Months ago I bought replacement shelves for my fridge. Together about the size of two phone books stacked. Shelves were $40 and shipping was $40 from Illinois to Ontario.
Life itself feels so frustrating when it's wildly cheaper just to buy more crap from China than to recycle stuff from within North America.
What's interesting about it is that there are some users who order 50x of whatever the item is and then just sell them out of their garage, but there are others who have an arrangement with their contract manufacturer in China to actually do drop-shipping through eBay storefronts and similar. This latter group are obviously the more professionalized ones, but it's funny just to see a tiny microcosm of this issue, where the guys who are sending stuff within North America and Europe struggle to compete against dirt-cheap overseas shipping.
$16ea + $5 shipping to Canada from China: https://www.ebay.com/itm/302678192585
Compare this to Metroboard, an established e-commerce storefront, who currently has their similar pulley marked down to $15 from a regular $30, but when I emailed to asked about shipping to Canada I was told it would be a $55 flat rate box: https://metro-board.com/e-skate-shop/pulley-insert-for-abec-...
You can send that for $10.50 from USA to Canada as an International Small Package [1].
They just don't care enough about you as a customer to bother.
Thank god for China! You are not at the mercy of the douchebags.
International shipping does require a bit of a knack for risk assessment. There are countries that most think are fine, but with terrible postal systems. Or annoying customs. Or people that flip out when a package takes more than 3 days to arrive.
Shipping to Sweden is fine. Shipping to Italy isn’t. German Customs will inspect a lot and send a bill, Canadian customs often doesn’t bother with American packages.
And I was happy to make some Super Nintendo collector in Sweden happy.
It's really an astonishing situation, but I guess the purpose was to subsidize China and other countries in order to help them develop economically, and to increase imports. It seems to have worked, so we can probably end the program now for China at least.
What's interesting is that there doesn't seem to have been a lot of debate or media coverage before now.
or you can say the purpose of the subsidy was to make goods cheaper for American consumers?
Though I'm not sure the funds will not just be redirected elsewhere, and how wasteful this is, given that it helps give access to more affordable and efficient direct shopping from producers, and puts pressure on the government to lower spending because of the tax breaks that are given to people buying directly from China.
If you drive from Bend to, say, Winnemucca, you go from Pacific to Mountain and back to Pacific.
It takes a minute to explain that Portland is to remote parts of Oregon like...New York City is to Morgantown, West Virginia in both distance and everything else.
Someone can land at Newark Airport, and have to figure out the difference between going to Newark Penn Station or New York Penn Station, which are in opposite directions from the airport.
Of course the PRR hasn't existed in 50 years so maybe it's time to change the name...
They're in the same direction from the airport, and the train will stop in Newark Penn on the way to New York Penn. Some people will be confused and try to get off in Newark, although the conductors normally try to announce this really clearly.
Found that out the hard way when I went to meet a fried at the general store in Strawberry, and wound up a few hours away from him.
However, it'd be fascinating to see some mapping showing in detail where most place names are from in a region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_state_and_territory_na... has the states, but it'd be more fun to dive into towns, rivers, mountains, etc...
Also note that where USPS has a monopoly it's often where it is required by law to sell below costs. For example, delivering mail to Alaska and Hawaii is quite expensive, but US law requires uniform postage costs.
The USPS is hampered by law in other ways. The UPU decision is one example; they also have fairly strict pension laws and they cannot raise prices without agreement from overseers (a price increase to 55¢ was just struck down in court). It's not totally clear that it's possible for USPS to run in the black while also being the mailer of last resort that it is today. (That said, perhaps mail is a government service worth subsidizing, though we can debate how much, and running in the black would be preferable.)
The issue for the postal service is that the law was changed so that the USPS would start funding their retirement health care costs since they are promised to the workers and the projected costs had exploded. This was supported by a bipartisan commission, the GAO, and the Postal Service itself:
>...Although retiree health benefits are often unfunded or poorly funded, two considerations suggested the Service’s retiree health care obligations should be funded: they are as firm a commitment as the Service’s pensions, and they had become enormous (about $75 billion by 2006). In 2003, the presidential commission suggested establishing a reserve fund for these obligations, and the Postal Service itself sent Congress a proposal for creating such a fund.
>Prior to 2006, the Service simply paid retirees’ health benefit premiums when they came due. The Service put aside no money when it promised the future benefits. Paying benefits when they come due rather than funding them in advance is known as the pay-as-you-go or unfunded approach.
>Early this century, Congress, the Administration, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), and a bipartisan presidential commission expressed concern about the lack of funding. Although retiree health benefits are often unfunded or poorly funded, two considerations suggested the Service’s retiree health care obligations should be funded: they are as firm a commitment as the Service’s pensions, and they had become enormous (about $75 billion by 2006). In 2003, the presidential commission suggested establishing a reserve fund for these obligations, and the Postal Service itself sent Congress a proposal for creating such a fund.
>In 2002-2003, it was discovered that the Service was contributing far more than necessary to fully fund its pensions, and Congress allowed the Service to contribute less. Congress decided the pension “savings” could help patch the retiree health benefit underfunding. In 2006, as part of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), the Postal Service Retirement Health Benefits Fund (RHBF) was established. Most of the Service’s contributions to the new fund could be paid using the pension “savings.” PAEA was bipartisan legislation with broad support.
https://taxfoundation.org/primer-postal-service-retiree-heal...
(BTW I agree with the other responders - this was an excellent summary for those of us not in the US)
It's also possible to run local fire departments, etc in the black as well. Whether that is preferable or not is a subject of debate :D
Fedex and UPS, in unison: am I a joke to you?
The short answer is yes, they are.
The USPS can't increase their domestic prices but there is good indication that they are charging more to offset this. There are complaints in this thread even about the cost of shipping abroad, as international shipping is not regulated like domestic postage rates if I remember right. So the USPS uses outbound international shipments as a cost center to make up for the subsidy to China.
The article states there is a ~$500M subsidy to China through UPU rates.
They won’t. The rates for shipments from China will go up and some executives will get higher bonuses
That's normalization. Instead of shipping a cog from 1 state over for $5 or China for $.05, it will now cost China closer to the same rates everyone else pays.
The argument want never that shipping domestically was too expensive, it's that shipping from China to domestic was cheaper.
I countered with the assumption that while the former will happen for sure, the latter won't, but instead the additional revenue coming from the increased shipping costs from China will subsidize higher bonuses for executives rather than be used to lower the costs for non-china packages.
(it's the sort of thing I personalize & sell myself, need to charge more than that for material costs + profit, and ship as well)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Acrylic-Transparent-Photo-Frame-6in...
Your example in the other comment was 4 oz. The commercial rate for pre-sorted flats is $1.249. There's even lower rates if you can do higher levels of sorting and injection, cheapest is $0.936.
See https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm#_c104 "First-Class Mail Commercial Flats (Large Envelopes)"
And even then you're wrong: Paying any amount for shipping of items, even if the items cost the same amount as the Chinese version it's still more expensive. It doesn't matter if the shipping cost is $10 or $3.50 or $1: It's still more expensive.
>And even then you're wrong: Paying any amount for shipping of items, even if the items cost the same amount as the Chinese version it's still more expensive. It doesn't matter if the shipping cost is $10 or $3.50 or $1: It's still more expensive.
Care to elaborate? If your cost was the same as the Chinese and your shipping cost the same as well then your overall cost would be the same. What are you trying to say here?
And you ignore that point that even at the high volume flats rate, it's still more expensive. Maybe your needs are an edge case, I don't know. But you asked for examples where shipping within the US is more expensive, and you have those examples in spades. Once given, you want to move the goal posts, and can't even move them to where you're actually right. You're being deliberately obtuse and intellectually dishonest. I'm done trying to have a conversation.
Regardless, you're not trying to honestly assess the examples given. But I guess I was incorrect when I said I was done with the conversation-- I couldn't help pointing out for other readers how you persist in being wrong.
No, it doesn't imply that. For other configurations there are different programs that reduce the cost; elsewhere in this thread I pointed out that using parcel select lightweight would reduce the claimed shipping cost by a factor of 3.
My claim is that the specific examples people give tend to be wrong. I'm sure there's some exotic configurations where China ends up paying less. It's just that virtually none of the articles about the topic point to correct examples.
>And even if it did, once again, it would still be more expensive.
You keep saying this, but so far have not identified what the comparable option you're showing that's cheaper.
In my initial comment I asked for locations, dimensions, and weight. You only provided weight, so I had to guess the others based on the product page.
Small packages, generally about 6" x 6" and weighing under 4oz, trickled in over the following few months. They came from China, Estonia, and Slovenia.
We got one really nice panda hand puppet, several charming small stuffed animals, a bunch of bookmarks, and some magnets.
Now that you mention it, it would be interesting to try the experiment again and see what is the cheapest price I could get to remail each package back to my friend elsewhere in the US.
Do any of the items fit in a regular envelope? Is it possible to ship for the price of a stamp? If not, most likely you can ship with flats for $1-1.50 range.
It was more expensive to ship within the US and Canada than from China. Pretty much crushed the small retailers (I know I refused to spend $7 shipping for a $12 item). Now that that’s improved the rates should more normalize, because they won’t have to subsidize the loss on China shipping.