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US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

bbc.com

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Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#71

Post by baybal2 »

colechristensen wrote: post #46
onion2k wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What will be the unintended consequences I wonder? Small businesses who use dropshipping direct from Chinese companies will stop being able to compete with big businesses who buy in bulk and ship from US warehouses. This will benefit the likes of Amazon more than anyone else. Not sure if that's an unintended consequence though.

>This will benefit the likes of Amazon more than anyone else. A _huge_ chunk of Amazon is low effort Chinese clone / drop shipped crap or straight up forgery. I don't feel sorry for /r/entrepreneur denizens' loss. It will help the kind of small business with core competencies revolving around producing things and hurt the kind of small business with core competencies revolving around buying things on Alibaba and sell…

Nobody forbids /r/entrepreneur denizens to go to China and open his own dropship outfit there. And in fact, many of them did. You will be surprised that all those aliexpress stores that have product description in perfect Russian, German, and French are shops ran by Russian citizens in China, mostly elderly women.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#72

Post by YouKnowBetter »

sschueller wrote: post #11

We have the same issue in Switzerland with cheap packages from China which are received as mail but do not fit through the automated sorting system. This requires a lot of manual labor which increases the costs for the postal service. This is why sometime this year people who receive such mail will be billed additional fees increasing slowly over the next few years. The treaty allows under developed nations to ship a…

> This is why sometime this year people who receive such mail will be billed additional fees increasing slowly over the next few years.

Interesting, got a source for that?

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#73

Post by whatshisface »

plugger wrote: post #43
nostromo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re paying the costs, just indirectly via taxes and artificially higher US shipping costs.

Incorrect, I live in Australia. This kinda reminds me of the conversation I had with my brother in law regarding the likes of SingAir, Emirates, and Qatar and just how much better they are when compared to US carriers that charge more on the same route despite providing an inferior product comparatively. He started on about how those air carriers are government subsidised, it's not fair, and I shouldn't be flying wit…

Those airlines don't provide a better product for a lower cost, they are selling you a higher-end product and billing part of it to their own citizens. That's what government subsidy means.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#75

Post by SwellJoe »

devoply wrote: post #4

Say goodbye to AliExpress in the US. This will more or less kill the business model that AliExpress relies on in the US for most cheap products.

There's a bunch of businesses arbitraging the differential between warehousing Chinese goods in the US vs shipping them directly with very cheap postage. Wish, DHGate, AliExpress, a bunch of sellers on Amazon, etc., but I don't think this will kill them. At least not all of them; there will likely be consolidation to bigger players and players that already have US-based warehousing and distribution in place.

There's already a number of sellers that compete on shipment speed, rather than just on price. Likewise, there are Fulfilled By Amazon sellers that import from China in bulk and warehouse it with Amazon. So, they can charge an extra 5% or whatever because it will arrive in 2-5 days from a warehouse in California rather than in 2 weeks for goods coming from China. I suspect this will push more business their way rather than completely destroy this market, but it's going to be a big hit.

I don't think it's entirely a terrible thing to put a realistic price on individually importing goods. I've been buying a lot of import stuff for electronics and guitar projects lately, and I'm astonished at how cheaply a bag of electronics parts can be shipped from China. It's a tiny bag of parts coming from the other side of the world, and it's still cheaper than buying locally. That doesn't seem like it should be so, compared to bulk importers that bring the goods over in container-sized quantities so they can ship it to individuals from the same continent.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#76

Post by breerly »

colechristensen wrote: post #27
paulsutter wrote: post #7

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…

Can’t have real free trade with central-banking and fiat, must have hard global money.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#79

Post by adwhit »

paulsutter wrote: post #7
godzillabrennus wrote: post #2

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.

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

Globalization is a hegemonic project of the West, best understood as a means to transfer capital from the economic peripheries to the imperial core, and has tended to wreak havoc on developing countries that have exposed themselves to it. China has been very sensible to ignore the dogma about free trade and to exploit weaknesses and loopholes in trade treaties when they find them.

Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty

#80

Post by a_imho »

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
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