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.
There's a great Planet Money episode explaining the brokenness of the existing system (https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/epis...). NPR ends up substantiating the claim of an entrepreneur who says that it costs him more to send a package across the street than it costs someone in China to send a package to that same address.
No they don't. They repeat a false claim uncritically.
If you look up the cheapest US shipping rates you'll find they're roughly the same range, and that almost all the comparisons purporting to show otherwise are cheating, typically by using retail pricing on a more expensive shipping option.
>So he turns to his shipping guy. And he asks, how much would it cost for us just to ship this mug, like, not across the ocean, just across the street?
>SMALDONE: He told me it's going to cost us about $6.30 to ship this item.
The cheapest rate is $2.02 for 13 oz. This rate applies when mail is injected at the closest mailing point (DDU), which "mailing across the street" corresponds to.
"Parcel select" is a service for large mailers who deliver packages, in bulk, to multiple post facilities in the US, near to the destination of the package and have the USPS do the "last mile delivery". Does China Post have a fleet of trucks, in the US which moves Chinese packages to a closer US postal delivery facility. I believe not.
Moreover, if China did have such a service, someone, China or the US is subsidizing it since individual shippers in China, not doing any aggregating themselves get a rate equivalent to large shippers in the US who aggregate and must pay the costs of this themselves.
"“Parcel Select” is the registered trademark name for the Postal Service’s economical ground delivery service for packages entered in bulk, including those entered at destination facilities. It is designed for and generally used by large- and medium-sized parcel shippers. Parcel Select mailers pay postage that reflects the degree of work-sharing they do in presorting their parcels and/or drop shipping their pieces at a destination facility located closer to the delivery point. Mailers are responsible for transporting their Parcel Select pieces to a destination bulk mail center (DBMC), destination sectional center facility (DSCF), or a destination delivery unit (DDU) for business and residential delivery."
You are claiming that China is charging a price equivalent to US delivery but it isn't. It's charging a price equivalent part of US delivery which clearly a false comparison.
The cost for an individual shipper in the US versus the cost for an individual shipper in China is clearly the correct point of comparison and it seems NPR was in making that comparison.
Where did I claim that? I'm claiming NPR is making/repeating a problematic comparison by using retail pricing for domestic shipping.
International mail is aggregated by China post, and they pay the USPS for the last mile. To evaluate to what extent USPS is subsidizing them, you need to compare to what someone else who aggregates and pays for last mile delivery would pay. This is very different from what an individual shipper would pay.
International mail is aggregated by China post, and they pay the USPS for the last mile.
The aggregation that USPS gives domestic shippers a discount for involves actually doing all but the last mile of the shipping process - taking a large group of packages to the appropriate shipping area. This is a process that would require a shipper to have a fleet of long distance trucks (something large and medium sized US shippers have).
If you're claiming China Post does this in the US, I think you need serious references. And, as I mention above, it ultimately doesn't matter. If China Post is doing this, they would be doing it for free because the total cost we're talking about individual shippers paying, in shipping things from China, is close to the last mile cost that USPS charges domestic shippers.
This is kind of ridiculous, USPS also sorts the packages they receive from individuals. It seems kind of clear that there's no special magic that packages coming from China are going to have that packages that are already in the US are not going to have. The USPS page I link to above specifically says that the USPS prices lower when companies do their work for them. That work is not going to be free.
It's not magic, it's just that the USPS doesn't have to do the work of sorting them.
Labor costs in China are much cheaper than in the US, it stands to reason their cost of sorting there will be less than what the USPS implicitly charges for sorting here.
> International mail is aggregated by China post, and they pay the USPS for the last mile.
This is the key point in your claim that was not clear in your top-level comment, which is the source of the confusion/dispute. (I have no idea who is right.) Consider editing your top-level comment to clarify this claim (with an edit flag) and, ideally, link to somewhere that backs it up.
For instance, even if you're right it probably means that China is subsidizing the shipping to the distribution point, which would be an important thing to understand.
As your comment exchange elsewhere shows, the nature of China post's contribution is exactly the crux of the matter, and is not at all obvious/indisputable to someone reading the transcript of that NPR podcast.
I guess it would be interesting to know how much the USPS is subsiding them, but I think what makes the NPR example striking is that they are comparing end-to-end prices: some business in China is paying less than $5.69 and the American business would pay $6.30 for the same service.
But I suppose part of the difference is not due to the subsidy but because the China post has lower labor costs for the aggregation work?
Under the UPU, the USPS is required to charge Chinese shippers a "terminal fee" for packages shipped from China. However, due to China being classified as a "transitional country" it had extremely low terminal fee rates.
Combined with China subsidizing shipping for export-based businesses, it was generally cheaper for a business in Shenzen to ship small/light products by post than for an American business to ship an equivalent product by USPS across the street.
The deal secured by the US allows the USPS to begin charging new terminal fee rates beginning next summer. Presumably the new rates will change the economics of this situation, but in the meantime Chinese shippers still have at least a year to continue these subsidized shenanigans.
Right but in real practical terms the cost for an individual and businesses to have goods in hand is going up. The second order effect is that the cost of goods from local businesses are also going up since that they were taking advantage of cheap shipping too.
In vague hand wavy tickle down from a government that isn't going to lower taxes nor reduce total expenditure there might be a benefit in increased funding available for other things but the visible net effect is less money in individual Americans' pockets.
Suggesting that the postal service will charge $2 more for X and $2 less for Y so it all balances out is not "trickle down".
Maybe they'll save more to that pension fund, but I can't in good conscience say "The USPS should keep that policy where I can get $3 cheaper shipping from china and the money to pay for it comes out of the USPS pension fund."
If most of the money stays inside the realm of shipping, the average cost for local businesses will go down. (The first order effect just shuffles money around. More to buy from china, less to send to customers, on average the same. A second order effect is that more purchases from china will shift to being bulk, dropping the average cost.)
I agree with you that the right deal was made. But the cheap shipping from China has pretty much proved a market for subsidized small parcel shipping as an economic multiplier that ought to be made available to everyone in the US and abroad.
They're not charging more to china yet either! Give it a while, then we'll see where the additional revenue goes.
I'm not sure I agree that there's a big difference between $4 small parcel shipping and $.50 small parcel shipping to the economy, especially when it involves waiting a month for the product.
No, getting cheaply made crap even cheaper is bad for the American people because it drives out competing cheap but high-quality US- and Canadian-made products.
And that is the primary reason that China subsidizes shipping costs for Chinese manufacturers: to drive foreign competitors out of business until only China is left.
The current scheme allows me to cut out expensive middlemen for quite a bit of products. Middlement that don't add anything I value to the equation.
Alternative is getting the same or maybe at best rebranded chinese OEM products, that went through a local distributor that adds his own markup, taxes, and other stuff, because he's operating in bulk quantities.
Changing the current scheme will be bad for plenty of consumers around the world.
It will also make it more expensive to get replacenemnt parts, for typical electronics, and will make self-made repairs more expensive. Because normal (unatuhorized) people can only get many of those spare parts from China.
Making it more expensive to ship from China will have many negative effects. It may have some positive ones, but that's to be seen.
Assuming you are an average mail user, you can still buy directly from China, no middleman, and spend the same amount of money you always did. The difference is that the cost will no longer be hidden behind abstract government subsidies.
If a middleman ends up cheaper because of bulk shipping, that's because they're actually providing value! They are reducing the total cost of shipping.
If the total shipping cost you pay, including your share of hidden subsidies, goes up? That means you were an above-average china-buyer, and the average citizen was paying part of your bill and getting nothing. That's not fair, and you're not entitled to offload shipping costs onto everyone else.
You assume taxes will go down as a result of this, which is most certainly not the case. They'll just be redirected to something else, perhaps something I don't care as much about.
And I'm also paying quite a bit of taxes that go to someone else's needs, and I have nothing from. Just a nature of taxation and government subsidies.
This just shifts the balance of what's comming back to me, to where I don't care as much, perhaps.
I literally linked the price sheet showing that it's wrong, did you not read my comment?
>Combined with China subsidizing shipping for export-based businesses, it was generally cheaper for a business in Shenzen to ship small/light products by post than for an American business to ship an equivalent product by USPS across the street.
There were more than a dozen other comments with examples when I posted my original comment, and each of those examples has supporting comments. Additionally, there is the NPR report cited in the parent confirming the disparity in shipping costs (https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/epis...). Unless you're saying the NPR got it wrong?
You linked to a price sheet for US shippers. Chinese shippers don't pay those rates. They pay Chinese shipping rates (which I can't provide an authoritative example of because they're negotiated on a vendor basis), and the terminal fee. In many cases, China Post covers the terminal fee and/or all shipping costs for strategic regions, such as for vendors located in Special Economic Zones.
The important thing though is that the terminal fee for Chinese shippers is lower than the lowest postal fee for US shippers.
My comment was calling out the NPR for repeating an incorrect claim, yes.
Yes, Chinese shippers pay different rates. NPR claimed to ship a mighty mug across the street for a US shipper would cost $6.30, when the actual cost would be about a third of that.
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.
Ok so you're right, you could drive to your local postal office and if you are commercially shipping stuff you can do destination delivery unit (DDU) and get a 13 oz mug to your next door neighbor for $2.02. So let's assume the fair cost of last mile delivery for a 13 oz mug is $2.02. The Chinese knockoff mug cost on ebay $5.69 including shipping from China. So if the Chinese seller was paying fair last-mile delivery (which they weren't), they would be manufacturing and shipping a 13 oz mug to a local postal office in America for $3.67.
If NPR was looking to ask the "average" business what it would take to fulfill a single order, they likely got a good answer. And the shipper may have been overestimating final shipping weight if done on the fly.
FWIW you could ship a 40ft container of mugs (something like 20,000 of them individually packaged) from china to Seattle, say for a rough cost of about 10c per mug.
Right - but what I was pointing out is making that particular scenario more expensive doesn’t shift the overall incentives that much of the COGS are significantly different.
I've thought recently that the low cost of container shipping blows the economic theory of comparative advantage out of the water. At least the common and naive one that's based on national/political boarders.
Ask why Australia ships iron ore and coal to China to be made into steel.
Also the cheapest 1oz DDU rate is $1.62 and I can buy a generic mug with free shipping for less than that on aliexpress.
Let alone how moving up one step in granularity to the more realistic DSCF pricing, where you go to the closest of 350 facilities instead of the closest of 30000, is already $2.52 for 13oz...
Thanks for the link. The price difference is huge. Around 16:20 in the programme -- if one ships a 3/4-pound package across the US, the USPS has to charge the shipper $4.76 for the "last mile", but if the same package is imported from China, the USPS can only charge China Post for $1.39 according to the UPU reimbursement rates.
This shows the rate for 12 oz under Parcel Select—Lightweight. Depending how closely you're injecting the product (how many miles the "last mile" is), rates range from $1.83 to $4.34. Not seeing $4.76 anywhere.
The absolute lowest theoretical price for having the USPS deliver a presorted parcel that my logistic network injects into the USPS delivery network as close as possible to the recipient is still more than the terminal fee China would pay USPS to take that parcel from port to recipient doorstep.
I think that's what the NPR report was getting at, with their colorful tales.
If anyone else is interested in some of the history of how we got here, Wikipedia has a pretty decent summary:
"The 1874 treaty provided for the originating country to keep all of the postage revenue, without compensating the destination country for delivery. The idea was that each letter would generate a reply, so the postal flows would be in balance. However, other classes of mail had imbalanced flows. In 1906, the Italian postal service was delivering 325,000 periodicals mailed from other countries to Italy, while Italian publishers were mailing no periodicals to other countries. [...]
In 1969, the UPU introduced a system of terminal dues. When two countries had imbalanced mail flows, the country that sent more mail would have to pay a fee to the country that received more mail. The amount was based on the difference in the weight of mail sent and received."
A few years ago, as a joke, I bought the absolute cheapest phone case off of Aliexpress for a friend for $0.46 with free shipping. 1.5 months later, I did actually get it in the mail. It went from China, through several of the central Asian countries (the ones whose names end with "stan"), and was delivered to my mailbox. All for less than the cost of a first class postage stamp at the time ($0.47).
It blows my mind that Aliexpress was willing to take my money and act as an intermediary between me and the retailer/factory as I cannot imagine they made a profit on this transaction given the fixed cost of accepting credit card payments (i.e. the "$0.30" part of 2.9% + "$0.30"). It further blows my mind that a retailer/factory can profitably send me the case at all, even if they were to receive the entire $0.46.
UPU terminal dues were up for renegotiation in 2018-2021 anyway.[1] That's done every 10 years. The end result of all the noise from the US seems to be the same thing as would have happened anyway - a rate change in 2021.
The UPU classifies countries by level of development, and there's a price break for underdeveloped countries.[2] China is currently in group 3, along with Chile and Lebanon, and was probably going to move up to group 2 in the 2021 round anyway.
If I'm understanding the article correctly, the USPS can now unilaterally set its own rates, which is a pretty substantial change from the existing system where rates were determined by the decennial negotiations you're talking about.
Didn't the terminal fee UPU agreement happen in 1969? China was considered a third world country back then and got favorable rates. Isn't all of this due to how in the last 50 years, the rates have not been updated to reflect how countries such as China have grown in the e-commerce era?
This is one of those instances where playing chicken seems to have worked out (for the US).
Good news on this issue; although I'd feel more comfortable if there were fewer geopolitical games of chicken going on; it just takes one crash to wipe away the wins.
European countries mostly discourage this not through postal rates, but by applying VAT and customs charges even on small-scale individual importation. How uniformly this is done varies by country (some inspect and enforce more aggressively than others). In Denmark, for example, which is one of the more aggressive, you either need to have your package pre-cleared by arranging duties/VAT to be paid ahead of time, or the Danish post office will charge you a flat 160 DKK (about $23) for clearing it [1]. That makes it not cost-effective to order $20 items from China, even if the UPU rates are low.
In the UK, consignments valued at £15 or less are free from Customs Duty and import VAT, so that doesn't do much to discourage small-scale individual purchases from China.
That fee is insulting. And if that kind of thing starts being applied consistently across large enough areas, I'm sure retailers will manage to fill out the paperwork and maybe increase prices 15 cents to compensate.
Amazon US at one point offered insurance against this. Basically they would sent you your items and hope it would not get caught in customs. If it did, they would pay.
You don't see that many sites offering this anymore, but the rare wish.com competitor will have the option.
So, you think that getting into your car, driving to a retail location, paying $7.95 for that $1 item, and then driving back home is better for the environment?
I suspect every dollar you contribute to a high-consumption 1st world economy is inherently going to be worse for the environment than sending it a developing country. Like that vegan / grassfed / murican made premium is going to fund someone's conspicuous consumption, versus spent on more basic needs in developing countries. And in case of China, with incredibly high savings rate, it's just going to the bank.
China is the largest polluter of the planet, and it's not even close.
And it's not because they're poor, it's that culturally, they don't seem to give a shit. The higher their standard of living becomes, the more they pollute.
Maybe, someday, they'll change. I hope so. For now, though, the only countries that care about the environment enough to pass laws preventing its destruction are in the West. People who care about the environment should spend their money accordingly.
China has 1/2 of per the capita emissions as most western countries, even with outsourced western manufacturing factored in. The dollar you're spending on a cheap Chinese item is going to some middle class drop shipper with 10,000 USD income who is going to save 45% of it in the bank.
>the only countries that care about the environment enough to pass laws preventing its destruction are in the West.
Environmentalism at the cost of economic growth is one of the few things Chinese public made CPC concede on. See the rapid improvement in air quality in major urban centres and the variety of green initiatives China is actually meeting prematurely. Westerners dog whistles that they care about the environment, they might genuinely believe it, but that's certainly not reflected en-mass in individual actions or massive infrastructure responses.
>People who care about the environment should spend their money accordingly.
Yet people who are good for the environment are the ones who spend less, aka people with less money, or if we're bringing in culture, the propensity to save. China savings rate is among the highest in the world, it's substantially higher than western countries. Compared to a western vendor who has a higher profit margin and lower saving rate = more consumption -> worse for the environment. The only thing keeping consumption down in the west is wage and purchase power stagnation due to increased inequity. And that's the hard pill, the best way to reduce consumption in absence of behavior change is to make people broke or redistribute wealth in a manner that reduces consumption.
Not pointed out is that this works in the opposite direction as well, and it doesn't look like that part was fixed.
For example Australia post operates a service when you can buy US goods, have them shipped to a US address, and then have the parcels shipped in aggregate to Australia for arbitrage on shipping and licensing costs: https://shopmate.auspost.com.au
Worth noting that despite us not leaving the union, Trump is apparently getting what he wants. The union basically capitulated to his demands. At least that is my reading.
To be clear, I'm not saying one way or another whether this is a good thing. It's just, I felt the title somewhat implied that the USG had given up on its intentions. Whereas actually what happened was the opposite. I meant only to point this out for others who might be likewise confused.
Which is good. It has been discussed here in Sweden as well and it feels pretty odd that we would subsidize packages so they pay less sending something all the way from China than I would pay sending something to the next town.
I get the history behind it but the world has changed since then.
Fundamentally, threatening to walk away only works if people believe you'll actually do it. (It's plausible Trump has additional influence here solely based on the fact him doing crazy %$&@ is considered "plausible".)
I’m genuinely asking, is that what you have to do if you’re not part of this postal union or is there some other state you find yourself in as an outsider? Do packages stop getting routed via your country? I don’t know!
> As a Canadian that sometimes talks Americans into selling to me on Ebay, they find it a painful and costly experience compared to US sales.
Indeed, buying from small U.S. suppliers into Canada is awful. The customs clearance fees are immense, and between those and CBSA, it seems that packages often arrive hastily repacked after a deep inspection, with permanent damage to the goods.
I wonder if the high prices for outbound international mail is an attempt to offset the losses on inbound mail from countries like China. If so, we might see better outbound rates after this goes into effect.
Just say "Trump was right". You will not be condemned by bien-pensants as a thought-criminal. At least, not immediately.
>I just wish he could get the USPS to stop seeing outbound international mail as a profit centre.
In other words, you'd like to pay less when buying from the US.
(There's nothing wrong with such a wish, but let's be clear about what you mean.)
>Plenty of Americans could be exporting a lot more internationally, but the USPS has chosen high prices and low volumes.
I know of no evidence that the USPS charges more to ship internationally than Canada Post, notorious among Canadians for high prices. On the contrary, it's sometimes cheaper for Canadians to ship to elsewhere in Canada by mailing from the US. (Discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/6rcn0v/canada_post_... )
>As a Canadian that sometimes talks Americans into selling to me on Ebay, they find it a painful and costly experience compared to US sales.
That's because it is, compared to mailing domestically. It'd be surprising otherwise, for any country.
I've sold on eBay and Amazon for years and have shipped often to Canada and elsewhere; the procedure isn't that much more cumbersome. The vast, vast, vast majority of sales are within the US, however.
It's quite possible for an American seller (whether on eBay or Amazon or with their own online sites) to make money solely from the US market. Canada is one ninth of the US and a smaller portion of potential sales for American sellers. A Canadian seller, on the other hand, knows that the American market is nine times larger than the domestic one, so has much more incentive to a) learn how to handle international orders, and b) be willing to pay the higher postage rates.
> In other words, you'd like to pay less when buying from the US.
Naw, I want USians to have better chances of getting my money. When I buy niche things that are available from the US and Asia, Asia keeps winning out. I'm willing to pay more for faster shipping, but I have my limits.
> I've sold on eBay and Amazon for years and have shipped often to Canada and elsewhere; the procedure isn't that much more cumbersome. The vast, vast, vast majority of sales are within the US, however.
Doesn't explain why most others don't bother. Is it still too cumbersome? Or is it just cultural where the rest-of-world is thought of as a scary and dangerous place?
> It's quite possible for an American seller (whether on eBay or Amazon or with their own online sites) to make money solely from the US market. Canada is one ninth of the US and a smaller portion of potential sales for American sellers. A Canadian seller, on the other hand, knows that the American market is nine times larger than the domestic one, so has much more incentive to a) learn how to handle international orders, and b) be willing to pay the higher postage rates.
> It's quite possible for an American seller (whether on eBay or Amazon or with their own online sites) to make money solely from the US market. Canada is one ninth of the US and a smaller portion of potential sales for American sellers.
Dunno why a business would throw away an extra 11% in sales, or being able to sell their same inventory for higher prices. Depends on your product. Obviously a lot of Canadians really benefit from FBA because postal prices are high enough to discourage a lot of non-FBA online ordering.
> A Canadian seller, on the other hand, knows that the American market is nine times larger than the domestic one
My own experience was that selling to the world made me more money than just N. America, largely selling video games, DVDs and other small electronics.
Although I comment from the perspective of a Canadian, there's a whole world out there that USians could profitably benefit from selling to, IMO.
Ah yes, you're one of those who think that not calling the only country in the world with the word "America" in its name, "America", somehow strikes a mighty blow against American imperialism. You'll pardon me if I am skeptical of your claim of primarily wanting to help American businesses, as opposed to wanting to pay less (which, as I said, there is nothing wrong with wanting, in and of itself).
>Doesn't explain why most others don't bother. Is it still too cumbersome? Or is it just cultural where the rest-of-world is thought of as a scary and dangerous place?
Yes, indeed, one of those.
>Dunno why a business would throw away an extra 11% in sales
First, it's not "11% of sales"; the actual share is less because of natural friction, just as you didn't have nine times as many sales to Americans as Canadians.
Second, unless the item is very small, international shipping by USPS requires a larger-than-usual mailing label, in triplicate, and a special plastic pouch to put the extra forms in on the box's surface. Then there are the risks of complaints by customers who have to pay duty, and the much greater difficulty of accepting returns from international customers. I was willing to ship internationally despite these factors, but I cannot criticize others who decided that the additional revenue isn't worth the trouble.
>My own experience was that selling to the world made me more money than just N. America, largely selling video games, DVDs and other small electronics.
That's a given. But, again, as a Canadian you would have left much, much, much more on the table by only selling to the domestic market than your American counterparts. I assure you that if American sellers could quintuple sales by selling to Canadians, they would do so even if the mailing process were three times as complicated. But they wouldn't, so they don't.
>My own experience was that selling to the world made me more money than just N. America, largely selling video games, DVDs and other small electronics.
Spare us the false veneer of kindly advice. You can't stand how the country next door to yours constantly has for sale items you want to buy at attractive prices but can't, at least not directly, despite sharing the same language and culture. Instead of trying to change things in your country to make it easier for such things to be sold there, you demand that the neighboring country seek to earn less money when transporting the items to you. Congratulations.
>Under the phased agreement, high-volume importers of mail and packages would be allowed to begin imposing “self-declared rates” for distributing foreign mail from January 2021.
Does anybody have any idea what this means? Who is considered a "high-volume importer" and how do they set "self-declared rates"?
I translated that the United States imports more mail then it exports.
Backbone internet companies trade traffic with each other, but the trades aren't always equal so it makes sense for there to be money flowing more in one direction.
The US is saying that the current relationship has costs that exceed the benefits, so the US is going to be declaring their own interpretation of a "fair market rate" to import mail from other countries that aren't receiving the same volume of US mail in return.
This appears to only affect small shipments, so like one USB cable from China would no longer be subsidized if mailed from China. But in reality if it's cheaper to buy a warehouse here in the US and drop ship from that you may not see much of a difference in cost.
China would need to use their foreign reserve to do this subsidy. Ignoring belt and road all of China's internal industry subsidies use Yaun. Belt and Road use dollars but are "lent" thus in theory China is not reducing its foreign reserve.
Problem for China as we see in their capital controls is maintaining wealth in Yaun. Any subsidy which requires using foreign dollars, as paying the US postal tarrif would, weakens the states stability.
Not sure why you're being downvoted; that's a perfectly reasonable prediction. If shipping costs start reducing shipments of goods to the US by any appreciable amount, and the Chinese government wants to offset that, a subsidy is a reasonable way for them to do it. And I'd much rather the Chinese government subsidize their citizen's postage than the US government doing it for them.
And for decades before this moment it never occurred to any of the demagogues in chief to look into such mundane matters as trade imbalance, or subsidizing everybody in the world at the expense of our own businesses and manufacturing base, hollowing out large chunks of the country to make a quick buck.
This shows the downsides of electing lawyers who never did anything of material consequence in the real world, and don't understand or care how the business side of things works.
I guess it would depend on the definition of "high-volume importers of mail and packages". I would assume the European countries had their own negotiators in the meetings.
I noticed this and found it interesting. I wonder what the motivation is here. Is the amount China stands to lose from this so low that it wasn't a hill they cared to die on? Will they use this in trade negotiations with Trump as a sign that they're being reasonable?
Trump successfully telegraphed US intention to leave the IPU and impose punishing costs on delivery of Chinese parcels in the US, making acceptance of an equitable compromise the only palatable alternative for the Chinese.
Incidentally, every Chinese person I know absolutely adores Donald Trump because he plays hard ball, whereas they didn't quite know what to think about Obama, who was totally inscrutable from the Chinese perspective. Trump lays out what he wants, and then he fights for it, and he usually gets it. As far as I can tell, people who grew up in China view that as the natural, normal, and proper way of conducting affairs.
> Chinese person I know absolutely adores Donald Trump because he plays hard ball, whereas they didn't quite know what to think about Obama, who was totally inscrutable from the Chinese perspective
I have read countless well-written articles arguing exactly the opposite, so I find this interesting.
There is certainly no shortage of impeccably composed essays dumping on Trump and developing a galaxy of identity-political rationales for why various people ought to dislike him. The story on the ground is distinctly at odds with the impression I get from American media and the BBC. I'm sure they feel they are advocating for a good cause in a situation so dire that all other concerns are overridden.
That sounds like a very non-nuanced view. I can understand the idea behind why a particular culture might view Trump as straightforward and Obama as inscrutable, but it's a bit insulting to suggest that's the only thing that group values, and won't look deeper into what that person actually does, and what the results are of those actions, and whether those results are good or bad.
I wonder whether, in practice, sellers will apply the higher rates only to US destinations - or whether they'll just spread it across all their customers, so that the situation changes to non-US customers subsidising the US ones?
I believe that the old rates were set by the UPU, and, in the case of China, were artificially low due to China's status as a developing nation. That status (conferred upon them 50+ years ago) has not been a reflection of reality for a long time. The new deal allows recipient countries to declare their own rates. The US will, almost certainly, declare a rate much higher than the current rate, such that the USPS will no longer be subsidizing shipments from China.
This is weird because the postal union was the one wonky, deep in the weeds policy where even the globalist agreed with the populist that something needed to be done. Way I see it there were 3 options.
1. Use international institutions like the WTO and UN to affect a change or enact a legal, narrow set of tarifs on bad actors without putting the wider, generally beneficial system at risk.
2. Start subsidizing our own postal service. China does it because it's an economic multiplier that benefits a wide segment of society. Why not copy it.
3. Burn the postal union treaty to the ground.
Trump picked 3 and has now pivoted to 1. I personally would have picked 2 but I don't think any of these options are crazy. 3 sucked but wasn't outrageous IMO.
Subsidizing own postal service would mean paying it with tax dollars. Why would those who never use this service should pay for those who use it more? Besides that (and its my own observation only) I have noticed that subsidies usually distort market and make service/product less sustainable and competitive.
Same reason I'm ok with the government building a road even though I don't personally drive. It's an economic multiplier. It increases opportunity overall by facilitating more transactions than were previously possible, and the net economic growth can flow back to me even though I didn't directly use it.
I'm not universally in favor of subsidies, just in certain specific instances where the economic multiplier is high and a large fraction of the public benefits directly (usually infrastructure).
They absolutely distort the market! That's the point if you're a government trying to affect your economy. The idea is that everyone collectively paying $X for cheap shipping to be available creates more than $X in economic value.
Someone who doesn't actually take advantage of the cheap shipping directly is 100% benefiting from the businesses they frequent that do.
An argument that might be more familiar in our industry: Why do we spend 10M on advertising when we could use that money to make our product cheaper? Because that 10M spent brings in 12M in revenue.
Good. This might actually be the one good thing that Trump has accomplished.
Or that would have been my reaction until I read the article:
"Countries with more than 75,000 tonnes in post imported annually - mainly the United States - may apply their self-declared new rates from July 2020, UPU officials said."
So does 'mainly the US' mean 'only the US'? I don't want an exception just for the US because they are too powerful to ignore, I want the same rule to hold for every EU country. Replacing a rule where rich countries subsidize long distance mail from (former) poor countries with a rule where only small rich countries have to pay for that subsidy is really not an improvement.
Trump is president of the United States, not of the EU. It is the EU and its member states' onus to obtain similar changes, should they believe them desirable.
That you begin with a snarky remark about Trump, and then go on to say that he is at fault for not helping Belgium or Austria win the kind of changes that the US needed to seriously threaten to leave the UPU for, says more about you than about the US or Trump.
I'm not sure how you think the UPU works, but Trump does not set UPU rules on his own. 200 countries are involved in those negotiations. If the UPU rules are inconsistent, that's not just on Trump, but on the UPU and the many parties negotiating in it, including the EU.
So I have no idea why you choose to read my complaint about the UPU negotiations as a complaint about Trump. I even started out by saying he is right in this one case. But this is an issue that's not unique to the US, but to all wealthy countries, and therefore should be handled evenly for all countries. That's what I pointed out in my comment. You're a bit too eager to read attacks where there are none.
Had the UPU made just a single exception for the US because of the US's power, that would have been inconsistent and a mistake by the UPU. But as others have explained elsewhere, that's not what happened. The rule is for everybody, it just starts 6 months early for the US, which I guess is a minor gesture to appease Trump. I'm fine with that. Starting in 2021, the situation will be fixed for everybody.
I love your rushing to pretend that you didn't write what you wrote:
>Good. This might actually be the one good thing that Trump has accomplished.
>Or that would have been my reaction until I read the article:
>"Countries with more than 75,000 tonnes in post imported annually - mainly the United States - may apply their self-declared new rates from July 2020, UPU officials said."
>So does 'mainly the US' mean 'only the US'? I don't want an exception just for the US because they are too powerful to ignore, I want the same rule to hold for every EU country. Replacing a rule where rich countries subsidize long distance mail from (former) poor countries with a rule where only small rich countries have to pay for that subsidy is really not an improvement.
In other words:
* Requisite snarky remark about Trump
* Complaint that the rule change is only for the US (written before you read the rest of the thread and realize that this refers to the US getting the rule change slightly earlier than other countries, as we can see by ...)
* Stating that "this is not an improvement" because other rich countries won't benefit from the rule change, again because you hadn't yet read the read of the thread. (Even were you correct, this would be an improvement for the US, which is Trump's concern. As I said, he is not the president of the EU.)
I'm not pretending I didn't write what I wrote. I did write what I wrote. I didn't write what you claim I wrote:
> "then go on to say that he is at fault for not helping Belgium or Austria"
That is not something I wrote. I never said Trump is at fault for these results. That is something you're trying to put in my mouth, and I'm telling you not to do that, because it's a dishonest way of arguing.
If you're looking for bad things to blame on Trump, there's tons of that around. This is one of those very rare things where he actually did the right thing. And had the UPU only made this an exception for the US, and not changed the rules for everybody, that would have been on the UPU as a whole and presumably the EU members who failed to negotiate this properly. Fortunately that's not what happened; it was a misunderstanding on my part (based on a cursory reading of the article, so I was already hoping it was the article or my reading of it that was wrong).
>I never said Trump is at fault for these results.
No, but you blamed Trump for not getting the results for other countries. Let me repeat again what you wrote:
>Replacing a rule where rich countries subsidize long distance mail from (former) poor countries with a rule where only small rich countries have to pay for that subsidy is really not an improvement.
That you wrote the above without understanding the full ramifications of the change is immaterial, because you
* Take a swipe at Trump ("This might actually be the one good thing that Trump has accomplished")
* Then say, based on your misunderstanding, that this "is really not an improvement".
The implication is clear: Trump is at fault for not obtaining the same improvement he gained for the US for other, "small rich countries" as well. I reiterate my original reply to you:
>Trump is president of the United States, not of the EU. It is the EU and its member states' onus to obtain similar changes, should they believe them desirable.
>That you begin with a snarky remark about Trump, and then go on to say that he is at fault for not helping Belgium or Austria win the kind of changes that the US needed to seriously threaten to leave the UPU for, says more about you than about the US or Trump.
> "No, but you blamed Trump for not getting the results for other countries."
As you can see from your own quote out of my comment, that is simply not the case:
> ">Replacing a rule where rich countries subsidize long distance mail from (former) poor countries with a rule where only small rich countries have to pay for that subsidy is really not an improvement."
Nowhere do I mention Trump. I'm not blaming this on Trump.
> "Take a swipe at Trump ("This might actually be the one good thing that Trump has accomplished")"
Well, it is. There's not a lot of good he's accomplished in other areas, has he? He's mostly a disaster. This is the one truly good thing I can see that he has accomplished.
> "Then say, based on your misunderstanding, that this "is really not an improvement"."
And indeed it wouldn't have been an improvement if it had only created an exception for the US. I'm glad that's not the result of these negotiations. I will absolutely credit Trump for this one good thing he has accomplished.
But if it hadn't been this good result, and it had only resulted in an exception for the US, he would not have accomplished this one good result. Surely that's clear, right? You can't claim credit for something that didn't happen (though I'm aware that Trump sees that differently).
However, had the result been not as good, that doesn't mean that Trump is automatically to blame. I understand the assumption, but he's not doing these negotiations on his own. It would be the whole of the UPU, and particularly the EU negotiators, that would have failed to replace the previous rule with a better universal rule, opting for an exception instead. That exception would probably have been good enough for Trump, so he'd still have gotten what he wanted, but this is an issue that's bigger than just the US, and I'm glad the UPU recognised that. I'm also glad Trump addressed this issue. Credit where it's due.
However I was kind of looking forward to the insanity that would follow from leaving this long term and fairly sensible pact! Change isn't always bad, sometimes change leads to new solutions.
I personally enjoy the ability to buy NEW parts for my 1914 sewing machine and have them sent directly from some mom and pop family stall in a Chinese village for $0.15 with free shipping.
But I also see the importance of encouraging American manufacturing, even though I also realize the long tail products I love so dearly and greatly appreciate the life support China's extended to them is valuable.
I also benefit from the ability to manufacture prototype PCB boards in China for new products just by sending off a webform request and for around 1/50 the cost stateside. Losing that ability might be damaging to domestic productivity since we really can't meet those prices, which makes doing frequent bugfix revs, or a small production product, untenable. For those with access to those highly superior Chinese facilities at low cost and quick turnaround, they might have the long term advantage. On the other hand why can't we locally have very modern robotic pick and place machines that don't cost hardly anything and have Joe Bob's fabrication of Arkansas pivot from custom tractor parts to producing clean room spec proto boards. These shops in China doing this stuff a lot are in rural areas and are small outfits run by a few people. We can do the same and would be more interesting for a lot of americans than meth and opioid despair. And yes we can do it.
Who knows though. What happens in the global economy and balance of tech is a delicate balancing game and difficult to predict long term outcomes past next year.
I do think our present administration is quite good at this game of take it or leave it hardball. The present outcome is a reasonable compromise. And is the new solution we may or may not have gotten from actually leaving.
> I personally enjoy the ability to buy NEW parts for my 1914 sewing machine and have them sent directly from some mom and pop family stall in a Chinese village for $0.15 with free shipping.
I do, too, but this just means that we're externalizing the cost of shipping and ignoring the fact that shipping things over such long distances is damaging to the environment, and damaging to the US's ability to have an independent, self-sustaining economy. (We'll never actually 100% get there in our globally-connected world, but getting closer when it makes sense for our interests is IMO a good thing.)
> I do think our present administration is quite good at this game of take it or leave it hardball.
I agree they're good at reaching for hardball at the slightest provocation, but I would not agree that they're good at it. This is one of the very very scant few situations where it's worked. It's the exception, not the norm.
"Joe Bob's fabrication of Arakansaw" has some licensing requirements his foreign competition might not. And some materials handling friction that's probably less costly elsewhere. His employees have overhead and administration costs which are again, higher than many other places.
The top-rated comment on that post is agreeing with the hardball negotiation tactics (or at least is agreeing with the idea that the current state of things is unfair), so I don't think your point is well supported.
An irrelevant statement. The book explains his negotiating skills and strategies. I recommend reading it because it will help you understand his speech and actions.
No it will not. Donald Trump is not a good negotiator and he has no strategies aside from narcissism. The guy who wrote the book said himself he made it out of whole cloth without really any input from him. You're falling for a conman, dude.
Choice quotes from the author:
>"Trump's tweet that he has "written" bestselling books is one more deceit & delusion. He is incapable of reading a book, much less writing one."
>Given the Times report on Trump’s staggering losses, I’d be fine if Random House simply took the book out of print. Or recategorized it as fiction.
>“If I had to rename ‘The Art of the Deal’ I would call it ‘The Sociopath,’” “He has no conscience. He has no guilt.... He does not experience the world in the way an ordinary human being would.”
>“I put lipstick on a pig. I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.”
Can you define what a good negotiator is? Who, in your estimation, qualifies as a good negotiator?
I think there are a ton of very negative, but true, statements you could make describing Donald Trump. It seems like he's not a strong reader, he's not very well educated, he's bad at reading a speech. He, unforgivably, seems to believe and actively promote crazy conspiracy theories, including that Obama was born in Kenya. Those are all clear, and I'm just sticking to personal attributes that would describe him without going into politics. The quotes you use to justify your comment all make very strong and from what I can tell accurate descriptions of Trump.
I think it's a stretch to try to say that someone who talked their way into winning a presidential primary and a national election is 'a bad negotiator'. It just doesn't scan.
Sure, he could be lying when he says he believes crazy conspiracy theories, but I don't know if that is much of a defense: "He's not crazy, he just dishonestly manipulates crazy people who actually believe the insane theories he repeats".
1) Previous state was achieved by cooperation and that state was negative to the US because it was preferring shippers in China at the expense of the shippers in the United States?
2) The new state was achieved by throwing the weight around and it is less negative to the US because it will decrease the current preference for shippers to China as the expense of the shippers in the United States? The new state has been achieved by throwing the weight around.
That's what is at hand.
It is like bugs in code. One can either fix the bug therefore making the codebase less buggy or one can talk about having everyone agree that a bug needs to be fixed and not fixed the bug.
At the end, the customer does not care about how the bug is fixed, the customer wants a bug fixed.
This is where Trump’s “give no quarter” tactics has really yielded fruit. I wish we could find a more normal and balanced guy who was still willing to throw around the weight and leverage of the US.
About the only area I can agree with Trump is in holding China's feet to the flames, and this is a particularly good example. Next up I'd like to see the Great Firewall declared as a trade-barrier and Chinese technology companies frozen out until it comes down.
Reagan too was called a total clown during his first election campaign and in his first term (he's in a good company, so was Lincoln). He was a much better public speaker, I'll give you that, but Trump is almost certainly a better negotiator, just from experience alone. I took some classes on negotiation, and did a bit of that myself, and I routinely see people misinterpret bog standard negotiation plays he does as his "missteps". Literally any book or course on negotiation will walk you through all of the techniques I've seen so far. It's getting tiresome. That's _the standard way_ of doing this shit, literally everyone who has successfully run any kind of business will see these tactics for what they are immediately.
As to "degenerate", that's the label you use when you've lost the rational argument. All I see is a talented businessman with a bit of Aspergers, strong Twitter game, and a profound lack of public speaking skills. None of that disqualifies him from the job he was elected to do.
No that’s not what I mean by degenerate. I mean someone who says Mexicans are sending their rapists, their daughter is a “piece of ass,” that they like soldiers who weren’t captured, that pays off porn stars to cover their affairs, that tells foreign leaders to investigate their political opponents, etc. There are plenty of people who can get tough on immigration, China, and NATO without being a degenerate... perhaps a four star general. Yes, one can make the argument that a degenerate can be an effective President, and there is precedent for this (e.g. LBJ, Clinton) but I think that welcoming degenerates to the office is a bad long term idea.
Litmus test time: does this look like degenerate behavior to you? This is a presidential frontrunner and (at the time) an acting VP. He got his cokehead son $1.5B in Chinese money, too, for his "investment" firm, how that continues to escape the front page of WaPo and NYT is beyond me.
Or are your morals selective enough to remain blind to this? Because it seems that the mainstream press is trying their hardest to not cover the story, and if it wasn't for Trump's "whistleblowing" (which I believe he orchestrated himself), nobody would know.
On the Washington-calibrated President degeneracy scale, bounded by George Washington at 0 and Donald Trump at 10, I’d give this a 5, Bill Clinton a 7, and Lyndon Johnson a 9.
The reason rates are so cheap from China is because the system was intentionally designed to make it profitable to produce goods in China where labor is cheap. These kinds of attacks on the system are pretty interesting as they undermine the system the business community has loved since the 1990s. It's kind of amazing that Trump is actually attacking the system in order to feed his xenophobic platform. On the other hand, it's possible the business elite are suspicious of China's rising economic power and want to reduce dependence. In no scenario will ordinary people benefit so long as the elites are allowed to execute their plans as all roads lead to their own enrichment at our expense.
Alternative headline: "China gets deal to continue having America subsidize it's shipping for another 7 months"...
I'm not impressed with the timeline associated with this deal.
I'm also not impressed by how the US seems to have only solved the problem for the US. It seems like Canada and most of Europe are in a nearly identical situation.
19 months is still a pretty reasonable timeframe for modifying a huge international treaty that around 200 countries are party to.
Regardless, I don't think it's fair to include the preceding 12 months; there was nothing actionable for any country to do to prepare for the changes until now. I would actually consider seven months to be impressively fast.
Yeah, I'm quite impressed by how fast and smoothly this happened. Considering practically every country in the world is party to this, and it's going to impact nearly all global mail traffic, I expected more talk and slower implementation.
That's a fantastic timeline, dude. You have to give people time to adjust. You know how we complain about products being sunset without sufficient headway. This is that headway.
Really? 7 months is too long for changes to an international treaty to go into effect? Your expectations are unreasonable then. Even if you counted the preceding 12 months as well, that's 19 months for 190 countries for make changes to their postal systems-- that seems fair. And counting the 12 months is completely ridiculous anyway: There was no change yet, nothing countries could implement to accommodate the new rules. The new rules just happened: 7 months is the time frame to evaluate.
Also, this change does apply to other countries. It's right in the article: Every country has the same terms, they can set prices when they import more than 75,000 tons annually.
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.