The fractional cost of a single phone cover on a container ship crossing the pacific is... extremely low.

Large container ships hold 14,000 TEU (twenty-foot-equiv) containers, each of which has a volume of 33m^3.

Let's use an iPhone's size as a stand-in for the phone cover: it's 173 x 70 x 8mm.

Divide the first by the latter: (14000 * 33m^3) / (143mm * 71mm 8mm), and, as google will helpfully tell us (https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&sxsrf=ALe...) you can ship 5.6x10^9, or 5.6 billion of these on a single ship.

From some related information it seems shipping rates for a single container are around $1,000 for China->US. Plug that in and the costs are ... $0.002, or 1/5th of a cent: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&sxsrf=ALe...

I may be off by an order of magnitude somewhere. But it just feels intuitively obvious that most of the costs of any delivery are incurred during the 15 seconds or so the mailman spends in your driveway or trying to find the mailbox with your name.

No, that's about right - containerised freight is extremely cheap. I just shipped an ATV, about 1.5m3, 250kg, from China to Europe for about $180 - and $150 of that is port handling and freight forwarding fees, the actual shipping part was $32.

Just last week I checked ocean freight rates again for a project of mine. Depending on ports and incoterms, handling charges, port fess, etc on both ends can almost amount to the same sum as the shipping part.

Most of the cost comes from land based shipping which you conveniently ignored.

But that is also necessary when something is made in your own country.

You're paying the same amount of tax either way. If the shipping costs $1 from govt. money, then that gets split over the many millions of taxpayers. So while the system is bad, for you it's good - you're getting effectively free shipping funded 99.999% by everyone else.

What tax dollars are you talking about here? The USPS is only in the red because of congressionally mandated pension funding requirements. It’s a business otherwise. Not sure why everybody’s talking about tax dollars.

https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2019/1114-...

That said, allowing them to set rates will likely help the bottom line a great deal, but the USPS is a business.

The USPS gets ~$18 billion in taxpayer funding and subsidies annually. All while having a monopoly.

https://fortune.com/2015/03/27/us-postal-service/

They are required by law to fund 75 years of their pension obligations. Because of this, they run in the red, not because the business model is completely flawed.

Further, rural routes are things that should continue but are cost prohibitive without subsidies. With those two considerations combined it seems like a pretty meager use of taxpayer dollars.

You’re not wrong. I think the concern can still be valid that the use of those taxes isn’t good, though. While some people get an alright deal out of a single shipment, the overall situation isn’t necessarily justified or beneficial.