Good. It was insane that we were subsidizing shipping from China. This, more than anything, will shift to a more balanced manufacturing model.
It was more expensive to ship within the US and Canada than from China. Pretty much crushed the small retailers (I know I refused to spend $7 shipping for a $12 item). Now that that’s improved the rates should more normalize, because they won’t have to subsidize the loss on China shipping.
This has been so frustrating. Last week I shipped a tightly packed t-shirt from Ontario to Oregon. $11.50.
Months ago I bought replacement shelves for my fridge. Together about the size of two phone books stacked. Shelves were $40 and shipping was $40 from Illinois to Ontario.
Life itself feels so frustrating when it's wildly cheaper just to buy more crap from China than to recycle stuff from within North America.
I've recently become exposed to the DIY electric skateboard scene, which has a fascinating dynamic going on where people in NA and Europe design parts (motor mounts, electronics modules, enclosures, etc) and then advertise them for sale to other forum participants. See: https://www.electric-skateboard.builders/c/electric-skateboa...
What's interesting about it is that there are some users who order 50x of whatever the item is and then just sell them out of their garage, but there are others who have an arrangement with their contract manufacturer in China to actually do drop-shipping through eBay storefronts and similar. This latter group are obviously the more professionalized ones, but it's funny just to see a tiny microcosm of this issue, where the guys who are sending stuff within North America and Europe struggle to compete against dirt-cheap overseas shipping.
Similar problem in the custom keyboard community. The cheapest custom aluminum keyboard cases cost something like $50-80 shipped. It's often cheaper to buy a brand new one from China than to buy used domestically in NA or Europe. It obviously helps the Chinese manufacturers, but it totally kills the entry-level resale market.
This might be the wildest community I have stumbled on in a long time. Have you noticed particular pricing discrepancies between similar items sold different ways?
Hard to say specifically, but for example I'm planning out my first build for this winter, and wheel pulleys are a big one that varies widely, even for something as relatively standard as a 5M one that fits on an ABEC11 hub. For example:
Compare this to Metroboard, an established e-commerce storefront, who currently has their similar pulley marked down to $15 from a regular $30, but when I emailed to asked about shipping to Canada I was told it would be a $55 flat rate box: https://metro-board.com/e-skate-shop/pulley-insert-for-abec-...
They think everywhere outside the US is a 4th world country.
International shipping does require a bit of a knack for risk assessment. There are countries that most think are fine, but with terrible postal systems. Or annoying customs. Or people that flip out when a package takes more than 3 days to arrive.
Shipping to Sweden is fine. Shipping to Italy isn’t.
German Customs will inspect a lot and send a bill, Canadian customs often doesn’t bother with American packages.
Potentially a seller who a) doesn't really care about customers outside the US or b) is used to shipping $1000+ complete products and doesn't do enough volume of small spare parts to make it worth investing in a separate process for those orders.
>Life itself feels so frustrating when it's wildly cheaper just to buy more crap from China than to recycle stuff from within North America.
It's really an astonishing situation, but I guess the purpose was to subsidize China and other countries in order to help them develop economically, and to increase imports. It seems to have worked, so we can probably end the program now for China at least.
What's interesting is that there doesn't seem to have been a lot of debate or media coverage before now.
No, the purpose was to make it affordable for poor people to send letters and packages to richer countries, with the assumption that traffic both ways would be roughly equal. The UPU and its tariff agreements way predate online shopping and the concept that it would ever be feasible for somebody in the US to order items from a shop in China with a few clicks of a button.
Except they aren’t, because subsidies are paid by someone (the government) who are themselves getting that money (I know there are other mechanisms) from your tax dollars.
Probably true, given that governemnt expenditure is the best measure of the level of real taxation.
Though I'm not sure the funds will not just be redirected elsewhere, and how wasteful this is, given that it helps give access to more affordable and efficient direct shopping from producers, and puts pressure on the government to lower spending because of the tax breaks that are given to people buying directly from China.
And the southern bit of the same county is back in Pacific time because it's nearer to Nevada. It's one of the few counties in the US with multiple time zones.
If you drive from Bend to, say, Winnemucca, you go from Pacific to Mountain and back to Pacific.
The thing that blows my east coast friends' minds, is that is a 6-hour drive to Portland if traffic is nice. All Interstate freeway, but never leaving Oregon, and the biggest town along the way is 20k people.
Lately the most standard response when people hear I'm from Oregon: "Oh, Portland! Cool."
It takes a minute to explain that Portland is to remote parts of Oregon like...New York City is to Morgantown, West Virginia in both distance and everything else.
One of the worst offenders has to be Newark, NJ and New York, NY. How confusing is it for an international traveler, especially considering how international the area is! On top of that, a major train station in NYC is New York Penn Station, and a major train station in NJ is Newark Penn Station.
Someone can land at Newark Airport, and have to figure out the difference between going to Newark Penn Station or New York Penn Station, which are in opposite directions from the airport.
It makes more sense if you know that there used to be multiple competing private passenger railroads. Penn Station was the station for the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Pennsylvania Railroad had stops in Newark and in New York. Other railroads had their own stations. Some railroads had shared stations, hence Grand Central, and all of the stations called Union Station.
Of course the PRR hasn't existed in 50 years so maybe it's time to change the name...
> between going to Newark Penn Station or New York Penn Station, which are in opposite directions from the airport.
They're in the same direction from the airport, and the train will stop in Newark Penn on the way to New York Penn. Some people will be confused and try to get off in Newark, although the conductors normally try to announce this really clearly.
What sucks about this one is it's too easy to get a cheap flight to Ontario, CA thinking it was a bargain, not realizing you're not going where you thought you're going...
There's a few stories of people buying tickets to Sydney NS (Nova Scotia Canada), instead of their desired Sydney NSW, and landing much earlier than expected.
At least once a year, something I buy from a US retailer for shipping to Ontario, Canada ends up in Ontario, CA if it transits from a Pacific time zone. It’s rather frustrating to have that extra delay, and I’m sure the shipping depots that service Ontario, CA or these other confusingly named areas don’t appreciate the extra workload...
To be fair most places in North America seem to be named after European places, possibly with a 'new' prefix. So I don't think it's fair to single out Ontario here.
Maybe - but why do you think the USPS won’t just pocket the difference? Are they in a competitive market for the class of packages they ship in the US? I don’t think I understand the competitive landscape for shipping well enough to understand your assumption.
For packages the USPS is in a very competitive market, against UPS, DHS, and Fedex. The only market they have something approaching a monopoly on is regular letters. This ruling affects (IIRC) only small packages, but that's still a place where USPS competes.
Also note that where USPS has a monopoly it's often where it is required by law to sell below costs. For example, delivering mail to Alaska and Hawaii is quite expensive, but US law requires uniform postage costs.
The USPS is hampered by law in other ways. The UPU decision is one example; they also have fairly strict pension laws and they cannot raise prices without agreement from overseers (a price increase to 55¢ was just struck down in court). It's not totally clear that it's possible for USPS to run in the black while also being the mailer of last resort that it is today. (That said, perhaps mail is a government service worth subsidizing, though we can debate how much, and running in the black would be preferable.)
That last paragraph is a great summary. I wanted to add: This was done with the intent of preventing USPS from being competitive. The law that forced it to pre-fund retirement also put enormous restrictions on its ability to increase prices.
USPS pension funding gets brought up quite a bit as some kind of a conspiracy, but that doesn't appear to be accurate.
The issue for the postal service is that the law was changed so that the USPS would start funding their retirement health care costs since they are promised to the workers and the projected costs had exploded. This was supported by a bipartisan commission, the GAO, and the Postal Service itself:
>...Although retiree health benefits are often unfunded or poorly funded, two considerations suggested the Service’s retiree health care obligations should be funded: they are as firm a commitment as the Service’s pensions, and they had become enormous (about $75 billion by 2006). In 2003, the presidential commission suggested establishing a reserve fund for these obligations, and the Postal Service itself sent Congress a proposal for creating such a fund.
>Prior to 2006, the Service simply paid retirees’ health benefit premiums when they came due. The Service put aside no money when it promised the future benefits. Paying benefits when they come due rather than funding them in advance is known as the pay-as-you-go or unfunded approach.
>Early this century, Congress, the Administration, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), and a bipartisan presidential commission expressed concern about the lack of funding. Although retiree health benefits are often unfunded or poorly funded, two considerations suggested the Service’s retiree health care obligations should be funded: they are as firm a commitment as the Service’s pensions, and they had become enormous (about $75 billion by 2006). In 2003, the presidential commission suggested establishing a reserve fund for these obligations, and the Postal Service itself sent Congress a proposal for creating such a fund.
>In 2002-2003, it was discovered that the Service was contributing far more than necessary to fully fund its pensions, and Congress allowed the Service to contribute less. Congress decided the pension “savings” could help patch the retiree health benefit underfunding. In 2006, as part of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), the Postal Service Retirement Health Benefits Fund (RHBF) was established. Most of the Service’s contributions to the new fund could be paid using the pension “savings.” PAEA was bipartisan legislation with broad support.
It's not that there's anything wrong with the model, it's that the fiscal situation of the USPS doing right by it's workers was then used by various groups to argue they should dismantle it entirely (and thus wipe out an important government service).
I don't see why the UPS should need to run in the black. It's a public service to have very accessible postal service around the country. Admittedly this was much more crucial when much communication took place this way, so it is less so today. But I think the public service aspect still stands. Many small businesses do lots of small, lightweight shipping of packages around the country that would be prohibitively expensive with UPS/FedEx. (I'm one of them: I run a small Etsy business that sells low-cost lightweight items that would be a lot harder if I couldn't ship for ~$3.50. UPS @ $11.00 would nearly double the cost of many items, and I don't sell enough for any sort of volume discount with FedEx or UPS)
Are FedEx and UPS subject to the UPU? Will this decision affect them? And are they currently shipping packages at a price that is comparable to USPS? If USPS is subsidizing international shipping from China by keeping domestic shipping charges high, how are they competing with FedEx and UPS?
(BTW I agree with the other responders - this was an excellent summary for those of us not in the US)
The USPS also seems fairly cognizant that they need to embrace parcel delivery with the decline of first-class mail; for instance, they are continually expanding their Sunday parcel delivery.
Unless you do incredible volume, USPS is very competitive on package pricing for items under 1 lb. For an item going from the east coast to the west, UPS is about twice the price for such packages. Closer destinations are a little cheaper, but not less than USPS.
If USPS is subsidizing international shipping from China by overcharging for domestic shipping, as some here are suggesting they are, how do they successfully compete with UPS and FedEx? Or are UPS and FedEx also subject to the UPU?
I don't think they subsidize through other rates. They tend to lose money every year, and their rates for packages under 1 lb are significantly better than UPS or FedEx.
They do subsidize through rates. The UPU is set up so that the last mile of a receiving country is charged to the sender as if it were in the sender's country. This is made up from other revenue the carrier in the receiving country makes.
I mean I don't think they increase other rates to cover those costs, because they don't actually cover their costs at all. They spend more than they take in and their rates are still, for lighter packages anyway, significantly better than either FedEx or UPS.
What do you mean spend more than they take in? The USPS is in the black, save for some strange law that they must prefund pensions 50 years in advance (any company would be running a loss if they had to do this).
The USPS can't increase their domestic prices but there is good indication that they are charging more to offset this. There are complaints in this thread even about the cost of shipping abroad, as international shipping is not regulated like domestic postage rates if I remember right. So the USPS uses outbound international shipments as a cost center to make up for the subsidy to China.
The article states there is a ~$500M subsidy to China through UPU rates.
Yeah, it was pretty awful that you could buy a $5 item on ebay with free shipping from China. That kind of subsidy is anti-competitive. On the other hand, leaving the union all together would have been extremely disruptive to international shipping to/from the US. I'm glad a compromise was reached.
Frankly, while I'm pleased that it puts local vs remote on a fairer footing, I was appalled to learn that there was a huge carbon cost externality being subsidized by this model.
That's normalization. Instead of shipping a cog from 1 state over for $5 or China for $.05, it will now cost China closer to the same rates everyone else pays.
The argument want never that shipping domestically was too expensive, it's that shipping from China to domestic was cheaper.
I think the hope of OP was that the rates for shipments from China would go up and the rates for non-China shipments would do down because they wouldn't have to subsidize the China shipments any more.
I countered with the assumption that while the former will happen for sure, the latter won't, but instead the additional revenue coming from the increased shipping costs from China will subsidize higher bonuses for executives rather than be used to lower the costs for non-china packages.
I often hear the claim that it's more expensive to ship within the US than from China but rarely see it backed up. I've yet to see anyone give a specific size box, weight, and locations for comparison, and the few times they have I find the US shipping rate is cheaper.
It's not hard to come buy examples. It costs me about $3 to ship a 4 oz package using USPS within the US. You can find items that cheap with free shipping from China on Ebay. Here's an example of one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/1-10oz-Hip-Flask-Stainless-Steel-Si...
(it's the sort of thing I personalize & sell myself, need to charge more than that for material costs + profit, and ship as well)
If interested in finding examples first hand look into e-packet from ChinaPost, that’s the new name of the service that lets you ship parcels from China to the US for a couple of bucks.
Quite often. But I've also read every report the USPSOIG released about ePacket, including the last two showing it's profitable (i.e. no subsidies), along with reading the price charts published by the USPS.
And you've never come across items on Ebay/Amazon for ~$3 with free shipping from China? There's tons. They sell items for less than item cost + shipping than my shipping alone costs.
I'm sure that's true, but that's because you're a low volume seller and can't get the same rates that China Post can get shipping hundreds of millions of packages. (And because you don't do the research to ship through the programs that do allow smaller volume sellers, such as flats.)
Your example in the other comment was 4 oz. The commercial rate for pre-sorted flats is $1.249. There's even lower rates if you can do higher levels of sorting and injection, cheapest is $0.936.
I don't think you actually looked at the requirements for a "flat" or you wouldn't use it as an example. It's not an arbitrary package of a given weight. It has to be FLAT. It has very specific size requirements, must have a minimum of 1/4 inch thickness and maximum 3/4 inch, and that thickness has to be uniform across dimensions: it cannot vary by more than 1/4 inch. And even then it has strict rigidity requirements: It cannot deflect more than 2 inches over a set distance from the edge of a counter. If any of these conditions are not met then you pay the standard "commercial plus" package rate, whether you ship 10 package a month or 10,000. I have inquired both directly with USPS and with a shipping logistics consultant: there is no amount that gets you a better price than the general prices I'm quoting unless you have your own logistics network that delivers directly to regional USPS distribution hubs for "last mile" delivery, and then you're not really using just the USPS are you? You're building out your own shipping network as well.
And even then you're wrong: Paying any amount for shipping of items, even if the items cost the same amount as the Chinese version it's still more expensive. It doesn't matter if the shipping cost is $10 or $3.50 or $1: It's still more expensive.
I've shipped hundreds of thousands of flats, I'm quite familiar with the requirements. Looking at the product you linked it seems small enough that it could be stuffed into a flat envelope and shipped.
>And even then you're wrong: Paying any amount for shipping of items, even if the items cost the same amount as the Chinese version it's still more expensive. It doesn't matter if the shipping cost is $10 or $3.50 or $1: It's still more expensive.
Care to elaborate? If your cost was the same as the Chinese and your shipping cost the same as well then your overall cost would be the same. What are you trying to say here?
So you know the requirements and persist in presenting it as a package shipping option? When any item thicker than 0.75" wouldn't apply and thus invalidates this as an option for the vast majority of package shippers?
And you ignore that point that even at the high volume flats rate, it's still more expensive. Maybe your needs are an edge case, I don't know. But you asked for examples where shipping within the US is more expensive, and you have those examples in spades. Once given, you want to move the goal posts, and can't even move them to where you're actually right. You're being deliberately obtuse and intellectually dishonest. I'm done trying to have a conversation.
I presented as an option for the specific item you presented as an example. I never claimed it's an option for the majority of shippers. It's an option for many of the cheap, light items people present as examples.
Nope, still wrong. It doesn't meet the length and width requirements, and if you shoved it in an envelop the size needed, it wouldn't meet the thickness variability requirements or the deflection requirements. And even if it did, once again, it would still be more expensive. So, you didn't claim it as an option for the majority of shippers: which implies that you concede the main point you raised, that there are plenty of cases where shipping within the US is more expensive.
Regardless, you're not trying to honestly assess the examples given. But I guess I was incorrect when I said I was done with the conversation-- I couldn't help pointing out for other readers how you persist in being wrong.
>So, you didn't claim it as an option for the majority of shippers: which implies that you concede the main point you raised, that there are plenty of cases where shipping within the US is more expensive.
No, it doesn't imply that. For other configurations there are different programs that reduce the cost; elsewhere in this thread I pointed out that using parcel select lightweight would reduce the claimed shipping cost by a factor of 3.
My claim is that the specific examples people give tend to be wrong. I'm sure there's some exotic configurations where China ends up paying less. It's just that virtually none of the articles about the topic point to correct examples.
Hmm. A friend took a $20 budget to Aliexpress and bought us everything matching the keyword "panda" priced under $1 with free shipping.
Small packages, generally about 6" x 6" and weighing under 4oz, trickled in over the following few months. They came from China, Estonia, and Slovenia.
We got one really nice panda hand puppet, several charming small stuffed animals, a bunch of bookmarks, and some magnets.
Now that you mention it, it would be interesting to try the experiment again and see what is the cheapest price I could get to remail each package back to my friend elsewhere in the US.
The ones under $1 aren't sent with ePacket, but under a different program that doesn't have tracking.
Do any of the items fit in a regular envelope? Is it possible to ship for the price of a stamp? If not, most likely you can ship with flats for $1-1.50 range.
It was more expensive to ship within the US and Canada than from China. Pretty much crushed the small retailers (I know I refused to spend $7 shipping for a $12 item). Now that that’s improved the rates should more normalize, because they won’t have to subsidize the loss on China shipping.