USPS loses millions each year on local delivery of mail from abroad (2014)

Note that whether or not middlemen add value is not under their control. Local resellers add much less value than they used to now that global e-commerce works. Recording labels added value until the Internet came, and now they don't.

The surplus comes from the fact that US buyers don't have to pay a percentage to the intermediary, so they can spend it on other things, like going out to a local restaurant more often.

Take that subsidy away. If the intermediate seller can still survive, then he is still providing some economic benefit.

I wouldn't necessarily expect local-to-local shipping always to be cheaper. But I'd expect there to be at least one option where you can bring a pre-labelled package to a shipping hub and get it sent at the same or lower cost.

A small domestic package just costs more than one shipped from China. So yes, it's possible they can instead compete on delivery time, and they do.

But all else being equal, it seems dumb that they can't be given access to the same pricing as Chinese sellers if they conform to the same rules (drop off at shipping hubs, labeling standards etc).

http://thydzik.com/how-do-chinesehong-kong-sellers-make-mone...

Anything else I consider too risky. In particular, I never order consumer electronics from China (unless I explicitly go for a particular Chinese brand). The crap quality is not worth the price savings.

I wouldn't try that with consumer electronics though. Anything that's actually assembled to be sold cheap will likely be close to unusable. I can name plenty of examples of crap electronics I ordered from China or saw personally on Chinese markets when I was in Shenzhen. I stick to big western brands in this market simply to avoid completely useless crap.

That may not apply to toy boats, but it does apply to some things. Take USB to serial adapters, for example. In that case, a middle man does add value. A good middle man ensures that you get what was advertised...for example, the chipset is what the product listing says it is. They also provide better documentation, support, the ability to return the item without high shipping costs, etc, than the direct-from-china seller.

So, yes, it's slightly different...taking into account that in some cases the middleman adds value.

Also, it does still apply if you don't like the idea that the Amazon listing said shipping would be a week and it ends up being a month. That's not just the overseas shipping time either...it's the cultural difference with the Chinese sellers. "Sorry for the delay, it is Chinese New Year, and we're all off on vacation for 2 weeks, and we just don't work , note that in the listing, etc".

Or, it matters if you want to return the toy boat. Your cost to ship it back to China might exceed the total cost of the item you paid.

If these tradeoffs were known before hand, I get your point. Typically, though, they are deliberately not disclosed.

I interact with Chinese sellers a lot. Both as a middleman, and for personal purchases. Hundreds of purchases over years. I see a lot of deception, deliberate as well as unintentional.

If we applied this to foreign transactions, foreign countries could easily use the same grounds to block goods and services coming from the US.

Vegans and various religious people make different purchasing decisions because of values they actually find important enough to change their lifestyles for.

It is by no means a fix but the government is not always making it as easy as you would like to skip on duties added to level the playing field. Postage aside, which is skewed by treaties, the main purpose of import tariffs is to offset labor costs which they do pretty well in my opinion.

I do have to say that in my experience buying from both China and local (Europe) the European product are always of higher quality if you buy cheap, even if the country of origin was China in the first place. Since that is not always needed, you buy China, otherwise local.

You can ship a package in 3 days all across the EU for under 4€ with DHL. I know, because I’ve done so several times.

Stuff that’s small enough to fit in a letter even for 80ct across the entire EU in 2 days.

In fact, the domestic shipping market in the EU is actually cheaper than getting international parcels.

I understand it's not correct at all. But I can internally justify why people type "1$" when they're thinking "one dollar".

For foreigners, that's easy, that's how you write currencies in other languages.

For American doing it, I guess it is just a typing artefact. You think "ten dollars", you write "10$", there is no autocorrect for that kind of things so you let is slide.

Surely you're joking and I'm bad at picking up on satire.

First, this particular scenario is exactly the other way around! By not doing this, every single consumer pays a lot more than they otherwise would so that this one guy's obsolete middle-man business model is protected. Why the hell should we all be chipping in to insulate his comfy middle class lifestyle from global markets? Especially when his business model already depends on offshoring manufacturing jobs anyways... protecting this guy's job is an extremely weird place to draw the line in the sand!

Second, this case is particularly egregious. I literally don't know a single tax payer who doesn't need iPhone or USB-C cables. And a lot of non-tax payers even have a smartphone.

A smartphone is the single greatest expense for many extremely poor people, who use their second hand phones to apply for jobs, keep in contact with family, google homework questions, as a calculator, find services, etc.

> The least fortunate will not always be the greatest beneficiaries of the subsidy.

Anecdata time.

There's an on-and-off homeless guy in our neighborhood who has a phone he uses to find places to eat/sleep, apply for jobs (getting to a physical location across the city is expensive -- better to apply online), find bus routes to job interviews, and make small change doing surveys/selling good stuff he finds on the curb during university move-out/finding random yard work on Craigslist/etc. And also, of course, for free entertainment. He doesn't even have a data plan -- he bums wifi off the local coffee shop. A smartphone is a computer that he can conceal and keep close to his chest when sleeping in the park or a shelter.

Thousands of homeless folk definitely benefit from cheap iPhone/USB cables, from cheap smartphones, etc.

You could make the argument that while the costs of the goods are now lower and consumer surplus goes to most americans, they're out-competing US made products, that would generate wages for the worst off. Then you'd be arguing for protectionism though.