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US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

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121–130 of 380 posts

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Globalization is about an even playing field, not one-sided concessions and subsidies

The idea of free trade/globalization is everyone benefiting from the efficiency of each place doing the work it can do most efficiently. Iowa corn and Swiss fine machinery and Arab oil and all sorts of things where one place can do something better and cheaper because of the nature of the place. Poverty (cheap labor) and treaties (cheap postage) shouldn't be the drivers of this efficiency because they aren't caused b…

I want to remind everyone that Chinese economy became what it is today because European, American and Japanese companies invested trillions in China. It was a Republican president who kicked it all off. A policy decision of pure capitalism.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#122
post #102
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest reduction in global poverty we've seen is due to outsourcing to China. Don't you care about starving Chinese peasants?

Depends. Are they so desperate that they want to go to war, or are they rather becoming more of a middle class that wants to play the newest video games?

How many wars has China instigated in the last 30 years though? Seems to me the region is shifting to accommodate the new power balance quite nicely.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#123
Sweeden had a much more interesting solution to this problem. Usually small packages like this avoid VAT because it's not worth the administrative hassle to deal with them. Sweeden decided that such packages should be liable for tax, plus a $15 admin fee to cover the costs: https://www.thelocal.se/20180119/your-cheap-imports-from-chi...

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#125
post #111
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things you see on Amazon are bought by the container-load from China and sent to Amazon's warehouses for fulfilment. This change will encourage that sort of business because it'll no longer be worthwhile sending direct from China (as the likes of dx.com and aliexpress do now).

AliExpress is doing that too. I'm in Spain, and I literally just received an SMS for a shipment from "SINOTRANS" which is what AliExpress uses to ship in bulk from China then fulfill locally.

Aliexpress is the consumer-facing side of Alibaba, which is the 5th largest internet company by revenue. The fact they're doing this isn't at all surprising.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#126
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixed it for you: This change will likely disproportionately affect the poor and middle-class (who will see a sharp rise in manufacturing jobs) as well as smaller businesses who rely on manufacturing to survive. Given the state of the economy, "burdened" is not a reasonable description.

The sheer volume China, and other Asian countries, are producing in the electric industry pales any impact this treaty could have. I seems to me that this treaty gained significance due to e-commerce. Thus it impacts consumer orders, not industrial ones. So the only parties to be impacted are online retailers (and every private sender). Not sure how that would impact the current global work-share in any measurable wa…

Amazon will be pleased I guess? AliExpress is coming for them. I for one welcome our new AliBaba overlords. Competition is good for consumers.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#127

A friend helped the Wall Street Journal expose the damage this treaty was doing to his small business in the United States as it tried to fend off counterfeiters. https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-subsidy-for-china-is-dumb-... Seems like a win for American innovation if you care about that thing. Seems like China is going to get hurt by this change which is bad for globalization if you are into that thing.

Does your friend get anything if I pay to read the article?

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#128

A friend helped the Wall Street Journal expose the damage this treaty was doing to his small business in the United States as it tried to fend off counterfeiters. https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-subsidy-for-china-is-dumb-... Seems like a win for American innovation if you care about that thing. Seems like China is going to get hurt by this change which is bad for globalization if you are into that thing.

It helps to understand the history of the postal system, which was archaic and impractical until Sir Rowland Hill came along with The Penny Black:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowland_Hill

The basic principle is a simple one, a letter could be sent to any address in the UK at the universal rate. There would be no surcharges just because you lived in a remote part of Wales. Equally there would be no discount because you lived next to the sorting office in London and wanted to send a letter to the next street.

In the UK we did celebrate Rowland Hill and his work, sadly times have changed and successive Conservative governments have undermined the universal postal service by privatisation and trying to make it 'better' with 'competition'. Hence, rather than one Royal Mail van delivering letters and parcels there is now a small fleet of other delivery vans and outsourced casual labour 'gig economy' type delivery options. It is not more efficient to send six different vans out to a small village, each of them delivering one or two items when you could have just the one Royal Mail van carrying a few dozen parcels.

Moving on from 1837 to today where ecommerce and email has changed things, there is the 'ePacket', not very well understood by most end consumers. Here is an article on Shopify that helps explain the fundamentals:

https://www.shopify.co.uk/blog/epacket-delivery-explained-ev...

Now I am no fan of the 'evils of global capitalism', however, I believe that the work done by China Post and their partners in 30+ countries is very much in the spirit of 'the Penny Black'. If your business in the West does have product made in China for good reasons, e.g. that is where your supply chain is, then you want to get your products to customers in good time. Why send a crate of product to your local warehouse to then have people then resend that on to customers when you can have a pick and pack operation in China?

This is particularly the case if you are wanting to offer your product to people internationally. For instance, Australia. If you have production facilities in China and then have a head office and warehouse in the UK, you can't realistically sell to the Australian market if it takes weeks for your parcels from the UK to get there, inevitably spending a week doing nothing in the Netherlands en-route. It makes customer service a non-starter. What you really want, and what your customer really wants is the China Post ePacket service and no extra trip for your products around the planet.

This applies for premium products people want, not the forged knock-off product that people berate Amazon for. ePacket helps the small to medium sized business compete against the giants of industry that can afford their own planes.

There is no 'win' for American innovation here, this is like a 'tariff' in that it is actually a 'tax' on American consumers. ePacket was as bit as innovative as 'the Penny Black' and it facilitates trade on a level playing field.

I am sure that knee-jerk reactions will mod-down my opinions on this, however, the ePacket and how we got here is not understood that well and going Donald Trump on parcel delivery is not going to solve the problems and frictions that genuinely exist with the status quo.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#129
post #123

Sweeden had a much more interesting solution to this problem. Usually small packages like this avoid VAT because it's not worth the administrative hassle to deal with them. Sweeden decided that such packages should be liable for tax, plus a $15 admin fee to cover the costs: https://www.thelocal.se/20180119/your-cheap-imports-from-chi...

That's not a proper solution and I hope it isn't the one that my country of residence, Norway, will choose. It is simple protectionism. And it is extremely regressive. If they want to figure out a way to efficiently charge the VAT that would be different (even though VAT is also a regressive tax). Charging a USD 15 fee to apply the USD 1 VAT to the USD 4 cost of the goods I have just received from China is absurd.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#130
post #57

if China loses its status as a developing country, all that's likely to happen is the items will end up being shipped from a neighbouring country that still has the status. When you buy items from AliExpress often they have the option of being sent by Singapore Post. I'm not exactly sure how that works (Singapore isn't that close to China), but although the item comes from China, to the postal service it doesn't.

I have been getting a lot of items shipped from Thailand. And one cheap item from the Solomon Islands. I have no idea how the last one happened.
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