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Comment by m000 | Hacker News Reader

> It’s sickening when I have to pay $5 to send something within the US, yet the same item would cost $.50 from China.

What's sickening about this? It's different quality of service. Your $5 package will be received in a few days. With $.50 shipping, your Chinese trinket will be delivered in a couple of months.

> So while I agree with you that we don’t necessarily need a profit motive at the usps, at the same time the taxpayers don’t need to subsidize cheap crap from China.

Too late for that. China is world's manufactory. Your stuff will be shipped from China one way or another.

Given that, subsidising direct shipping from China is the reasonable thing to do. Otherwise you will be paying a 5-10x markup to middlemen for the exact same item.

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All the slow Chinese mail gets put on a boat, and taken to say a port in LA where it is offloaded and then inserted into the US mail system. If I bring a package to that same spot in LA where the packages enter the system, why can't I choose a shipping option that costs something less than 50 cents to anywhere in the US?

The system was illogical. Whether you want to say that US shipping is too expensive, or Chinese shipping to the US too inexpensive is unimportant.

> why can't I choose a shipping option that costs something less than 50 cents to anywhere in the US?

Not an American, but I believe there's a 2006 bill that prevents USPS from selling services below the cost. Learned about it in a John Oliver's video [1], mentioned somewhere else in this thread. I'd guess that Chinese epackets are part of an international agreement, so they are exempt.

> The system was illogical.

It would be illogical if USPS had flexible costs.

But the USPS costs are more or less fixed. The mailman will go his round every day and will get his salary, even if he has little to deliver. So, you may as well have him deliver Chinese epackets, for whatever price the Chinese are willing to pay. And that's a good deal for the public. Otherwise the $1 trinket for China would be $6 (if Chinese had to pay full shipping), or $10 (if bought through a US-based reseller).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoL8g0W9gAQ

> All the slow Chinese mail gets put on a boat, and taken to say a port in LA where it is offloaded and then inserted into the US mail system.

It's shipped by air. It is so slow because of sorting, customs, paperwork. The last mile postal shipment is actually quite fast in USA.

> It's different quality of service.

I think that’s only true until it arrives in the US though and USPS delivers the package to your door. Sure, total time is long, but the cost to USPS seems similar?

I'd bet this has to do with capacity, similar with network equipment. If you operate below capacity, it's hard to tell apart a high priority packet from a low priority one. You will start noticing delays in low priority packets only when you start saturating your network capacity.

Actually it has to do with how international shipping rates are arbitrarily set by committee every 4 years.

Here’s a planet money episode on the topic.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/epis...

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