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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

> but their volume is so huge that they will probably rival UPS/Fedex if you included all of Amazons shipments across carriers

Not even remotely close. Amazon's total retail shipping volume represents about 5%-6% of UPS by itself. Amazon's total shipping costs annually are equal to about 9% of the revenue UPS does currently. You're dramatically underestimating how big UPS + Fedex + USPS are. Those three deal with shipping for businesses and consumers representing $40+ trillion in global economic activity, and of course have a huge share of the US $18 trillion economy. Amazon is still just a large drop in that vast shipping ocean.

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This is clearly wrong. World GDP currently is ~$77 trillion. You seriously think more than half of that goes to shipping?

Adventured said their _customers_ represent $40+ trillion. Which is a rather meaningless figure, but not clearly wrong.

I general, a lot of shipping revenue comes from business-to-business, which is not threatened by Amazon.

No, don't be ridiculous, it doesn't just go to shipping, it all goes to just these 3 entities. All other shipping companies are about $25 trillion. It's truly surprising how little of all money spent actually goes towards stuff.

Check your next credit card bill. I'd be willing to bet that over 80% of all you spending in a given month is shipping.

There have been fascinating studies done on the psychology of it. It's become such a large part of our cultures that most people forget they even do it. There was a documentary that followed 17 people through their daily lives in a major US city for 6 whole months. Most people didn't even remember shipping something most days, yet on average each person when into either a Fedex, Ups, or USPS store 37 times per day to ship things. Absolutely amazing.

What? That's a bunch of absolutely baseless claims.

> Most people didn't even remember shipping something most days, yet on average each person when into either a Fedex, Ups, or USPS store 37 times per day to ship things.

You had me going for a second until I got to this line. Genius.

I didn't realize I was at a FedEx until I read this. Thanks Ulysses.

Sorry to see that you were downvoted. Poe's law[1] strikes again! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

The $40trn latter figure is just a vanity metric about how much money those couriers' customers (most businesses have sent or received something from them at some point during the year) make overall.

Combined revenues of USPS, UPS and Fedex are easily found and are a little over $150bn per annum

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