361–370 of 508 posts
Two questions: 1) What are the possible unintended consequences? This is fairly drastic. Certainly, something(s) unforeseen are going to happen. 2) What are the new opportunities? For example, importing in bulk and shipping from here (as opposed to individual orders shipped from China).
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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…
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.
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…
There's a good Planet Money episode about this: The Postal Illuminati ( https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/epis... )
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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…
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…
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.
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>despite shipping from China being obviously more expensive in real world resources. 3 weeks container shipping on a super container ship vs. even cheapest truck shipping ?
The Chinese shippment also has to use a truck to get from 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 :)
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.
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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…
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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 opti…
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.
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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 U…
> The USPS will certainly make more revenue 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 tota…
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.
Of course, but we're discussing revenue.
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…
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.