i see this thread took off more than i expected, glad to hear i am not the only one who has an interest here
of course i am going to spend my money on whatever brand is available to me, but matt is right that there is nothing that is comparable. or can anyone point me to a replacement for epitome? if anyone can, please do, i am especially interested in the 'blocking LPS'-part of the formula because i think i have problems there.
it is not true that predator has myo elite, bmp, epitome, new slintensity, and if they are really trying to implement a new website before catching up we all know they will not have it this year, and possibly not until at least the second half of next year. i think we even know them well enough by now to know they will probably try to shove craze v3 down our throats for twice the price of a normal preworkout, claiming it beats the eth-spiked predecessor.
i think collectively our best option is to not give them any business of any kind until they go bust so the good guys over at jw etc are the only options for any us brand looking for a distributor. i mean, yes, none of the big retailers here are perfect (powerbody only stocks mainstream brands, powermyself is a bit hit or miss on what they decide to stock, half of JWs inventory are really crappy brands with PHs of questionable quality, gigas has their own scam of an in-house brand so i am not sure it is a good idea to give them business) but the open disdain that predator has for its customer base is on a level of its own. iirc, reggie johal himself posted on his own forums that they do not include samples in every order because they cost them a lot of money (i have never gotten a single package from powermyself without 3-5 usually pretty recent samples, while paying about 2/3rds of predators asking price for the entire order). he also at some point justified their high prices by saying that they are bigger than their competitors and therefore have more staff and bigger warehouses and so on and basically suggested that everyone should be glad to have the honor of being allowed to buy from him. meanwhile, if have yet to get a single order from them without either 'blabla stocking error blabla we dont have that stuff anymore and will cancel your order in three days after it took us half a week to find out we cant ship what you want anyway' or just having my order shipped within half a week (they advertise on same-day-deployment iirc, but they never manage to make it).
their pricing on the evomuse line, ironically, is kinda ok though, so if they get a hold of dat dere bmp and leptigens and so on, whatever, i'll swallow my pride.
on the matter of importing directly, i think this is really not a good option for any germans, and can offer a very long-winded and probably barely readable rant on that to back this opinion.
getting stuff through customs is not a risk i am willing to take because you can end up having to consult a lawyer to try to avoid being treated as a criminal somewhat on par with a small drugdealer. i may have outdated knowledge because i have not tried to import anything for several years, but i doubt they stopped bullying because no laws changed for the better as far as i know (some got a bit worse tho).
i once got threatened with being sued over - i **** you not - vitamin c tablets because i tried to order some stuff from iherb, but since they were 1000% of the RDA customs declared it medicinal (iirc up to 300% is max for it to still be treated as a supplement). also, i had them throw away a product that contained 3g of tyrosine per serving with the guy who explained it to me clearly thinking he was saving my life, saying 'that stuff would warp you away!'. we are talking about a powder where i could easily have used half a scoop, but stuff like that does not matter to an official - if they put '60 servings 1.5g' on the bottle instead of 30@3g, i would have been fine.
when you ask them if you can take a look at a list or sth about what is allowed to order, they replied to me that they will not hand that out and only check it whenever someone tries to get sth into the country, but i can ask the same dude they ask. i did, he replied to me that he does not have time to check anything for me, the list of what is legal is only used internally and not for anyone to see, and that i should not import anything but protein powders.
now if you do try to import anything they arbitrarily decide counts as medicine, this is actually not a very small infraction unless its just 'megadosed' vitamins or amino acids, and as soon as they do you will automatically get sued once it passes a certain $$threshold and have to prove that what you ordered is, in fact, a legal supplement and not a medicine waiting for approval, which usually only works with any degree of certainty if it has either been in use by naturopaths for hundreds of years or is sold at pharmacies.
so to make a long story short, you risk being really ****ed despite not doing anything that is outright illegal (because you can usually purchase a lot of what you cannot import legally from german stores). to add insult to injury, many judges (especially the older generation) generally seem to have a hard time to discern between anabolic steroids and caffeine pills, so good luck with getting a fair trial that actually takes the laws we have into account without investing 1-2 years into the dispute because you often will not get a sentence at first that will hold up at a higher court, which again increases what you have to pay your lawyer up front.
it is a ridiculous system that i believe is intentionally rigged because the pharmacies sell fish oil etc for a markup of 500-1000% on what you would pay for at supplement stores, the laws are essentially co-authored by the pharma lobbies (pharmacies do not carry small brands, their inventory is usually from the still pretty huge side-operations of big pharma) and therefore extremely anti-consumer.
so if you do get something through, this will mostly depend on which district the plane flies to, therefore you can't really make an assumption about other orders even if a couple lucky ones get through.
oh and the fun part? even if you call them before you order and manage to get them to look at the product, if you import it, another guy handles it when the package comes in they can still decide to seize your order, throw it away, threaten to sue you if you dont fill out a form that you are ok with it and if you dont, either nothing will happen because they already threw your stuff in the garbage bin and you have to sue them for the monetary loss (which isnt worth it if its ~200 bucks), or the whole process i mentioned above starts if its more than a couple hundred bucks. i really wish i was exaggerating at any point here. believe me, i do.
god i hate our nazi government.
customs are a joke here and operate somewhat arbitrarily/unpredictable because there is nothing you can realistically do to combat them even if they throw away stuff that would be perfectly legal to import.
