OK, so when we take the most hyperbolic example-- mailing from China only costs slightly less than a special rate for DDU/presort to a nearby post office, when you use a special service with volume and account and marking requirements. It's still an absurd result.
China post is mailing hundreds of millions of packets. Comparing their rates without taking volume and presort discounts into account is going to be misleading.
The claim was that someone (and, actually, this includes low volume mailers) could mail something from China for a total cost less than his cost to mail it across the street.
The claim seems to be true. Yes, he seems to have overstated his shipping cost and could have done better. Yes, with the combination of all 3 of A) volume pricing, B) presorting, and C) taking it to the specific delivery unit, you can get pretty close to the cost to mail a parcel from China. To somehow take these facts and get to "lolol it's a false claim" is absurd.
Also note that the US delivery China is paying for is from a port to a final destination. If someone is comparing from East Coast to West Coast or vice versa, they're looking at a package traveling further in the US than the Chinese one is.
Fair enough, but DDU is a good response when someone is claiming their cost to ship across the street is insanely high.
If you set up an apples to apples comparison, I think China would end up slightly cheaper much of the time, but nowhere near the hyperbolic numbers that get thrown around. Maybe they pay $2 for something that costs $2.25 or something. It's difficult to point to specific comparable shipments where they're actually cheaper, though.
The mail is aggregated at the country level, sorted, etc. To call it low volume is like suggesting someone using Amazon's FBA to ship a package to their customer is a low-volume shipper, rather than reflecting Amazon's huge scale of logistics.
>The claim was that someone (and, actually, this includes low volume mailers) could mail something from China for a total cost less than his cost to mail it across the street.
Actually, the claim made there was that someone could sell something including shipping from China for less than the shipping cost across the street. This claim is laughably absurd, and the comment I was replying to said that NPR had substantiated that, which is also absurd. If they'd fact checked that podcast the $6.30 figure would have never made it in.
> To call it low volume is like suggesting someone using Amazon's FBA to ship a package to their customer is a low-volume shipper, rather than reflecting Amazon's huge scale of logistics.
I can't use Amazon's FBA to ship one package cheaper than I could myself.
End, low-volume customers in China can get packages shipped to the US cheaper than I can myself as an end, moderate-volume shipper in the US.
Fair enough, but that's because China post is aggregating it. Part of the excess cost of your moderate volume shipping is because the USPS needs to sort your mail and doesn't need to sort China's mail.
I think using published rates for presorted mail is fair. It's not the cheapest the USPS charges - they give further, unpublished, discounts to Amazon, and they still make a profit there.
