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...
