It made sense when they were truly a developing country. But the issue is that entire businesses have been built on top of exploiting these rates. For example, a few years back I bought several specialized antenna cables for $2-3 online (total price, including shipping) and assumed they must be surplus some warehouse was trying to unload here in the U.S. and they'd just drop them in domestic First Class mail. I couldn't believe it when they arrived several weeks later from China and when I asked the post office what it would cost me to ship that exact package back to the sender they quoted me ~$30 (which of course didn't include the cost of the actual contents.) Good luck competing with that.