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Comment by blihp | Hacker News Reader

It made sense when they were truly a developing country. But the issue is that entire businesses have been built on top of exploiting these rates. For example, a few years back I bought several specialized antenna cables for $2-3 online (total price, including shipping) and assumed they must be surplus some warehouse was trying to unload here in the U.S. and they'd just drop them in domestic First Class mail. I couldn't believe it when they arrived several weeks later from China and when I asked the post office what it would cost me to ship that exact package back to the sender they quoted me ~$30 (which of course didn't include the cost of the actual contents.) Good luck competing with that.

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That's not just subsidies, but also how trade routes have been optimized. China, the US and every other country, have non-symmetric mail dispatch systems, optimized for the China->wherever route, with mass dispatch from China branching out to everywhere else. The reverse wherever->China is how much shipments cost over non-optimized routes around the world.

Stopping the subsidies won't stop the differences in volume and optimization (but it can be argued that subsidies no longer make any sense).

I'm sure I am missing something, but surely every container ship that leaves china with a huge pile of mail has to return again to collect more - can't they just take stuff with them?

Packages are mostly airmail. Nobody will wait two months for the delivery of their cable they bought online.

Not true. Look at the growing popularity of sites like Wish

I don't know anything specific, but a few things come to mind.

First, it's not necessarily the case that these ships are traveling in direct A → B → A... routes, they could be going from China to the US to South America then back to China, carrying some proportion of finished goods and raw materials along each leg.

Second, having to fill up the containers with something at the origin, and unload all that something at the destination, are both huge logistics efforts to manage. Not at all 'free'.

Actually, I'm pretty sure there's a surplus of containers (as well as pallets and other such materials).

Is a good question, and I don't have an informed answer, but I wonder the same. Maybe the ships leave the US full of exports bound for other destinations in a global "round robin" style route or something along those lines? Or perhaps it's just much faster without the added mass? Would love to hear more about this from someone informed on the topic.

This asymmetry also prevents you from doing a return when your $2 cable is broken or doesn't match the description.

Yup. I figure that anything I need to return / repair has at least $40-50 in overhead. The current shipping situation amplifies however good/bad the deal you got was.

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