461–470 of 721 posts
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So how are they able to deliver at such low rates and why can’t other work it out and use that as well
Because it's subsidised or effectively subsidised by treaty - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union AFAICT it means that postal costs are only paid in the originating country, and receiving countries are still obliged to deliver.
I loved temu, aliexpress, and shein. I probably averaged 1 item per day arriving to my house, for years and years. Mostly little electronics parts and specialized tools for my workshop. Buying from Amazon or locally would have cost me 10x as much. Obviously it's over now. Anyone getting a package in May will be hit with a $75-$150 or more bill per package, even a 75 cent envelope will be charged +$75. I feel bad for…
Lot of "good they only sell crap" comments here. Would you guys feel the same about your neighborhood dollar store?
Dollar stores sell cheap crap and destroy communities.
So no, I don't feel quite the same about them.
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I don't get this argument. All the cheap, toxic, unsafe, non-lasting crap will still exist, it's just going to be sold on Amazon with 1-day shipping. Consumers want these products and the market just fills the demand. The deregulation that will take place under this administration will lead to even more, toxic, unsafe crap flooding the market, except it'll just be manufactured in the U.S.
The same item on Amazon will cost x2/3 times than Temu, if you will be able to find the same item at all, meaning it cuts a big chunk of the potential buyers of the cheap crap. The world would have been a better place if we hadn't been allowed to flood the market with cheap crap. Not only it creates enormous waste, it also means that reputable brands now start to cut corners in order to compete with cheap no name cra…
No. Really not much at all.
The US cut 330 million or so people out of a market of billions setting it up so the rest of the world starts getting a competitive advantage over the US.
>it also means that reputable brands now start to cut corners in order to compete with cheap no name crap.
LOLOLOL. You do not think like a capitalist. They didn't go "oh no I have to cut corners". They saw they could cut corners on costs decades ago. China has been building your name brand products for as long half the people on HN have been alive. If you look at Tiktok now, they are out right showing the factories building products you are paying hundreds/thousands for in the US for 20-50 dollars.
The US screwed itself with huge consolidations and rent seeking behaviors. We are paying huge amounts for products and not getting the value we deserve.
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But the person receiving the package doesn't receive the package until they've paid the tariff. You don't have to pay it -- if you don't, the package gets returned to sender or destroyed. The post office delivers you a slip with information to go to your local post office to pay it and pick up the package. With UPS and FedEx you get a notice to pay online, and they deliver it once you do, as far as I know. I've never…
This is literally false. My wife paid for a jacket from Ireland. Ireland jacket arrives. Weeks later, tariff shit comes in the mail.
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15 different variants of the same product, all obviously cheaply made from the same factory, with varying degrees of quality control and reviews strewn about the various “brands” of the product so that it’s much harder to have a negative review everywhere. Yeah, this sucks. Though the correct thing to do here is to enforce this hygiene on the platforms themselves. They have every resource and means to be able to prev…
I ended up drastically cutting back on Amazon purchases when they started getting flooded with brands like that. Its absolutely on Amazon to maintain quality. There are certain brands and types of products I'll order there because they're just harder to find otherwise, but its mostly a last resort these days given that Amazon doesn't care to curate what is on their "shelves".
I wonder if we can look forward to the end of the letter soup brands on Amazon, it's ridiculously difficult finding real brands in between them. That would be one silver lining in all this mess, at least.
A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.
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"If we enrich the CCP we just end up with an adversary capable of taking us on. That's why tariffs." This argument is absolutely accurate and somewhere between two and six decades late depending on who you feel like blaming for offshoring. Present day all we're doing is poking inflation with a stick, threatening the bond market (and eventually the dollar reserve), and encouraging economic partners to look elsewhere f…
The thing that really annoys me is tariffs could have been used SO much more intelligently. For example a 24 month increasing schedule. That gives business the kind of incentive to affect manufacturing and something they can plan against. But now we have a dumpster fire and tariffs will have an even worse reputation.
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> I loved temu, aliexpress, and shein. I probably averaged 1 item per day arriving to my house, for years and years. > I feel bad for the unaware people still ordering. I personally feel bad for the environment and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production. Good if the beneficiaries are gone from your part of the world.
> I personally feel bad for the environment 1 item per day is certainly not efficient, but nowadays temu and aliexpress batch things over a small period so that shouldn't really happen... > and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production Remember that taking away bad jobs does not save anyone, quite the contrary. People go from having shit jobs to no jobs, or even worse jobs with lower-prof…
Around the time that manufacturing started moving to China en masse in the 1990s I started to hear about trichloroethylene contamination at manufacturing sites in the U.S. Look up "trichloroethylene united states" in Google and you'll probably get results about how our marines were exposed at Camp Jejune and are now eligible for V.A. benefits. A search for "trichloroethylene china" might turn up a picture of a truck full of barrels from a company that wants to send you those barrels.