This actually sounds like a good thing. It costs Chinese shippers almost nothing to send stuff directly from China, while it costs me quite a lot to send stuff within the US, largely because I'm subsidizing all the Chinese shippers.
Moreover, for me to send any parcel (even very small ones, like 2 oz.) outside the US costs a small fortune these days, again because I'm subsidizing the Chinese shippers.
> Moreover, for me to send any parcel (even very small ones, like 2 oz.) outside the US costs a small fortune these days, again because I'm subsidizing the Chinese shippers.
International shipping was expensive before China flooded the market b2c.
If you sent a pkg to China, the US would only have to drop it off in China, the last mile delivery cost is mostly up to China. The actual air freight cost to USPS is about $5/kg.
I think what’s really happening is that USPS (and Canada Post!) are using international shipping as a profit centre because there’s little competition and they need to subsidize legislated activities (6x/week door-to-door service for 53c or whatever it is).
Canada is truly awful in this respect. In Canada, it might cost around $50 to send a small package to another country (excluding the US, which is a little cheaper). In the US, the same package might cost a little over $10.
I'm in the US and I occasionally have to ship small light packages to Canada and was always frustrated when it cost me $10, 3x as much to ship a few hundred miles to Canada compared to 2,000 miles within this country. Then I learned that shipping that same package within Canada would cost almost $20.
Originally they didn’t collect much data and used manifests on the individual packages, but for the past 5-6 years they’ve a computer system to enter package info, it’s basically a Google Sheet, and they show the manifest like any other shipping company. They’ll occasionally get a thorough stop but it’s up to chance as anything when at a trusted, high-volume border crossing. If you’ve a Nexus card and nothing to declare, you don’t actually have to stop at the border between the US and Canada if Nexus lanes are open... and if you do have something to declare you can drop off a form. Also they probably stick to the same land border crossings and the same schedule to make it easier long-term. They can close many borders but there a lot of commerce and cross-border travel between Canada and the US and parts of Canada can be more populated/central than parts of the US and vice versa. Besides, as long as the carrier follows directions from CBP or CBSA, the responsibility of the shipment belongs with the shipper and you have to leave your complete ”from” details and they even check IDs, in order to ship with them. They send the list in advance so anything suspicious can be flagged or recorded, that’s how customs works in this digital era...
Sounds like the next thing for big VCs to fund. It used to be that going somewhere with strangers you met online was feared, then came Uber. Couch surfing? AirBnB. Next, getting packages around customs, tariffs, and expensive shipping by crowd sourcing? Bam! VC Unicorn.
And yet I've never had a reliability problem with USPS-shipped packages, whereas I've had so many problems with UPS that it's a joke among my friends that someone at UPS has a personal grudge against me. Lost packages, dented packages, me being home all day long and the doorbell never rings but there's a post-it on the door saying they couldn't deliver because nobody was home.
In theory USPS takes longer, but for me personally it's about the same time and a lot less of me getting upset at people. If USPS says Friday, I'm getting it on Friday. If UPS says Friday I'm getting it on Monday evening.
I miss when Amazon used to let you chose the shipper. That's been forever ago.
USPS has been great for my tiny side-business. They are cheaper than anybody else for packages under a pound, and you can create a first class shipping label from within PayPal. This is cheaper than priority mail, and seldom if ever takes longer. I've simply never had a lost package, despite shipping a couple hundred units per year for almost a decade.
On the receiving end, I like USPS because I can have my mail held when I'm on a trip -- the process is totally painless.
Now, who knows if my shipping is being subsidized. Probably, when one considers subsidies to transportation infrastructure. But I suspect that if we lose USPS, whatever money the government saves will be more than made up by having to bail out one or more of the private shipping services every few years, like other "too big to fail" industries.
In addition, if you're shipping smaller heavy items, you can get free shipping supplies like padded envelope and boxes for flat rate shipping which can be a better rate in some cases.
As I understand it (and even though I live in NZ I manufacture in China and ship all over the world from there) much of the airmail shipping from China is essentially founded on arbitrage of the empty space in air-mail shipping containers from Asia to the West - it's while it takes a while and sometimes your package goes out of Hong Kong, sometimes Singapore etc
In essence those packets are cheap because some smart person is buying up the empty space in containers that are already going and filling them - I assume that Air-Mail FROM the US could be equally cheap if someone was entrepreneurial enough to do the same there
Planet money did a pod cast on it. Some guy selling some product could buy a Chinese knockoff of his product (including shipping) for cheaper than it costs him to ship his product from his local post office to his house in the same town. (excluding the cost of the product) Think about that. The product plus shipping across the world is cheaper than shipping across town.
I think it's because they are buying space that otherwise would be empty, and maintain an elastic buffer of packages to fill those spaces as they become available - the outgoing mail containers on planes are likely booked and paid for months in advance so the people paying for them will happily take 20% of their normal rate to fill the rest of them at the last minute
Here is the problem. I make a widget. It costs me $10 US to manufacture. I go to the post office, and ship it to an address directly across the street. They charge $7.
I go on AliExpress. I buy a similar widget, and ship it to the same address. The total cost, the item plus shipping, is $6.
Let's break that down. Their cost of manufacturing is lower. Let's say it's free. Ok fine. Trans Pacific shipping is cheap. Let's say it's free. Ok fine. They still have to ship it via the post office from the port in Long Beach to the post office in New Jersey; again, let's say that's free. The post office then has to deliver out across the street.
The post office charges me $7 to walk it it across the street. Why should the Chinese shipper only pay $6 for the same service?
That, and air freight only costs around $5/kg at regular rates.
The low-rate consolidators are kinda shameful by only bringing goods to the closest port to the origin, not the destination.
E.g. in Canada, they only bring it to the Vancouver port, while wealthier countries will pre-sort and air it to the closest intl mail port (Toronto, Montreal or Vancouver).
this is a trade off between cost and speed of delivery - shipping out of China I have the choice of many different carriers - for example I can use cheap (and slowish) China Post, or faster and $6 more PostNL who will also give me tracking - I give my customers the cheap China Post for free and charge $6 for PostNL
(in the near future if US mail prices go up I may be forced to charge US customers more, I may also have to raise prices to US customers if I find that Trump's sanctions start to apply to small packages and I'm stuck paying from my end)
I think you're confusing "terminal dues" (which is what countries charge each other for delivering a package in the destination country) and the actual cost of shipping between countries (which is what I'm talking about here)
Since you are responding to someone comparing US domestic (in town) shipping prices to international shipping price, I don't see how you are not talking about "terminal dues".
International freight costs could explain why international shipping is more expensive than domestic shipping, but even if international freight prices are 0, they can't explain why domestic shipping is more expensive than international shipping.
Don't know about air mail, but for maritime and rail transport, there is much more going from China to the EU or US than in the other direction by volume.
This means cargo carriers have to send back empty containers to China.
As a result, it's cheaper to book a container, from, say, Antwerp to Shanghai than the reverse. The difference can be quite substantial, potentially hundreds of USD per container.
For the other parts of the trip I don't have any hard info but I would think rail and truck is cheaper in China per km when converted to USD.
>Don't know about air mail, but for maritime and rail transport, there is much more going from China to the EU or US than in the other direction by volume.
Where can I verify this? Thats looking at only the direct transport? Or also indirect transport?
Consider a hypothetical container from the US/EU going to Africa (bringing products, second hand goods, "recyclables", ...), then the container could pick up raw minerals and resources going to China, now theres an empty container in China and it has to go back to US/EU?
It's because the shipping containers belong to the shipping company, and are rented out for the trip.
So the shipping company will have a bunch of empty containers at the port of landing (destination), and needs to send them back to the port of departure to be filled again.
If trade between the two ports is balanced, then the containers will always be full regardless of the port of departure.
But since trade is not balanced, they wind up having to send empty containers on the "return" voyage. Which is pure loss for the shipping company, so they are willing to heavily discount routes that have empty containers transiting.
Which are these routes does change of course, but they are often those originating in the EU / US and arriving in Asia.
It’s pretty much the result of our trade deficit. Not only does China export more than is, they export much lower value products on a volume/weight basis. Heck, a big USA export to China are airplanes that can simply be flown there.
China exports plenty to Africa, no need for such circuitous shipping patterns.
China has a huge population, so material consumption (raw materials or finished products) for internal use in china, can bayesian catapult reasoning on value per volume/weight basis.
A long time ago, USPS signed an insane sweetheart deal for free shipping from China, thinking that it would help US companies ship to China. But for many reasons (labor laws, environmental laws, go subsidies) outsidee of shipping costs, US-China post package shipping (not heavy industry whatever), is absolutely massively imbalanced. Chinese shippers massive privilege over US domestic shippers (shipping to ISo customers) was the main side effect. US shipping costs more than Chinese manufacturer + shipping, despite shipping from China being obviously more expensive in real world resources.
The USPS signed an agreement for ePacket, but most of the packages are being shipped under UPU rules that most countries in the world are signatories to.
USPS fares better under ePacket packages than the UPU tarifed packages.
Do you remember that article a couple years ago about pollution at the Port in LA? They've done a bunch to reduce ship emissions in dock but the truckers are popping up on the radar.
The short-haul truckers at the Port in LA are all independent owner-operators, which sounds like a cool libertarian/capitalist ideal until you figure out that new trucks are super expensive so the operators are almost exclusively buying used trucks, often quite old (and grandfathered into emissions rules). And as we all know from personal experience, there's a lot of soot that comes from a heavy diesel when it accelerates from a dead stop.
And there are no large necks to wring so now you're in the awkward situation of having to go after little guys.
1. around half of US population (and even bigger share purchasing/consuming capacity wise) live on a coast not far from a major port.
2. container ship is 10g/tonne-km of CO2, ground truck 60g/tonne-km of CO2
3. Shanghai to LA - 10000km, Shanghai to New York - 17000km
So, it is simple math that container delivery from Shanghai plus 100-200km or even more of truck delivery from the port beats any cross-US truck delivery (for the US West it beats even half-cross-US truck delivery). Of course when it comes to the math vs. ideological politics - last season of Veep was brilliant about it :)
> 3 weeks container shipping on a super container ship vs. even cheapest truck shipping ?
Container shipping is ridiculously cheap. See e.g. https://www.joc.com/maritime-news/capacity-cuts-keeping-asia.... Seems around 640 USD from Shanghai to North Europe as per above article/source. This for a 20 foot container. A lot of containers are 40 foot. US has loads of 45 foot containers.
If you'd go very far inland you wouldn't use a truck though; either a barge (inland vessel) or a train.
container ship shipping from US to Middle East was cheaper for me than shipping my stuff from NYC to California (and similar shipment from east coast to middle east was less tha half the price of shipping from California). Boat is much cheaper than truck overall.
I bought a A1 sized picture frame from a french seller for around $50 on Amazon. It was a total pain getting an affordable frame in A1 size, because the best we can get easily in America is a 24x36" which is just far enough off to be unusable.
When it arrived, it had some damage to the acrylic and I wanted to return it. Amazon Support said they would reimburse me up to $20 for shipping it back, but when I took it to UPS they wanted $370 just to ship it back.
I have no idea how shipping costs are determined. I'm sure the seller didn't pay $370 to send it to me.
Did you contact Amazon or the seller, and what was the outcome? You received a defective item and your out of pocket costs should be nothing. You should dispute the return costs with both Amazon and the seller, and the seller may tell you to dispose of the damaged item and refund you the purchase price.
You are better off finding a local framing shop to custom make something for you. They don't charge too much unless you opt for fancy frame material and matting.
> You are better off finding a local framing shop to custom make something for you.
Yes, local framing shops can make things in any size you want, it's what they do. And usually fairly reasonable, certainly less than the cost of international shipping.
I bought a A1 sized picture frame from a french seller for around $50 on Amazon. It was a total pain getting an affordable frame in A1 size, because the best we can get easily in America is a 24x36" which is just far enough off to be unusable.
I'd talk to some of the mail order frame places. I've used Frame Destination, and while they don't list metric sizes they'll let you spec custom imperial sizes with no premium at 1/16" precision (e.g. 23 5/16" x 33 1/16" is a bit closer). If you call they may be able to properly do metric sizes.
In my experience shipping prices from the US to EU are ludicrous. So much so that I'm surprised they have any business. This doesn't sound outside of the realm of possibility to me.
We send small A4 sized parcels to Germany quite a bit and often it never arrives, the same goes for France, if anything it gets lost more often in France. (shipping from New Zealand)
Bought some books in France and shipping to US was ~$10. It never arrived and contacted seller who sent another. A month later the 1st shipment arrives. So I contact the seller to let them know. They want it back and will cover the return shipping. So I go to USPS who informed me shipping to France was $90. At that rate it would be cheaper for me to fly with it, 2x25kg checked bags are a hell of a lot cheaper.
While I was living abroad my mom would send me care packages and I had no idea what it was costing her to ship it. I would send her aboriginal carvings or SE Asian cooking utensils all the time and it didn't cost nearly as much.
I recently returned a 13 inch laptop to Amazon from Hong Kong after they sent 2 and it was around $120 (reimbursed by Amazon - the original Amazon delivery charge was ~$18).
$370 did sound particularly egregious, but I just checked UPS' online quote site[1] and got a quote of $311-394 for a 5 pound, A1 sized package from California to Paris.
In my experience in Asia, Fedex, UPS, DHL etc. provide substantial discounts to customers with accounts, but one-off quotes to the US/Europe are typically very expensive.
I recently returned a 13 inch laptop to Amazon from Hong Kong after they sent 2 and it was around USD120 (reimbursed by Amazon).
HK Post wants about H$350 to get a 3kg parcel from HK to France. That works out to about $45.
$370 did sound particularly egregious, but I just checked UPS' online quote site[1] and got a quote of $311-394 for a 5 pound, A1 sized package from California to Paris.
I'm not quite sure what A1 sized is (ISO A1 paper? Amazon A1?) but at 5 lbs USPS quotes between $60 and $130 to go from San Francisco to Paris. For international shipping from the US, the private companies will almost always be significantly more expensive and potentially leave you on the hook for expensive customs brokerage fees.
So ISO A1 then. I plugged in something like 24x33x5 as well as the Amazon A1 size (which is smaller) and got the same price range but with additional options for the smaller (Amazon A1) sized package. At that size, the weight is the determining factor at USPS (at least based on the rates I've seen) even though 24x33 is still considered an oversized package.
OTOH if you want to ship it express (Global Express Guaranteed — GXG in USPS speak) that comes out to around $265 (less if you pay online) and not all post offices will take GXG packages. $60 to $265 is the difference between a 1-3 business day expected delivery time and 6-10 business days.
I have. I left my Kindle on a plane in Germany while on vacation a few years ago and didn't realize until I was already on a different plane back to the US. I got a hold of at lost and found at the airport who said they had it and if I sent them a shipping label, they could mail it back to me.
When I started looking at different shipping options, UPS wanted about $107 to ship it back and FedEx was a similar price. I think I ended up using DHL which was the cheapest I could find at about $80, which still felt crazy to me.
I participate in reddit gift exchanges, and frequently get recipients in the EU. What would cost me ~$10-15 to ship in the states or somewhere in asia routinely costs north of $50 for European destinations. And these are small things, nothing like the size of a picture frame. The $300+ cost for the frame doesn't surprise me at all.
Depending on the destination, if you have a “______town” for that ethnicity (or a nearby one that they’re not at war with), they’ll have some shops that can do far cheaper rates by consolidating.
A polish shop near me can send things to most of W. Europe for far less than the post office can.
The Ukrainian credit union near me can send cash to anyone in Ukraine pretty cheaply.
With USPS it will depend largely on how you send it. Priority Mail will be expensive (and fairly quick). A first class package (if you're within the limits) can be much cheaper if you don't mind the lack of tracking.
I mailed some 8x10s overseas in a rigid envelope and my friend swore up and down it would be too expensive ($30+). I think in the end it cost under $10 per envelope. Meanwhile international postcards from Germany were like 2€.
>Meanwhile international postcards from Germany were like 2€.
What are you talking about? I was just in Germany last year, and sent a bunch of international postcards for €0.90 each. That's the standard postcard rate for sending a postcard anywhere in the world. (It's €0.45 within Germany.)
Prices went up this year, and from my POV the German post was indecipherable. An international post card required two stamps. Deutsche Post is showing domestic postcards at 0.60€, but their postage calculator is showing international postcards at 0.95€. Fuck if I remember what I paid.
being a buyer off ebay what always surprised me is the next to nothing if not free shipping from China. It is good to see it changing as an article from 2014 [1] indicated how the USPS is getting soaked for the shipping on our side of the ocean.
if this is fallout from the trade issues it honestly is the only good outcome of them
Note that the program described there, ePacket, is now profitable for the USPS. It took them a few years to scale up but it's been profitable for years now.
Noticed this direct shipping years ago, the first time it took weeks for a small part to be delivered. I think the absurdly low cost reveals just how much you can jam into a shipping container for the current flat rate.
Weirder when you think about it from a fuel efficiency perspective; it probably takes a few drops of diesel to move a t-shirt 5000 miles.
Edit: NOTE- if you still buy stuff on ebay, be sure to check the feedback page on bulk "US based" sellers. Currently some of them actually ship from china even though their location is set to the US/canada.
>Weirder when you think about it from a fuel efficiency perspective; it probably takes a few drops of diesel to move a t-shirt 5000 miles.
Yep, try looking up the fuel efficiency number for shipping freight by boat, train, or airplane. It's really amazing just how efficient boats are. There's a good reason our distant ancestors had worldwide trade routes centuries or even millennia ago using boats.
It also only allows it for small shipments, so it encourages the Chinese to sell directly. The per-item shipping cost wasn't close to UPU rates unless you shipped a whole container, and sometimes not even then.
I don’t have the background on this - help me understand why or how it’s cheaper for goods to ship cheaper from China than shipping within the US? The US taxpayer is subsidizing this? I’m shocked and confused.
It's a UN-based forced rate subsidy for developing nations that China still benefits from.
"According to the U.S. Postal Service, it costs around $20 to mail a small parcel weighing 4.4 pounds from one U.S. state to another, yet mailing the same package from China only costs about $5."
"The Universal Postal Union, a United Nations agency that sets postal rates among its 192-member countries, dictates USPS's artificially low rates. It bizarrely groups China – the world’s second-largest economy – with developing nations like Gabon and Fiji into its third tier of shipping rates, which are just a fraction of what the developed world must pay."
"USPS loses about $300 million per year on Chinese imports - losing about $1 per small package it delivers."
Parent is correct, despite being grayed currently by downvoting. UPU is an international postal treaty organization that was subsumed into the UN. Every country used to have conclude treaties with every other country (read Anthony Trollope's autobiography for a fine account of his negotiation of one such treaty between the the US and Britain). China has gamed the system on this rule, so the US is forced to threaten withdrawal to fix it.
The rules were probably set when China was a poor country like Fiji. They seem to have overtaken only in 2009. In 1980 GDP (nominal) per capita of Fiji was 6x China, now China is about 60% ahead. They've come up fast. (data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_past_and_...)
The article says that Trump is moving to pull out of or renegotiate the UPU agreement, which at worst is a Presidential choice, and it's not even clear to me why USPS can't do it unilaterally.
The UN can "force" rules upon us if we sign an agreement allowing them to do so. If we sign a treaty agreeing to abide by the rules set by a UN agency, then they can impose such rules, and under the US Constitution, such rules have the force of law within the US.
The rules might not be fair. Our recourse is to try to change the rules, and failing that, threaten to withdraw from the agreement. That's what we're doing.
They have zero power. The US can destroy the UN in a flash.
But in that instance, humanity would pay much more than extra bucks for shipping crap we don't need.
A strong AND fair UN is a good deterrent for world wars.
Of course, it's better to renegotiate any precieved unfairness than to just blow all violence avoidance safeguards like a world congress.
China got away with their economic trickery because of US corporate greed and short sightedness combined with the US public insatiable consumerism.
But we humans have a short memory and we like being empowered by bully leaders.
Let's just hope we'll survive this age without too much bloodshed.
Planet Money did a great breakdown on this. Essentially it comes down to international agreements on the cost of doing the past mile of shipping for other countries.
It's cheaper to ship 10,000 items in a single container, than to ship each one separately, which is why mail carriers bundle items together (in bags, vans, containers, etc) instead of handling them separately all the way.
Domestic mail is like sending separate items, which get bundled together, then un-bundled again to deliver them to their final destination. All these steps happen at domestic wages, and at best with medium volumes. If there are not enough items to fill a container, it's still getting sent some other (more expensive) way.
Items from China get bundled by lower wage workers, the bundles are sent by lowest priority freight (usually a 7-45 day delay), bundles are only sent when fully filled in order to minimize costs per item, and sorted to minimize un-bundling costs.
This won't change no matter what, it's just economy of scale.
There are other factors like the reduced shipping costs for China set by the UN, or the fact that some will ship items at a loss just to convert Yuan to USD through Hong Kong, but ultimately the production vs. consumption imbalance is what decides most of this.
Basically has to be right? Even if the shipping labels were completely standardized, you still have to deal with irregular package dimensions, composition, and label locations. The sort of stuff that robots aren't so good at.
I don't see how poly bags offer any weight advantage over an envelope. The advantage they have is durability: paper envelopes get easily ripped open, whereas poly bags are nearly indestructible for about the same weight and size. I've also noticed that many shippers now print their mailing/customs label directly onto the poly bags, so that probably makes the shipping process faster and more automated.
This ignores the actual reason, which is that USPS charges less for China->US movement than domestic movement even after bundling like Amazon does at the warehouse.
Exactly this. It has nothing to do with the boat cost or economies of scale because once it arrives it has to still go that last mile - or last hundred miles within the U.S. the same as any package.
This is great. The tariff agreements were never made with such a huge volume of small parcels in mind, many of them awkwardly shaped and causing problems with automatic sorting machines. And there’s the obvious ecological viewpoint as well.
Maybe it is anecdotal, but whenever I order anything from China on Amazon, it takes exponentially longer to receive my product. Once I got Christmas items that I ordered in November the following March. There was no recourse when it happened either.
I know it's a long distance, but it's substantially longer than orders I've made from other parts of the world. So I avoid purchasing from there.
It's very common to get (large) items via DHL from mainland China to SF in less than a week. The US simply doesn't manufacture the same set of items. Raising the cost to order items from China for political reasons will just hurt existing business. There's no alternative, I have a choice to pay more or not buy.
The US doesn't manufacture those items because it's cheaper to have them shipped from China. Raise the cost of manufacturing them there and importing them, and the balance changes.
The domestic vs. offshore production calculus is actually closer than a lot of people realize, in many instances. Often it's a choice between a highly-automated and capital-intensive production process in the US, vs. a manual process at a contractor in China. The combination of higher shipping and very low cost of capital in the US is a pretty good one.
Whenever someone tells you that it's impossible for the US to rebuild its manufacturing base, go take a look at factories in China: they're not that old (esp. the light industrial stuff). What was built in China in 20 years could be built in the US in the same amount of time or less, if the economic case was there. There's nothing magic about China, it's just a place where labor happened to be cheap at one point in time.
> The US doesn't manufacture those items because it's cheaper to have them shipped from China. Raise the cost of manufacturing them there and importing them, and the balance changes.
The US doesn't manufacture those items because it has no capability to do so.
There are no factories, no supply chain, no expertise and no known how.
There are some things that are cheaper to manufacture in US, (surprise!) if you manufacture for the local market, than in China, but them being simply cheaper still doesn't mean you can actually manufacture them.
I myself tried to setup an electric scooter factory, first in Canada, and than in Washington state. We were simply unable to find even moderately competent manufacturing engineers, nor the line workforce.
Of course, every consumable and every part had to be imported.
And both of the above meant that we decided to close the business in under 6 months.
Even in industries the U.S. does have manufacturing for the cost of manufacturing is insane. I shopped around to literally every apparel production company listed on any list in the U.S. 50% of the companies said they don't have bandwidth to take any more orders, they literally didn't want the business at any price. The other 49% didn't deal in 'small orders' basically anything under 5000. In the last 1% of U.S. companies the very cheapest cost was double the price to manufacture in China - where we got very few quotes because of the language barrier.So Electric scooter or simple piece of clothing, the U.S. just loses out in every single way. This is the smallest of a long road to challenge China, point being if the U.S. companies are more comparable in price they will become more profitable, will be more likely to expand and build, and buyers will be more likely to buy U.S. Not to mention, the U.S. really needs it's own version of Alibaba so businesses can shop easier, it boggles my mind that it doesn't exist.
Basically, the US simply does not have the infrastructure to manufacture complex items in mass quantities. We haven't invested in that infrastructure, whereas China has, so they have the ability to do this stuff, and we don't. So trying to build an iPhone in America is like trying to build an iPhone in Zimbabwe or Sudan or Armenia: the infrastructure simply doesn't exist and it isn't feasible to take on a project like that there.
America stopped being an industrial powerhouse decades ago, by choice, and you can't just bring that back overnight, especially when some other countries never gave that up and will easily out-compete you.
This is completely ignoring the fact that Chinese labor is significantly cheaper than the US as well as the standard of living. No amount of shipping is going to recover those costs unless you jack up the rates astronomically.
Nearly all the supply chains are in Asia. It would cost companies billions to relocate and they would just relocate to other areas where the labor is cheaper and they can get away with working their employees 12 hour shifts. Things like electronics for example would be extremely difficult to switch to a country like the US because there isn't a trained workforce here to deal with manufacturing small components. Plus, they'd be asking to be paid 20 dollars an hour with benefits vs China's probably 12 dollars and no benefits.
Also, leaving the UPU is as drastic as the tariff war because all it will do is cause countries to jack up the rates of incoming mail to compensate. Every time the US leaves without negotiation, there's no reason why countries won't retaliate.
It's not about manufacturing, it's about shipping to end customers. Anything involving the USPS will have almost nothing to do with business-related shipping (b2b). Businesses don't ship stuff to each other with small packets, they ship large quantities in bulk. If you're worried about hurting existing businesses in the US, then stop worrying: US-based businesses aren't dependent on cheap postage from China on Aliexpress. Companies ordering parts from China are getting them shipped in shipping containers, or by DHL/Fedex, not by the USPS in < 1-lb packages.
Like I said, I'm just talking about anecdotal experiences. I have no stake in the trade war, I've just been wondering why shipping from there has taken months in some instances. I'm talking about a pair of shoes, not a washer & dryer.
They just don't have their act together in China in the cases where it takes so long. They put up 10,000 items for sale, stock none of them, then buy them as needed when something sells. They get weeded out eventually by bad reviews. The Chinese companies that do have their act together can ship to US in 3 days for DHL, or 1-2 weeks via subsidized USPS.
Huh? I'm not sure what this has to do with taxes or government spending. The USPS doesn't get tax money; it's financed by its customers, like any other business, it just happens to be wholly owned by the federal government. Postal rates are high because they're forced by the UPU agreement to deliver Chinese mail for almost nothing, so they pass the costs on to US customers.
To offset the debt that Congress has forced on them by requiring them to pre-fund pensions and healthcare cost for employees who don't exist yet. And Congress sets postage rates as well, so USPS can't raise rates in order to pay down their congressionally-mandated debt without getting approval from Congress. And the requests to raise rates are often denied.
That first article is severely stretching the definition of "getting money". Virtually all of the alleged $18B is attributed to the law that gives the USPS jurisdiction over your mailbox.
The second just reflects Congress's attempts to deliberately hobble the USPS in 2006 by requiring them to suddenly pre-fund their pension obligations.
> The law requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees' health benefits up to the year 2056. This is a $5 billion per year cost; it is a requirement that no other entity, private or public, has to make.
> hobble the USPS in 2006 by requiring them to suddenly pre-fund their pension obligations
Maybe it's a flawed methodology (arguable), but being fiscally responsible about pensions is something that should be encouraged. In California pension liabilities are out of control and at impractical levels, causing all sorts of havoc and manipulation (corruption). https://www.vcstar.com/story/news/2018/12/07/governor-jerry-...
Fully funding pensions out to 50 years in the future goes beyond "fiscally responsible". Consider that the nominal working lifetime of an employee is only 47 years (18 - 65) -- they're being required to fund pensions for hypothetical employees who are still in high school.
Oh, ha -- so then change "high school" for "grade school". Either way, it seems ridiculous to require a pension to be fully funded years before its beneficiary is even hired.
Talking about people in high school who will end up in public service is irrelevant.
Having more money in the bank than you take out for a car loan is fiscally responsible. Not exactly. More than. That's WITHOUT your holdings (bank account balance) being subject to market forces, which is a compelling reason.
If fiscal responsibility were the goal, they'd have required the other federal agencies to do the same. That this specifically targets one of the few agencies ripe for potential privatization is... suspicious. Even if it made fiscal sense, the sudden switch is problematic.
> If fiscal responsibility were the goal, they'd have required the other federal agencies to do the same
That's not how the Federal government works. It's a LARGE organization that sometimes have people with philosophies align. There is no chance that the military would prefund pensions. I think that, toward the initiative to make the USPS free of subsidy now and in the future, it made perfect sense. The USPS workers used to talk about everything moving electronic, but that's not happening in our lifetime. 50 years is just "the near future", respectively.
Why didn't the same Congressional Republicans who pushed through the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 push for similar changes to how other federal agencies fund their pensions?
Why won't the military pre-fund pensions? Why shouldn't they do the same "fiscally responsible" thing for veterans benefits?
> Why didn't the same Congressional Republicans who pushed through the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 push for similar changes to how other federal agencies fund their pensions?
I don't know. Probably something to do with the majority of the US population liking the USPS but not everyone wanting more military spending.
> Why shouldn't they do the same "fiscally responsible" thing for veterans benefits?
Probably because congress would never approve another 20%+ on top of the current military spending and still get all their pork in. These topics are an amalgam of political decisions as well as leadership decisions.
I vote for more accountability, reliability and term limits in government. That's rarely a topic from either major party.
It's not "any other business"; it's a shared resource that improves the lives of all citizens. And we WANT it that way. "Any other business" would not offer or employ any of the features we expect from our Post Office (systemwide flat rate parcel & 1st class letter, 6d/wk delivery (for free!), lack of surge/congestion pricing). If you think UPS and FedEx aren't taking profit away from USPS think again.
It has a legal monopoly, the power to tax competitors under the Private Express statutes (this is why there is no FedEx First Class mail competitor), it is exempt from local taxation, and doesn't pay federal taxes to the same extent a regular business would.
> Back when the US was a major exporter the UPU was great for US merchants.
The US is the world's #2 exporter. $1.57 trillion versus $2.15 trillion for China. China's figure peaked a few years ago, the US is likely to narrow that gap, especially with US energy exports continuing to ramp up. US exports of goods are near an all-time high after adjusting for inflation.
Universal Postal Union is a UN body that manages the relationships between different national post offices. They set standard rates and stuff for all member countries so that each country doesn't have to negotiate a treaty with any other country it wants to send international mail to.
"With its 192 member countries, the UPU is the primary forum for cooperation between postal sector players. It helps to ensure a truly universal network of up-to-date products and services."
The USPS gets a monopoly on its gigantic market from the government. That is an enormous government subsidy. It is very much not like any other business.
The USPS does have a special relationship, but it isn't a one way street. First, it isn't a monopoly -- there are many other shippers competing in the profitable segments of the market. Second, USPS is obligated to service every location in the US, and at government-controlled prices.
USPS will deliver, door to door, a letter from Nowhere, MT to Remote, GA for $0.55, even though they take a loss on it. Try to get Fedex to match that.
Perhaps you should look at USPS Publication 542, https://about.usps.com/publications/pub542/welcome.htm, which describes how they have a monopoly and the power to levy what amounts to a tax on anyone that competes in a prohibited way.
But it is. A simple googling gives many hits confirming this simple fact. This one seemed most informative:
> The USPS actually has two legally enforced monopolies, as per Title 39 of the US Code. One is over the delivery of anything defined as a “letter,” which is within certain size and weight limits. The second is over the use of your mailbox.
That is defining monopoly in a very constrained way. You might as well be complaining that USPS having a monopoly over delivering watch fobs. FedEx isn't trying to capture the $0.55 letter delivery market.
I was commenting on your remark about USPS lacking pricing power. I wasn't really disagreeing with you, just pointing out some of the moat between them and pricing power.
The postal service has beenbadly run for decades, with excess deliveries - once a day. Make delivery once a week and chageextra for daily delivery. As e-mail sucked away letters the USPS staff all stayed employed with fat wages as well as fat pensions.
Now those excess people and unfunded pensions have sucked USPS dry and allowed UPS and Fedex etc to craft specialized services to dan lots of $$ from the system.
Deliver all mail to PO Boxes, once a week.Daily delivery is a special fee delivery.
This aggressively selects against the elderly, the poor, and rural and even many parts of suburban living.
I am not, as a rule, particularly fond of rural or suburban living due to free-rider problems, but as long as we choose to subsidize those lifestyles, a prompt and rigorous postal service is necessary. And as long as we have poor (and old) people kept out of the technological race, it is incumbent upon us to not stick a thumb in their eye.
It would be cheaper as a society for us to just pay one-time to relocate these people to more populated areas and set them up with new jobs (if they can work), and then cut off many of their services. Those who choose not to avail themselves of the relocation offer would then have to pay extra for services.
Why is our society responsible for subsidizing rural dwellers' lifestyles anyway? Note that I'm not talking about people living in small towns. These people choose to live this way because our society subsidizes their lifestyle, and don't actually need to live there. People who do (e.g., farmers) don't need any subsidy as they make enough money to afford living where they do. I grew up in the rural South; these people aren't actually contributing to the economy in any way, they just like living in the middle of nowhere, and are enabled by cheap gas prices and the subsidized provision of many services.
Lots of speculating why it is cheaper to ship from China than domestically, a lot of it misguided.
The root cause is that quite a few years ago the consortium of national postal providers which setup agreements on who pays for which parts of international shipping decided that China was classed as a developing country and given subsidized rates by other countries. This wasn't a big deal when the agreement was made because it was before the days of pervasive online commerce, and there just wasn't that much sent from China to other countries via the postal service.
> The reason for this price gap, Jayme claims, is a secretive group of postal policymakers that meets every four years to fix international shipping rates. A kind of postal illuminati.
> Today's episode: A conspiracy theory that's actually real. How the decisions made behind closed doors make it cheap to buy things from across the world, but are also distorting the global economy.
> This is great news for U.S. sellers, especially eBay sellers.
Exactly the intended consequence. Why should US taxpayers subsidize shipping costs for products to come from China? It made no sense at all in today's economy unless the only thing you care about is paying less for your goods regardless of the consequences, which I don't think is a majority position of adults today.
Is that a problem? Seems like if they do that then it's US domestic mail, playing by all the same rules (and high rates) as any other domestic mail item. Competing with Chinese shippers would look exactly the same as competing with anyone shipping out of LA/Oakland/Seattle.
This is common in Australia and there are some problems. Any faulty goods purchased here are to be returned to the merchant (rather than manufacturer) and some of them make this very difficult by providing a local sender but a foreign 'return' address. I'm pretty sure it's not strictly legal, but it's too annoying in most cases to fight it.
It also gives them a local business address so they can advertise local shipping but a lot of the time you have to wait for the next cargo shipment to come in so something that should take a few days now takes a week or two. This can be helped with reviews but we all know how those get gamed now with sellers flooding reviews or shutting down and starting as a new account.
These are both differences that arise from a business not having a real local presence, but just the bare minimum presence 'for show'. Luckily, most of them are fairly inept and make themselves obvious on eBay by pasting Australian flags and Koalas all over their store pages :)
It’s just not going to be a boon to US drop-shippers, the Chinese ones will still have a lower cost of operations by dealing direct and almost 100% Chinese labour costs.
I think most will agree that is a "fair" competitive advantage.
What myself and I think most find problematic is that the USPS is actually subsidizing Chinese packages inbound to the US, to the point where its somehow cheaper to send from China than domestically.
That may have made sense at some point when China was still in its embryonic phase of development, but they are well past the point where this is necessary or desirable.
I think the way this happened certainly looked like (petty)"Politics" and "not-rocking-the-boat (generally)".
I'm sure most would expect "Globalization" as an idea that was generally in the air would have influenced those who took the actions here as well as the people allowed those actions to happen (which had to include quite a number of US officials).
The thing is that definitely involved a huge amount of money flowing in various directions and so I tend to believe a portion of people making this and allowing this to happen were considering the interests involved also. Especially, some people (small US operations) were screaming about this from the start, why it was hard for them to be heard is worth considering.
Honestly? Probably because partisan politics has wrecked my country. China as a trade manipulator has been a Republican talking point my entire lifetime. So Dems wouldn't touch it, regardless of the merits.
And before that? Well, it wasn't a big problem in 2006.
You seem to be completely overlooking the fact that it is way cheaper to ship an item from China to a specific location in the US, than it is to ship the same item from within the US.
I haven't really heard jobs being a part of this discussion at all, the reasoning and the rhetoric has been about leveling an clearly unfair playing field.
The USPS will certainly make more revenue, and in turn they should be able to pass that on by reducing shipping costs for people shipping from within the US.
For companies drop-shipping from China, regardless of whether the person running the business is in the US or in China, the impact is the same. But for US based businesses that inventory items and ship out of the US, this change would be a big advantage.
Maybe. The main benefactor may be Amazon people switch to them. They have the lowest domestic shipping costs (presumably, since they’ve implemented their own in-house couriers).
The actual cost of USPS of delivering a package is kinda complicated. If USPS is going by your house every day, how much do their costs go down if they have 1 less package to drop off?
Dividing total costs by packages delivered doesn’t tell that story.
If prices are raised as significantly as suggested, you think they'll only maybe make more revenue? If the sales completely stopped, or there was a mass exodus (eventually) to Amazon there may not be an increase, but this seems fairly unlikely in the short term.
> If USPS is going by your house every day, how much do their costs go down if they have 1 less package to drop off? Dividing total costs by packages delivered doesn’t tell that story.
Nothing wrong with that. If a Chinese company wants to ship things over in bulk, break them up here in the US and ship them via the USPS, more power to them. They'll need to incorporate in the US, pay taxes in the US, probably rent space in a US warehouse, and generally play by the same set of rules as a US company that buys stuff from China and imports it for sale would.
I'm all for having a level playing field; the UPU rates were anything but.
Yes this is what most of us do anyways. We have the manufacturers deliver directly to a 3rd party logistics company that then packs and delivers the individual products here in the US.
The goal of the UPU was to have one rate for international shipping based on sending country vs. per destination pricing. Countries agreed to eat the costs. This produced things like the International Postal Coupon which are great.
Like Internet peering agreements, the UPU model only made sense when there was about the same amount of traffic going in each direction. In that case, it makes sense for each country to just pick up the cost of domestic last-mile delivery, because other countries are doing the same for its outbound packages.
The problem is when there's a continuous structural trade imbalance, and more packages flow one direction than in the other. Then you have a de facto subsidy scheme, and it makes sense to terminate or renegotiate the agreement and switch to something more along the lines of sender-pays.
US taxpayers are not subsidizing shipping costs. Domestic shippers probably are.
"Zero tax dollars used. The Postal Service receives NO tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations."
A better question might be to ask why US taxpayers should continue to subsidize direct marketers. Thats all I get anymore. Everything else is electronic.
It's my understanding that direct marketing mail helps keep the USPS profitable. Here's an excerpt from a report on whether they should offer simplified addressing for saturation mail (every address in an area), but the point is more general.
> The implementation of new products that support customers and improve its bottom line is of paramount concern for the Postal Service. In fact, profitable new volume benefits all mailers and consumers in the long run by helping the Postal Service fulfill its fundamental obligation of affordable universal service. Volume is significant because the Postal Service is a network industry and the vast majority of the costs for its delivery network are fixed. Greater volume spread across this network would lower the average unit cost of every mail piece delivered. A service such as simplified address mail, which has the potential to significantly increase delivered volume could dramatically help the Postal Service and all users of the network.
In other words, they are going to visit everybody's mailbox 6 days a week no matter what. Stuffing more mail into it while they're already there costs them very little.
>unless the only thing you care about is paying less for your goods regardless of the consequences, which I don't think is a majority position of adults today.
It may not be the stated position of adults today, but it's their revealed preference.
Given that income for the bottom 40% has barely budged in 20 years, keeping the price of goods low (i.e. low inflation) is probably a net benefit to America, no?
This is one way to mitigate knock off products from China. If the shipping costs come up to the norm, they won't always (if ever) be the cheapest product so the real one will win out more often.
Various products will have different tipping points where it just doesn't make sense to ship and/or they aren't getting enough sales to justify it.
Personally, I like it and it seems like everyone wins.. except people who undercut the real product with cheap, inferior knockoffs.
Yes, but it is being shipped in volume containers. That is both more efficient all around, and much easier for the customs inspectors to find and divert counterfeits than in waves of individually packaged items.
Nonsense, not everything from China is a knockoff and there are a lot of genuine non-copied products. How weird to think their economy is just "inferior knockoffs".
Can someone shed light on the subsidy structure behing the current model, are shipments from China being subsidized by shipments from other countries or is there government money involved ?
In any case this kind of subsidy is not necessarily bad for developing countries, and it was probably instrumental in China's phenomenal economic growth, but it is now in the conquering superpower category, it's time it loses this advantage.
There's a fantastic Planet Money episode about the Universal Postal Union[1] and why this is a problem.
Basically, the UPU assumes that a country will send about the same amount of international mail that it receives. There may be an imbalance between any two countries, but in aggregate, it assumes that these imbalances will net out. Furthermore, the UPU sets rates based on the sending country's costs. Since China was classified as a developing country, it was very cheap for Chinese to send mail into the international mail stream. This was justified because China's last mile delivery for mail received from other countries is also very cheap.
However, with the huge US-China trade imbalance, these assumptions no longer hold. U.S. shippers were at a major disadvantage because of this.
Yes it does, although AFAIK noone in Europe is quitting the postal union yet.
However here in Norway VAT is being introduced on all packages now, which is going to cut Aliexpress down quite a bit. Previously it was duty free below €35 combined value & postage.
I pay Australian GST on AliExpress imports, but it doesn't make local outfits more viable. I buy hobby electronic components primarily, local suppliers are often one to two orders of magnitude more expensive, not just a few percent more.
If you order electronic components from China, you're never quite sure what you get. You might get the stuff that failed QA testing at the factory, or second-hand stuff that's soldered off some old PCB. Or sometimes you get something else entirely... I ordered some LM35 temperature sensors in the TO-92 package, and got some cheap transistors instead. Case was TO-92, markings where as expected for LM35, but a quick test betrayed what was really inside.
In this case I expected them to be fake, based on the price, I just wanted to see what I got. But even if the part is appropriately priced you can't be sure.
A bare atmega328p-pu is 10x the price. LEDs are about 15x. Resistors and caps are, as another poster said, huge, but you're possibly getting factory seconds from an already mediocre brand. I buy decoupling ceramics and 5% resistors from China for peanuts but stick to RS online for caps where I depend on characteristics or reliability.
China sells a lot of older stock via AliX, so newer chips are hard to find and might be near the same price, but older clonable classics like a 2n7k are dirt cheap and just as good.
If someone in China sends a packet to the US via China Post, China Post are responsible for getting it to the US, while USPS are responsible for getting it from wherever it lands in the US to the recipient. An agreement made between all national postal services via the Universal Postal Union determines how much China Post have to pay the USPS for this final leg, a fee called the "terminal due".
The UPU agreement on terminal dues sets a sliding scale based on the sending country's level of economic development - less developed economies pay less, while more developed economies pay more. The logic behind this is fairly obvious, in helping less-developed economies to fully participate in the international mail system.
The problem for the USPS is that they are obliged to handle large volumes of mail originating in China, but the terminal dues for lightweight items are substantially below their cost of delivery. The handling of these items is effectively cross-subsidised by USPS customers.
The US is demanding that terminal dues should be set at a flat rate based on domestic postal costs, with the possibility of direct subsidies for less developed postal systems. This would partly (though not completely) reduce the competitive advantage for Chinese e-commerce sellers.
The Universal Postal Union rules for how international mail is paid for were established at a time when most mail was letters, and most letters would need a reply by letter.
So on average, every international letter delivered in Country X behalf of the Country Y postal service would be balanced by one letter delivered in Country Y on behalf of the Country X postal service.
No exchange of money between countries needed, and if a country had daily/weekly mail delivery or dense/sparse population or expensive/cheap postal employees or rich/poor citizens or tax/subsidy on post or efficient/inefficient processing that was no other country's business, so long as the number of letters balanced.
In the modern age, the number of letters doesn't balance, because no-one places their AliExpress order by mail.
Even if they did, there's often a substantial cost difference between delivering an order form and delivering the goods being ordered. I'm not sure I've ever ordered something as small and light as a letter.
I think the issue was in mistaking China for a developing country for so long. It’s different from western countries, but not undeveloped. Its size, population, culture, heritage, and history all play a role in how the ethnocentric West misinterpreted it.
For years the United States has protested the cheap UPU rates that China gets. But the UPU still classifies it as a "developing" nation.
China is the world's second-largest economy. It doesn't need or deserve the artificially cheap rates anymore. China shouldn't pay less to send packages overseas than countries in Africa.
By leaving the UPU, the United States can set correct prices.
It's one of those situations where China claims to be a developing nation when it suits its needs, and then claims to be a developed nation when it suits its needs.
If you're going to play in the big leagues, you have to play by big league rules.
> China is the world's second-largest economy. It doesn't need or deserve the artificially cheap rates anymore. China shouldn't pay less to send packages overseas than countries in Africa.
China is a undeveloped nation. There are still parts of China where people live on under $40 a day.
Developed nations have a moral obligation to help undeveloped nations
I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. You must divide by the population if wealth/development/whatever metric were uniformly distributed. But it’s a massive country with enormous diversity in statistics on all fronts. There are pockets far more developed than the average American town and even the most developed cities in other countries, and villages hundred of years “behind.” Debating whether or not to call it “developed” means missing out on a whole lot of nuance.
You can’t even compare cities to cities, since even an entity like Beijing is structured and defined so differently from how we define a city like NYC or Chicago.
This is why I stressed the ethnocentrism of it all. It’s a country that has developed tremendously but not at all in the same way that we have traditionally defined development in the western sense, and a lot of that comes from its size, its historic dynastic cultures and their political structures, and its population (count and local densities).
Then cite the GDP/capita of individual provinces or cities. Citing the GDP of the entire country is meaningless, though, given that it has 1.4 billion people. China is not more developed than Monaco, even though its GDP is thousands of times larger.
I haven't ever heard of the Chinese government claiming China to be a developed country - that was one of the original contentions above. I also think that by any reasonable metric, China is a developing country. There are pockets that are much more developed than others, but the country as a whole is still very far behind developed countries.
It's not really a subsidy so much as an underpayment by the foreign goverments[1]. There is no tax money involved, and all the subsidizing comes from the increased revenue from raising domestic shipping costs.
The UPU has been around for decades, but it's only been since 2010 that the USPS has formalized the process with the "ePacket" shipping.
In terms of dollars per unit weight moved, yes. They are not only moving massive amounts of cargo with low drag, they're also relatively lightweight compared to the product being moved. Also, there's no maintenance cost to keeping a flat path across the Pacific like there is in keeping roads free of potholes.
In terms of environmental damage, not at all. Container ships burn some of the nastiest, most sulphrous and damaging forms of crude oil in existence, with little to no emissions controls.
I think rail transport is best, but I could be wrong.
A lot of Chinese ships burn spent USA motor oil (illegal to burn in the USA) on the way home, ergo, free trip home! And the entire smoke plume lands in the USA . .
Sulfur dioxide emissions at sea are not that damaging compared to in land. They did make some zero emission cargo ships but it was pretty expensive due to crew complement for the reactor.
I appreciate that you cited a paper, but I think you are overstating. The paper discusses CO2 emissions, which indeed are lower for transport by ship than by trains. But the parent was talking about "environmental damage" from ships that burn the "nastiest, most sulphrous and damaging forms of crude oil", and thus was referring to pollutants other than just CO2.
This report, for instance (I have not read it completely) says "Rail is generally the cleanest mode of transport for most pollutants" and "Maritime shipping is one of the cleanest mode of freight transport, except for PM and specific sulphur oxide (SOx) emissions". While there is lots of emphasis currently on CO2 emissions, other pollutants are also worth considering.
UN is doing something already. By January 2020, the limit for Sulphur in fuel oil used on board ships operating outside designated emission control areas will be reduced to 0.50% m/m (mass by mass).
The shipping industry is responsible for a significant proportion of the global climate change problem. More than three percent of global carbon dioxide emissions can be attributed to ocean-going ships. This is an amount comparable to major carbon-emitting countries -- and the industry continues to grow rapidly.
In fact, if global shipping were a country, it would be the sixth largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions. Only the United States, China, Russia, India and Japan emit more carbon dioxide than the world’s shipping fleet. Nevertheless, carbon dioxide emissions from ocean-going vessels are currently unregulated.
>The shipping industry is responsible for a significant proportion of the global climate change problem. More than three percent of global carbon dioxide emissions can be attributed to ocean-going ships.
According to wikipedia, ships account for 2.2%[1] of co2 emissions. However, the transportation sector as a whole accounts for 29% of co2 emissions. Considering how much ships move, that's pretty good.
Not really a helpful or fair comparison. Global shipping emits more carbon dioxide than India, but that's literally apples to oranges.
It might be easier for the shipping industry to reduce it's emissions, or it might be easier for India. The benefit(s) of India polluting is spread across 1.3 billion people. The beneficiaries of polluting by the shipping industry is presumably the whole world, though the benefits are unevenly spread. It might be easier or more impactful for one to reduce while the other doesn't, but again, we can't know without more data.
A better comparison would be between shipping and air freight. Or make the case that we don't need to ship if we can produce locally instead. Maybe it could be supplemented by saying that if the cost of the externality (pollution) was borne by the producer of the products, then it would incentivize local production.
> Or make the case that we don't need to ship if we can produce locally instead.
My impression was that this was the argument being made. Shipping emissions could be cut dramatically if more things were made close to their end destination.
For certain kinds of pollution, yes. By the same logic, so do nuclear reactors, since cars don't tend to release fission products (even if reactors do so very, very rarely)
I don't know about that, I'm unqualified to answer. However, ocean liners do use very dirty fuels (compared to automobiles) and very dirty engines with respect to sulfur and nitrogen oxides emissions
Except for the pollution. That bunker fuel is terribly dirty.
Athens Greece has a pall of smog over it mostly coming from the ships in the harbor as they sit there spewing columns of thick black smoke into the sky. I don't doubt some of the pollution is from vehicles, but it's pretty noticeable how the particulate smog starts in the harbor and moves inland.
Perhaps, but the price of fuel already incentives shippers to use less of it. It might be better mpg to ship by sea but by shipping such a huge distance much of that may be negated
Yes more efficient than trains, though only by a factor of 2 to 3. 0.209 to 0.35 mJ/tkm for rail versus 0.11 for ocean freight. Domestic water freight (river barges) is 0.16.
Road freight is 1.3 to 2.4 and air freight is 6.9 to 10.5 waaaay worse than any of these.
I am trying really hard to not post a bunch of expletives here, too many people on HN downvote facts, even with sources (my fault for thinking everyone has a brain and can use Google or something). Wtf happened to this site...
Not sure. I'ts an unfinished thought but something I've toyed with in my mind. Mostly because I prefer local and the movement of goods is unnecessary a lot of the time. Environmental reasons for the most part- moving unnecessary junk around the world is still excessive even if it's done efficiently.
Any tax beyond that which internalizes actual externalities will just decrease market efficiency, your opinion on what goods are 'unnecessary' and how far an object in a supply chain can move before it becomes 'excessive' notwithstanding.
Companies don't ship goods around just for the hell of it; they do it because it serves some business purpose.
I'd be curious to see the math, at least for the West coast and more generally to US coastal areas. Insofar as I'm aware, sending cargo by sea is very cheap compared to sending it using airplanes and long distance trucks.
We should make a 21st century version of The Pirates of Penzance with Donald Trump as the Pirate King, or perhaps the Major General, and September 31st the farcical contractual factor.
A major benefit of drop shipping from China was the pretty much $1 shipping for almost any item via ePacket.
Obviously the products are still cheaper, but with a 25% tariff on most goods, and what I can only assume will be a close to DHL price for shipping, a t-shirt drop shipped from China will probably cost more than one made and shipped domestically.
To continue to be competitive, drop shippers are going to have to think about bulk imports and warehousing, thus no longer being drop shippers.
Probably. This is going to drop a lot of sellers off of Amazon and eBay, and likely have major effects on independent small business dollar/99c stores.
Also businesses like Harbor Freight will benefit, because it will be much harder/more expensive to buy direct. Same thing with the "cheap" brands at places like Menards.
This will slow the pace of innovation in a lot of areas, especially among electronics hobbyists. Cheap chinese circuit boards from Shenzen are a major driver for electronics related businesses, robotics, drones, and lots of other areas.
This is going to hurt a lot of people in the US, and put more money in the hands of big business like most other initiatives coming out of the government lately.
All this isn't talking about the elephant in the room, which is the fact that this agreement is changing because our delusional President doesn't like non whites.
There are lots of companies that buy in bulk from China and have US distribution. They will still be around for your Shenzen electronics needs.
I have very little sympathy for people who were depending on what was essentially taxpayer-subsidized shipping from China. If you can't do what you're trying to do without that subsidy, you probably shouldn't be doing it. I'm certainly not interested in having the USPS lose money so someone can save a few bucks on a servo or flight controller vs. buying it from a legitimate retailer like Adafruit or Hobbyking (which has US warehouses in addition to its HK ones; I expect they'll need to expand the domestic ones now).
The end-user cost of a good needs to encompass the price of manufacturing it and transporting it, inclusive of as many externalities as we can. Too many problems in the world are caused by artificially cheap goods that don't capture their full cost.
Keeping stuff cheap for the purpose of having cheap stuff is not a noble goal.
Having worked at the USPS, I can say definitively it will lose money anyway, and it is not taxpayer supported except by special request (USPS can ask congress for funding for special needs, which they can deny)
So, despite all the people complaining here about "muh dollars subsidizing", that isn't correct. See the USPS FAQ for more info.
The UPU situation was not great, but it has a limited impact on taxpayers.
They won't be locked out, they'll just now have to pay whatever the standard rates for USPS shipping (or whichever carrier they'll use), instead of the artificially low rates mandated by the UPU. Presumably someone (whether in China or in the US) will find it worth selling whatever widget you want, just the shipping cost won't be subsidized.
In addition to Amazon 3rd party sellers, this seems like bad news for Shopify. They host a lot of Chinese drop ship stores that work because of these artificially low rates.
The impression I get from that thread is that the dream here is now Americans can do what they do best, sit in the middle of transactions and collect rent. Previously, you could go to a Chinese website and have the Chinese factory send you a widget directly to your door. Now that will be too expensive, but hey we have a solution! An American will order a bunch of widgets in bulk, ship them over in a cargo ship, come up with some fancy marketing, and then sell the widgets to you at 200% markup. You know these folks will never hire electrical engineers to certify safety and conformance, or work with the factory to improve the product in response to customer feedback. They're there to do one thing: sit in the middle of the transaction and charge Chinese manufacturers for the privilege of selling to Americans.
But hey, look on the bright side... at least there is someone you can sue when your widget blows up.
Pretty much. I absolutely fucking hate Amazon now. It's full of white label products. You can tell the seller does no real safety testing of any kind from their broad array of random shit. You can't even trust the kitchen equipment for chance they made the steel with lead or the silicone is mixed with something toxic, etc.
Completely unregulated market place of stupid. And this is on top of Amazon's counterfeit problems they half ass enforcement. I'm surprised nobody has died yet from counterfeit or substandard automotive goods of all things.
I work in automotive parts (ASE Parts Specialist Cert.) and Amazon carries all the same substandard automotive goods Autozone and the other Mexican car parts stores have. Valuecarft line is dangerous Mexican made remans, duralast same crap. Most the time you go to one these Mexican car parts stores to get hard parts your getting something marked up 200% and searching it on amazon gets you same identical part. Your right it's amazing that even more people don't die from crap parts.
I like RockAuto. But since I had a bad run-in with a supposedly-quality oil pan for an Aisin transmission, I've increasingly been using OEM. Like, from the local dealers. But, there's always things like brake calipers from TRW which are identical to the VW-branded ones (but far cheaper). Anyway, I avoid Dorman and a whole host of other parts manufacturers. If I need to get it done in one day, OEM helps...
I had one bad experience from RockAuto and haven't gone back. One OEM lists a part as compatible for a Honda Accord 2006 V6 belt tensioner when it is basically incompatible it comes in as the pulley's are different sizes from factory (and you can't tell in their images). They made it incredibly difficult for me to return it for god knows what reason.
A different OEM sourced elsewhere was the correct kit out of the box :/
From the OEM as much as possible. I know their parts are "expensive" but nobody debates that they have the best fitment and quality compared to places like AutoZone, O'Rly, etc.
The only other option is to look for the company who builds the OEM parts and find their suppliers. For example, you'll find Exedy builds clutches for companies like Honda. So if you can get an Exedy clutch from your local parts store, it's usually the same as the OEM part.
If you do research too, you'll find that there are a lot of high-quality aftermarket parts suppliers too. If you are looking for bearings, you can usually look for places that sell SKF bearings (or whatever you prefer), and measure and cross reference the sizes to find what fits your application.
So what it comes down to is, it depends on the part, and it depends on what is available from where. It's basically a giant research project for every part.
I think I'll take my chances with the "Mexican" parts you've described as I have seen them installed in countless cars and road deaths have only been dropping year over year.
There is no need for me to crucify myself financially because German plastic is supposedly better than Mexican.
Honestly, there's nothing wrong with "Mexican" parts specifically just "aftermarket" quality outside of known aftermarket brands.
For example, an after-market engine mount isn't going to kill you when it goes bad, but your wallet is going to be a lot emptier compared to just buying the factory part after you replace the damn thing every year. (I've had the experience, I tried a few aftermarket brands, I've since gone exclusively to factory and haven't replaced an engine mount in years)
I 100% guarantee someone has died from substandard automotive goods. Not sure when or where, but mechanical failures contribute to accidents all the time.
> I absolutely fucking hate Amazon now. It's full of white label products.
So is Walmart and Dollar General. It's always been the customer's responsibility to buy the product they want, not the store's. Don't want counterfeit crap? Don't buy IFONE FROM APPEL in the listings. I don't know when the last time I got counterfeit crap from amazon is because I look at what I buy before I buy it.
White labelling and counterfeiting are two different things.
White labelling is just rebranding; I go to Home Depot and buy some screws, print out a label that says "jrockway's miracle fasteners", slap it on top of Home Depot's label, and sell them to you, that's white labeling.
Counterfeiting is when you inject seemingly-identical goods into the supply chain. You mix up some soap and blue dye in your bathtub, pour it into some recycled Tide bottles, and ship them off to Amazon's warehouse as "Tide brand laundry detergent". Now you are selling them to customers seeking a genuine product, but they're not getting the real thing.
White-labelling is a perfectly legitimate thing. Counterfeiting is a crime.
To be extra clear, your "I look at things on Amazon before I buy them" technique is exactly the sort of procedure that won't protect you from counterfeiting. The counterfeiters already fooled Amazon. Amazon thinks they're selling you genuine merchandise. But they're not. That's what upsets people.
What Chinese companies actually do is both really. They take an order of 1000 say Apple iPhones then actually produce 2000, keeping 1000 for themselves. They then sell the knock-offs themselves within China or into the U.S. on e-bay and other 'used' sites.
I wouldn't blame the consumer on this. Retailers are responsible for the things they sell. That includes if it's low quality or if it says it's something that it isn't (counterfeit etc).
Also hosting fake reviews etc is also something they are responsible for.
Is it a veil? Imagine you are a landlord and you rent to a Walmart. Are you as the landlord responsible for all of Walmart's products? It is the same thing but Amazon owns a virtual high traveled location instead of the landlord who owns a place on a busy street. Amazon shouldn't be responsible for the third party seller, but it should be extremely clear that it is a third party seller, like the sign on the side of a building.
Caveat emptor has to have limits. If merchants can just write whatever on whatever package and sell it, how the hell are consumers supposed to function as informed or responsible? How long until every transaction turns into a sketchy used car buy, having to take my package of fucking toilet paper to a maid so she can use her expertise to make sure they didn't make the paper out of razorblades and carbon fiber?
I'm all for free markets but merchants have proven time and again, and long before China for that matter, that they can't be fucking trusted with anything. Sure, some are good, but the vast majority especially online will do any damn thing they can to increase bottom line.
Yes and no. Essentially this is already happening, except they are drop-shipping you the product for next to nothing direct from China. In fact, there is a small industry that revolves around this business model. The barrier of entry has just risen dramatically with this news.
There are thousands of small drop-shipping businesses based in North America that depend on cheap postal service from China. Excuse me while I go short Shopify stock.
I see this as a positive for Shopify. We work very closely with the platform, and over the years I have only seen a handful of direct-from-Chinese dropshipping sites that actually produce any revenue. Sure there are a lot of accounts that are opening with the hopes of a get-rich-quick scheme with low cost and risk.
I am certain that it is the legitimate businesses that are behind Shopify's success, and this will help with their reputation and give them a chance to focus their marketing on the right customers.
Check out Shopify's marketplace for selling online businesses [0]. I limited the search to dropshipping. Dozen's of businesses with five figure monthly revenue and a few with more than that. Revenue data comes directly from Shopify and can't be edited by the seller. These are just the businesses for sale. I would call this more than a handful.
Look, Shopify is a great product and long-term I only see it growing. That being said, I would think the loss of Chinese dropshipping would hurt it's short term outlook.
As a side note, Shopify acquired an app to help with this whole process of importing AliExpress products for drop shipping a few years ago for about $10-15 mil. Oberlo, it is called [1].
I would guess based on the acquisition price that there’s likely a significant enough number of accounts that depend on this whole drop shipping at minimal shipping expense model.
Yes you either pay for the shipping or you pay the middle man. It's much cheaper for the consumer to subsidize the shipping than it is for the consumer to subsidize the middle man.
I expect going forward Alibaba will open warehouses all over the US which their sellers can stock with goods which can then be shipped domestically for about the same cost. I doubt Alibaba will just go away.
If cheap crap x from China has a moderately expensive source alternative from the USA and stopping subsidising the transportation costs from China makes the moderately expensive option price viable then that's good for the USA supplier without any middlemen being involved.
> sit in the middle of transactions and collect rent
This is already a cottage industry, drop shipping. You make a shopify store, put up some marketing of people in sunglasses in front of brick walls, and sell cheap crap like fashion watches. Then when someone buys one, you go on Aliexpress and order it directly to your customers' address.
If you're a real expert in arbitrage, you don't settle for making a couple dollars at a time. You charge people thousands of dollars to "teach" them how to make their own drop shipping stores.
We've experienced something similar here in Norway. The commerce unions have been lobbying hard to get rid of toll-free imports, which we have up until a certain limit. (Turns out that the majority of imported Chinese goods fall under that limit)
So they've been fighting tooth and nail to get that limit removed, which means that every single item gets slapped with additional brokerage fees and what-not, essentially rendering the purchases economically unsound (i.e a $1 item will cost close to $20).
They did the same in Sweden, and IIRC, the post offices ended up with storing hundreds of thousands of shipments that people refused to pick up, when they discovered the new fees.
Our unions have argued that it's good because
1) consumers get better consumer rights when purchasing from domestic retailers
2) shipping times are much lower
3) supports domestic economy - both e-commerce and postal services.
4) Better for climate, as less parcels = less transportation
But yeah, in the end, it's just one more link in the value-chain.
"This is all related to the Universal Postal Union agreement that allows Chinese sellers to ship products to the U.S. for less than it costs us to ship to the same state."
The USPS has been losing money on this arrangement for a long time, it's one of these things that has stuck around despite being a total embarrassment due to industry pressuring. There is no reason taxpayers should be subsidizing this -- in fact, THAT is the most American of tales, everyday Americans paying for the privilege of bad downstream consequences.
Who cares? The goods crossing the ocean should not have their shipping subsidized. Drop shipping doesn't change that. If it's cheaper to use a drop shipper then they are providing a service anyway so I wouldn't call it rent seeking. That would only work for really in demand products anyway in which case good? Not to mention any drop shipper is taking on risk.
> An American will order a bunch of widgets in bulk, ship them over in a cargo ship, come up with some fancy marketing, and then sell the widgets to you at 200% markup. You know these folks will never hire electrical engineers to certify safety and conformance, or work with the factory to improve the product in response to customer feedback.
Pretty sure that's been going on at Amazon for at least 5 years now. There is no shortage of 3rd party sellers importing garbage in bulk (try to buy a Li-Ion battery on Amazon), marking it up to account for their shipping, marketing and the 15% Amazon fee and then selling it to the end consumer in the US.
No electrical engineers involved at any point there either.
I see this as a good thing. It should cull a lot of garbage listings from E-commerce platforms.
The advantage of having a US based middle man is that he can be held accountable if the goods sold are unsafe or counterfeit. These days it’s difficult to buy genuine goods of eBay and Amazon unless you buy from a reputable seller. It shouldn’t be this way.
This has been happening for literally years already. Basically dropshippers would buy products list them and ship direct in the way you're describing. Then, when a manufacturer noticed that a product was popular enough, they would undercut the dropshipper and just list the product directly. Most of the "advanced" dropshippers though have white label products with some branding and design changes and then buy them in blocks of inventory and have them shipped to a 3PL partner anyways.
I'm actually pretty curious how this could niche cultural phenomena like electric skateboards or mechanical keyboards hobbyists where it's all about low volume customized shipping from Shenzhen. Maybe this will force consolidation of individual consumer tastes into things like Massdrop.
There are so many people hawking get rich schemes by selling on Amazon FBA. Judging by the array of meat claws on Amazon, there might not be a lot of opportunity left.
Edit: we've had to ask you this a bunch of times before. If you continue ignoring these requests we will ban you. Also, I'm pretty sure jrockway is super American—not that it's relevant here, because you can't attack another user based on where they're from or where you imagine they're from.
I don't know why USPS doesn't just raise its rates across the board. I understand why, 50, 20, or even perhaps 15 years ago, it was important to keep mail ultra cheap. But today, I'd argue >95% of mail comes from businesses, and most of that are ads in some form or another. It's ridiculous to me that I can send a piece of mail to the other side of the USA in 2 days for less than $0.50. I don't want prices to go up, of course, but at the same time, I have trouble listening to the woe-is-me attitude of the USPS, while their pricing scheme makes no sense at all.
> I'd argue >95% of mail comes from businesses, and most of that are ads in some form or another. It's ridiculous to me that I can send a piece of mail to the other side of the USA in 2 days for less than $0.50
Don't you think these two facts are somehow related? They have to go by your house every day anyway, carrying paid junk mail, and the marginal cost of delivering an actual letter is quite low.
Maybe a bit analogous to newspapers/magazines, where the price you pay may not even cover the printing costs, but the difference is subsidized by the advertisers.
I ordered more than 1000 parcels from AliExpress, banggoods, gearbest and hobbyking. Never ever I had to pay import duty costs (Netherlands) and in most cases shipment was either free or a redicilous low amount. If everyone would be like me, no store would exist anymore here in Holland. Even though I am a bit of a hypocrite, I do think it's fair to make the market a bit more fair.
Just curious, what type of stuff do you buy? I find that the quality often is poor when buying from Aliexpress with artificial ratings boosted by the seller doing anything to get a high review. Banggood has been better with more accurate ratings.
yes same here.
Connectors, crimping tools, wire, electronic components, props, electric motors, control boards, radio sender/receivers, antennas, batteries, tools etc.
You need to find your way. The stores have a lot of crap, but once you get a grasp of everything you find out that there is actually quite decent quality stuff out there.
So what does that mean for US companies sending packages into countries that are part of the UPU (Edit: virtually all countries on Earth)? Can each country now refuseand set their own rates for transporting US parcels the last mile?
Probably, since everything is bilateral in agreements and negotiations. The point isn’t to minimize costs but to even out the playing field. US companies drop-shipping overseas will likely pay more, but that’s a consequence deemed overall worth it for the US local economy and market.
Probably, the person writing that piece actually got official notification that the termination would occur on September 30 or the end of September, and miswrote, though that kind of error in an official notice is not unheard of.
This is fine for an end date. Any duration should be specified as half-open, t₀ <= t < t₁. This way it's clear that September, even its last day, is in the period and October is not.
Yes, but try codifying that and you won’t get far enough to make that comparison. E.g. mentally or on a computer, ‘Date.Parse(“2019-09-31”)’ is an error ;)
Any properly defined software should take a date that doesn't exist and move it forward or backward to a date that does. Leap years would crash every computer every February if that wasn't taken into account.
Except that the whole February/leap year case is part of the Gregorian calendar. Moving the date forward or backward to a date that does exist is not a set rule and would only cause unnecessary confusion for a user or other developer for that matter; even worse if you were to do it without notifying the user. Wouldn't you agree that it'd just be better to catch the error and tell the user they "done messed up"?
Right, that's totally how people will reason about a date that doesn't exist. This is why the other side of the business can't stand talking to some of us.
In Brazil, the local mail charges R$ 15 (~US$ 4) to deliver international packages from "certain countries" i.e. China. The result is, ultra-cheap freight has almost disappeared, most sites like AliExpress now charge around US$ 4, but the class of this kind of package is not charged again here, so it is still kind of cheap.
OTOH mail from USA is damn expensive. I don't buy more things from USA because of this. And local customs tend to target USA packages more so the chance of paying import tax is way higher, too. Even packages from Europe and Japan are cheaper, and one can see they are more distant places.
South African experience. I buy a fair number of items on Aliexpress. Stuff you can never get in any store here. I use the Post Office to ship because courier is just too expensive. It takes 40 to 60 days to arrive. The hold up appears to be the SA Post Office. Since a few months ago the Post Office now charges approximately US$2 processing fee for each package. Its a fair charge I guess but there hasn't been any improvement in delivery times. Sometimes stuff arrives after so long that I have forgotten why I ordered it.
Here's a good background article, but I worried it was too political to submit directly:
"On October 17, 2018, President Trump announced that the United States will withdraw from the Universal Postal Union (UPU), an intergovernmental organization that sets the rules and rates for international mail delivery. The decision to withdraw has been widely seen as another salvo in the Trump administration’s campaign against what it deems as unfair trade practices benefitting China. This post explains what the UPU is, why the Trump administration is withdrawing from it, the legality of withdrawal, how this decision is related to the trade war with China, and what could happen next."
>The administration has given the UPU an ultimatum, that they: either allow the USPS to set rates for China mail that arrives in the U.S., or the U.S. will officially leave the UPU on October 17th.
(Emphasis mine)
why "for China mail" ?
why not "no exceptions: all over the planet everybody pays the same local rates, or else we leave the UPU" ?
This smells like hidden import taxation, but I hope I am wrong. But then why insist on phrasing the ultimatum with referene to "for China mail" specifically ?
EDIT: adding another gem:
>Global Supply Chain News: After Three Years of Secrecy, Amazon Starting to Ramp Up Global Logistics Services
>they are actively looking to compete in the shipping industry
...
>The project’s name: Dragon Boat.
>As part of that strategy, Bloomberg reported Amazon had plans to take on freight forwarding and brokerage services directly, eliminating a set of middlemen.
>...
>Among the most important ramifications from Amazon’s vision: small Chinese manufacturer will be able sell to American consumers with no one else than Amazon between them.
So if an American company (in this case Amazon), will perform transport within China, does that mean that reciprocally, Chinese companies can also become a mail service in the US? They could be paid a low wage, and eat cheap food that is shipped internally. Is this really about balancing trade or about big corporations doing to mail, what they did with manufacture: export jobs to China for increased profit?
This is an issue in Australia too, and since we are usually followers and not leaders for these kinds of issues it might mean a change is on the cards for us too. Is there an easy way to find out? My hope is that the USPS leaving the Union is enough of a threat to shake up the rules for all countries.
>FOUNTAIN: Anna sent us a chart that estimates how much less. And it says, if you or I wanted to send a three-quarter-pound package somewhere in the U.S., the U.S. Postal Service would charge around $4.76 for the last leg of the journey.
>MALONE: Yeah, the so-called final mile. However, if that same package came in from China, the USPS would only charge China Post $1.39. That means the USPS charges you and me roughly 3 1/2 times more than what they charge China Post.
Comparisons like this are very misleading. They aren't comparing apples to apples. In particular, they take a retail price for fast shipping with tracking and compare to a wholesale price for slow shipping without tracking.
It's true in general that UPU rates are cheaper than the comparable US rates but by 10-20%, not a factor of 3.5.
You're right that not all of them have tracking. The ones with full tracking are AliExpress Standard Shipping and ePacket.
Not that there's a noticeable difference in shipping cost: in some ePacket cases, the shipping cost was $0, even when the product itself was a $2.50 microcontroller board.
They may not be charging you for shipping but they're definitely paying for it.
I'm not sure exactly what program AliExpress Standard Shipping is sent through. It seems like it's slower but it's hard to get information. How does the shipping label look?
Do US sellers have access to this slow shipping option? If so, it's curious why they wouldn't (based on the comments in the link) offer it as an option to compete with Chinese sellers.
Large shippers generally do have access to similarly priced shipping options. It's difficult to directly compare because volume prices aren't all public.
Not sure where we're getting our wires crossed here....
You described the "if you or I wanted to send a three-quarter-pound package..." scenario as "very misleading", because "They aren't comparing apples to apples. In particular, they take a retail price for fast shipping with tracking and compare to a wholesale price for slow shipping without tracking."
I asked: "Do US sellers have access to this slow shipping option?"
You have not yet answered that question. The "you or I" in this context is not large shippers, and "similarly priced" is not the same as having access to the same shipping options (and prices) that individuals in China have.
No, US sellers can't ship using an international shipping program. It's two fundamentally different things.
You can try to set up a comparison that's closer. That would involve sorting discounts on the US side.
Chinese shippers sending packages through UPU are going through UPU wholesale rates, because they're all processed in bulk before it gets to the US. USPS doesn't pay for getting it from someone's local post office into the US, they pay only once it's already in the US. You can't compare that to retail prices someone pays at a US post office, because that pays for "first-mile" processing.
Comparing the cheapest international shipping program with one of the more expensive domestic options, when there are several differences I pointed out above, is misleading. You've yet to make a case that they're comparable.
I just got an email from eBay Main Street, which is eBay's mailing list for political issues which affect their sellers.
This email is tells me to call congress to NOT withdraw from the Universal Postal Union, under the logic that it will make it harder to ship stuff from the US to other countries.
Of course this is bad for eBay, and perhaps etsy, shopify and others. The flood of direct-from-China sellers selling cheap products and shipping for free (on USPS's dime) will stop.
Warehousing won't solve the greed problem at USPS. The $5 poll tax on all shipments is just insanity. Stamping "priority mail" on 1st class packages and using red, white, and blue boxes doesn't justify their greed and incompetence, no matter what the USPS execs think ....
I foresee that withing 6 months China will have 100M square feet of dropshipping warehouse space in Vietnam. This is another in a line of Trump "look busy, change nothing" initiatives, the only difference this time (vs the border do nothing initiatives) is that this time the problem is real, unlike the non crisis at the border where immigration is near a multi decade low!
Why would China create more warehouse space in Vietnam, or so many people spend time writing about this topic, if nothing is changing?
Have I taken your comment literally when it was intended to be metaphorical? If so, could you more clearly clarify the specific idea you are intending to transmit?
I had a neighbor for while who worked full-time for USPS. Postal workers provide reliable service, and are able to earn a livable wage without driving themselves into the ground like the contractor delivery services. I like that USPS is a piece of the American infrastructure fabric, and I like that it employs local people in a sustainable way.
I do not consume nearly enough things that require international shipping to value cheap shipping more. And even if I did, the ethical implications involved with destroying decent jobs for Americans and losing a piece of our national delivery network would stil not make it worthwhile sacrifice in my book.
Really what needs to happen is that the UPU in general needs to be redefined. The Chinese sellers can still access Europe, Canada, and basically anywhere else, which isn't going to stop especially since most countries are not as aggressive as the US when it comes to China trade. Hopefully the reduction in sales due to the US leaving the UPU kills off a bunch of the Chinese businesses but it is definitely still going to be a problem elsewhere.
While I would be happy to see a more equitable and sustainable distribution of jobs and industries between the U.S. and China, the phrase "Hopefully...kills off a bunch of the Chinese businesses" uses language which is a bit off-putting. If those businesses changed their business model to sell more to Chinese consumers, or utilized U.S. distributors more, that would be good.
I realize that you were not actually suggesting that anybody should get killed, just pointing out how it sounded from my perspective, a little off-putting.
Will this even matter when Chinese Alibaba/Aliexpress sellers recently started sending their items to Singapore to avoid tariffs and shipping restrictions?
Having bought a couple drop-shipped goods from China, I, for one, won't miss it. The most noticeable effect I have seen is scammy listings on eBay and Amazon, unresponsive sellers, and unreliable delivery time.
I have not seen any arguments of the form "but the price of X will go way up."
I’ve had great success getting all sorts of stuff delivered straight from China (usually sold through eBay). As long as you don’t need it next week (or sometimes next month), you can save a ton. Compared to domestic sellers who want to gouge me $7.99 to ship a 5 square inch bag of diodes 50 miles.
This could still be a problem if those sellers move to Fulfillment By Amazon. My understanding (and I'd like to be corrected if I'm wrong) is that Amazon's current policy is to commingle products with the same SKU from different sellers, so it will become even more likely to pay for the original and get the knockoff.
Nothing the parent comment said has anything to do with commingling of inventory. I get that HN likes to complain about FBA, but pretending inventory commingling has any relation to unresponsive sellers or long delivery times is misleading and stupid.
I may not have phrased it well, but I wasn't implying that the original poster would have the same problems. I was just saying this change -- which I still think is fair -- may not be only upside for American customers and sellers, if current policies don't change.
I am still able to go on ebay and buy small items (usb cables, camera lens caps, plastic pry tools, etc) shipped from china for $0.80. Is this going to change?
What about the same situation for items shipped from Thialand or Vietnam? There's quite a few of those available as well.
The problem here is an organization which has a right of regulating the market by setting artificial rates.
The shipping price should depend only on private companies their pricing policies.
Bad thing is that people blame China instead of the United Nation bureaucracy. :(
Will be interesting to see the effects of this. Especially Shopify drop-shipping stores and Etsy stores full of cheap garbage. Hopefully it helps clean up some of the noise...I don't think those stores were adding much value anyway.
I'm wondering how this is going to effect the hobbyist and small business electronics markets here in the United States?
Know how cheap and easy it is to get a small number PCBs made in China and shipped to the US? That's over.
So is any number of small electronic parts that would've been shipped free or cheaply from China. Cheap ESP8266 boards? Nope. Cheap automotive relays? Nope. Basically any and every kind of piece of electronics components, modules, etc you can think of will jump in price drastically.
Even if it doesn't need to - it will (like I've seen on the tariffs, prices jumped for small amounts of electronic components just because, even if they were being shipped directly to the end-user consumer - when that's not a part of the tariffs - direct to consumer sales shouldn't be affected, but because the vendors could do it, they did it anyhow - just to make some extra cash).
So where are hobbyists and others supposed to get these parts now?
Digikey and Mouser for some of it. Surplus for others. But for boards and modules and such - well, there's just Sparkfun and Adafruit - maybe a couple of others (not sure?).
But they are likely to raise their prices too, because they depend on the components (resistors, diodes, mosfets, chips, aka the "raw materials") to make their boards (Sparkfun makes them in-house - or at least some of them - but I don't know what Adafruit does).
Or we'll have to pay the extra shipping fees and other costs (because the chinese sellers will just add on some extra cost - just to grab it - it's inevitable).
This will have a ripple effect; small entrepreneurs and startups - kickstarter startups especially - won't be able to compete, unless they base themselves in Shenzhen - because where are they going to get the components cheaper than a competitor who is already there? They aren't made in America any longer (and they never will be again - get that fantasy out of your head if you think that's going to happen).
Radio Row is gone. The original "silicon valley" is gone. Heck, there used to be a ton of computer (mini) manufacturers and businesses here in Phoenix - they are virtually gone, too.
And now with this change - however you feel about it - is going to hobble the next up-and-comers, and current suppliers. At least, that's how I am seeing it.
Now I'll admit - it wasn't fair for competition here - but it wasn't as if China was doing something wrong, as far as I understand it. They were playing by the rules set forth by an international body. Maybe it wasn't fair to us. But instead of letting this kind of thing go on for 1-2 decades, it should have been fixed back then. Now it is likely to destroy or severely change at least one or more areas of enthusiast and hobbyist things (think also RC, drones, etc), as well as probably a ton of other non-electronic things. Do we really think there are that many suppliers here in the US that will charge low prices (competitive with Chinese suppliers) and have fair shipping rates to boot?
The fact is, it will likely still be cheaper to ship it from China, even with the extra cost on shipping - since you're going to be paying that anyhow. For instance - my goto - 12V DC gearmotors. I can buy one kind from a supplier of Ametek (maybe Mouser or Digikey); I will pay whatever the high cost of shipping such an item to my door in addition to the price. Have you ever priced those motors in small quantities?
When you can get them...I've seen prices 10-20x over the equivalent motor from a supplier in China. What would cost $15.00 in China for a single motor, can be up to $100.00 or more from a US manufacturer for the same specs. Let's say it cost $10.00 to ship to my door, whether from China or the US, and let's say the Chinese supplier adds on an extra $5.00 "just because fee" - well, which is cheaper? $110.00 dollars for the US motor, or $30.00 for the Chinese motor?
It's all a farce in my opinion - this administration essentially raising prices, which is going to be passed on to the consumer ultimately, trying to gain support from US small businesses (that's the political angle), at the expense of the rest of consumers, and is selling it with some kind of idea or expectation that this is somehow going to lead to the United States becoming a large scale manufacturer of "everything" that we get from China now. Of course what isn't said is that, even if that fantasy somehow did become true - those items manufactured here would still cost a hell of a lot more to make, and they would be virtually unsaleable on the international market because of that (let's ignore the fact that we'll be lucky if other countries ever buy from us again).
I see a very, very bleak future ahead for this country - no matter what happens with this current administration or the next. Maybe that was always going to be the case. The problem is, prior to this admin, that date was likely out a few decades - now those decades have been erased, and that future is happening now (and it is worse than it would have been had it happened "naturally" I think).
I say if you are an American and are under 30 years of age, and you have any marketable skills at all, you might want to think long and hard about emigrating. Dead serious on this.
Non-machinable letters with the automation discount cost $0.65. Protective mailers add $0.30. No tracking though. I import by FedEx and ocean freight. This change won't affect me directly but the tariffs are killing me.
> and inconsistently takes forever or semi-forever.
As a teenager I ordered a custom mousepad from a website, apparently it was ultimately sourced from China. Never did show up, but it was something like $5 so I never bothered looking into it, chalked it up to a lesson learned.
About four years later I'm visiting home, and in my mail pile sits a random Chinese package. Lo and behold my mousepad finally arrived!
I figure my $5 went towards building the actual factory.
living in canada, I genuinely hope we follow suit and increase the cost of shipping from china to canada. It's encouraging incredibly wasteful buying patterns, and sets up a system canadian companies can NEVER compete with.
It has always struck me as mad that I can order an individual widget from China for less than it would cost for the postage of that widget in my own country.
I thought/wondered the same regarding wish.com. Although this 2019 Forbes article makes it sound like it's not a death knell.
> Shipping is cheap thanks in part to an agreement between China Post and the U.S. Postal Service that allows goods that weigh 4.4 pounds or less to be shipped at low rates. About 15% of Wish’s shipments qualify.
It is still going to be cheaper to order directly from China then to pay someone in the US to order it, repackage it, and mail it to me. (Or even to be lazy and order it on my behalf from China, but US companies will repack it so you don't find out their sources). The US just doesn't have the manufacturing capabilities anymore, and even if the US wanted to have its own manufacturing capability people are not going to work China wages, they are going to demand US wages. So again China will end up being cheaper.
shipping from canada to the usa is fairly expensive and slow (customs delays are fairly common). better to ship to a depo in the usa and mail out from there to individual buyers.
Oh, Universal Postal Union "terminal dues." Those were scheduled to go up in 2021 anyway. China is still getting the "underdeveloped country" rate, because the last 10 year rate setting was in 2011.[1]
If the Trump administration had just opened with this, I think we might have saved ourselves a lot of stock market turbulence with tariff pissing contests. U. S. sellers start in the hole by the fact that they can't even compete on shipping prices with Chinese companies. It reminds me of the Shell gas station owner I worked for many decades ago who complained that the local drugstore could sell quarts of oil cheaper than Shell sold it to him, a Shell station owner. Now how are you supposed to succeed with a rigged system like that?
Let's see how it goes when the price of shipping actually reflects the fact that the $1.50 piece of molded plastic had to take a boat ride half way around the world.
Tangentially related, but I was surprised at how blatant a lot of supplier price fixing is. Either you sell at the supplier agreed price or they don't supply you. This keeps prices up for the sellers, which presumably is good for the supplier as well. That's in the more open market of independent businesses.
In your example, the drugstore may be selling at cost or at a loss to bring people in the door, or he may actually have a cheaper supplier. But for the Shell Station franchisee, he likely has a contract to buy Shell products from a particular distributor, so even if he could find a lower priced distributor he is unable to use it. That's all part of the franchise business model, where the franchiser double dips by taking licence fees and contractually obliges you to use their services as well. Subway charges high margins for their mandatory dishwashing soap supply for one example.
Second, China is already paying for the cost of shipping the item to the US shores. The change affects how much the the USPS charges for the final delivery once it arrives here.
Your drugstore/gas-station anecdote doesn't quite apply here though. The ePacket delivery option comes with size, weight and cost limitations such that it's not useful for shipping retail quantities. It's almost exclusively used for suppliers in China to ship directly to end-customers.
Or do they up the ante and impose more tariffs on incoming U.S. goods?
Is this something that the Hacker News community actually supports Trump on? More curious than anything - you just don't see a lot of support for any of his initiatives here.
I support this, and I'm a rabid leftist. Things should cost what they cost. The only time government should interfere with pricing is to force companies to price in externalities.
"I'm a rabid leftist". I appreciate your candor, but if you think "things should cost what they cost", then you're not nearly as rabid as many of the rabid leftists that I've encountered.
I think what is left and right have been evolving since the 60s. Leftism is being fought over now between anarcho-capitalists vs labor while the right is being fought over between big business vs nationalists.
"Left" and "right" have been pretty arbitrary ever since the French Estates General set up their seating plan with monarchists on the right and republicans on the left. That fight, like all fights before and since, was really divided along multiple axes with overlapping but not identical motivations.
I don't think there's a single thing to be misunderstood, so much as a rough analogy between many different kinds of political battles. Anti-intellectualism does seem to present a kind of newish element to that fight, though I suspect it's always been present in various guises. (I will say that I'm particularly unhappy with the version of it that has dominated for the past 30 years or so.)
Left and right is not really useful. The issue is that there are multiple degrees of state control. But state control comes in more than one flavor. States want either to control what everyone thinks, or to own the economic output of all individuals, or some combination of these two. The state control axis is the most relevant, and its endpoints can't be labeled left or right.
Right, among leftists, some want an absolute state authority controlling all aspects of the economy, and some want absolutely no government at all. The common denominator is the socialization of the means of production (for whatever that means to different people).
Left/right is kind of a stupid spectrum because it's essentially compressing a great deal of dimensionality into a single dimension. And not even that, but "left" in the US means "higher taxes" where to the rest of the world it means "abolish private property and money."
> The state control axis is the most relevant
That's like saying "I think color is the most important aspect of art." I think different things are more important to different people, subjectively. That said, given where I land on this political compass (https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2?ec=-9.0&soc=-6.62) I'd say I do share your views on state control being important.
Oh, no. Don't get me wrong: I'm a communist. But in the current system, I would rather costs not be subsidized. In fact, I think costs should incorporate much more than the pricing system currently allows (pollution, recyclability, etc).
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. The aliexpress sellers need the cheaper shipping rates to be able to compete, wouldn't you say?
There's a difference between agreeing on the idea, the execution, and supporting a person who says that idea. (and the story they try to sell with that idea)
A lot of people likely agree the imbalance was hurting us businesses. But fewer agree with how it was done, or want to support Trump.
The resolution should be restoration of reciprocity, like having China Post insist on commercial shippers having customs clearance arranged.
Other trade war elements like getting out of TPP and bellicosity in general have cost vastly more than the value of stopping drop-shipping Chinese eBay sellers, which is negligible in US China trade.
That's not what I have seen in any description of TPP. It appears that withdrawing from it is pure vandalism of US interests that we now see in the trade war with China, happening outside the framework of TPP.
TPP instantly lost the bulk of the intellectual property chapter and a good amount of ISDS-related commitments when the US withdrew. Is there anything in the CPTPP signed version that's worse than the version the US wanted?
What concession? It's a clear market distortion that shipping rates across such distances are so ridiculously low. I'm not sure why anybody is supporting them. This isn't about Trump or not Trump, and always putting these issues in these terms is incredibly distracting from what's actually important. (And I say this as somebody who absolutely despises Trump.)
>What concession? It's a clear market distortion that shipping rates across such distances are so ridiculously low. I'm not sure why anybody is supporting them.
Come on, everyone supports ridiculously low costs on anything.
You can't just mandate low costs by fiat. That's why it causes market distortion.
You could also say mandate that say breakfast at a hotel should cost no more than $1. You'd get that, but you'd also pay for it via rising hotel prices that would need to subsidize that benefit some enjoy with a higher room fee that everyone would pay for.
In this case lower shipping rates for some are subsidized with higher shipping rates for others, or in some other countries with the same problem corresponding state subsidies for the postal service paid for out of the general state budget.
We absolutely do know this, the UPU (universal postal union) has a mandate to subsidize mail rates from nations that are termed developing under its rules, like China.
Not sure why everyone thinks this is a good thing. If the Chinese government wants to subsidize shipping so that US consumers can buy products for less money, what is the harm?
The reason postage is expensive in the US is because there is a legal monopoly on first class mail, and very little competition for premium services (which is why Amazon decided that launching its own shipping carrier would be highly profitable).
So the blame for high US shipping prices rests with the US government, certainly not with anything China is doing!
The Chinese government was not the one subsidizing it. The original UPU treaty [1] stated that countries would pay a flat rate when shipping to another country. This was original passed several decades ago. The USPS only was getting paid $1.50 per package to forward on any parcel that arrived for a USA destination from China. Since no USA tax money was involved, the "subsidizing" gets passed onto domestic shipping in the form of increased fares to help cover the loss in revenue.
Moreover, for me to send any parcel (even very small ones, like 2 oz.) outside the US costs a small fortune these days, again because I'm subsidizing the Chinese shippers.