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Or do they up the ante and impose more tariffs on incoming U.S. goods?
Is this something that the Hacker News community actually supports Trump on? More curious than anything - you just don't see a lot of support for any of his initiatives here.
? Why all the downvotes?
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.
Does this mean lower government spending? Kind of blows my mind the government gets tax money and private people get the benefits.
Great planet money episode on the topic: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/epis...
>MALONE: Yeah, the so-called final mile. However, if that same package came in from China, the USPS would only charge China Post $1.39. That means the USPS charges you and me roughly 3 1/2 times more than what they charge China Post.
Comparisons like this are very misleading. 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.
It's true in general that UPU rates are cheaper than the comparable US rates but by 10-20%, not a factor of 3.5.
Various products will have different tipping points where it just doesn't make sense to ship and/or they aren't getting enough sales to justify it.
Personally, I like it and it seems like everyone wins.. except people who undercut the real product with cheap, inferior knockoffs.
What would be the concession from the Chinese? Or do they up the ante and impose more tariffs on incoming U.S. goods? Is this something that the Hacker News community actually supports Trump on? More curious than anything - you just don't see a lot of support for any of his initiatives here. ? Why all the downvotes?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this mean lower government spending? Kind of blows my mind the government gets tax money and private people get the benefits.
Huh? I'm not sure what this has to do with taxes or government spending. The USPS doesn't get tax money; it's financed by its customers, like any other business, it just happens to be wholly owned by the federal government. Postal rates are high because they're forced by the UPU agreement to deliver Chinese mail for almost nothing, so they pass the costs on to US customers.
If they had pricing power they'd raise prices regardless of fixed losses elsewhere.
Do courts just do the reasonable thing when contracts stipulate deadlines on dates that don't exist?
Good. It should not be cheaper to ship across the Pacific ocean than ship domestically.
Having bought a couple drop-shipped goods from China, I, for one, won't miss it. The most noticeable effect I have seen is scammy listings on eBay and Amazon, unresponsive sellers, and unreliable delivery time. I have not seen any arguments of the form "but the price of X will go way up."
I will, China makes good stuff depending on if you do your research to what's quality and is just a cheap piece of crap.
If the Trump administration had just opened with this, I think we might have saved ourselves a lot of stock market turbulence with tariff pissing contests. U. S. sellers start in the hole by the fact that they can't even compete on shipping prices with Chinese companies. It reminds me of the Shell gas station owner I worked for many decades ago who complained that the local drugstore could sell quarts of oil cheaper…
In your example, the drugstore may be selling at cost or at a loss to bring people in the door, or he may actually have a cheaper supplier. But for the Shell Station franchisee, he likely has a contract to buy Shell products from a particular distributor, so even if he could find a lower priced distributor he is unable to use it. That's all part of the franchise business model, where the franchiser double dips by taking licence fees and contractually obliges you to use their services as well. Subway charges high margins for their mandatory dishwashing soap supply for one example.