near-fascilimes from opportunistic Italian cosmetics and friends just yet.
