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Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

I'm not claiming that China is using Parcel Select. I'm responding to the claim about local shipping in the NPR piece.

They explicitly claim that the prices quoted are just for last mile 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.

Edit: removed comment about other thread.

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.

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?

Amazon charges sellers $3.28 in fulfilment fees for packages between 10 and 16 oz, which includes two day shipping to prime members.

That's end to end, although you do need to pay to ship it to Amazon's warehouse, but that can be done in bulk cheaply.

> 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.

It's mentioned in the NPR article. Don't think I need to source the part that I agree with them on.

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.

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.

No, it's somewhere in between. They're not injecting at the local level, but they are sorting it (depending on the exact program).

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.

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