I don't think I should be able to order a little plastic trinket for $10 shipped direct from China, when just shipping the same thing inside the US costs $10+!
When shipping from China instead of the US, the first segment is cheaper, the middle distribution and last mile are the same, and there's a ship segment that splits a couple thousand dollar container cost across a massive pile of packages. I don't expect a particularly big difference.
FWIW, most of the packages I've bought from AliExpress over the last 6 months have been delivered by private couriers (like OnTrac for packages from China or UPS for packages from the US).
I have a hunch that AliExpress hasn't been using USPS shipping for a while now.
Skipping the reseller saves you money and pollutes the environnement less.
You think that makes sense?
Once again, tell me how that makes any goddamn sense.
https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm#_c450
You should really research UPU rules.
Even just domestically, contrast the published retail UPS/Fedex rates with the prices of items with free shipping that ultimately go UPS/Fedex. Reasonable off-the-shelf retail rates that facilitate small businesses is also why it's important the USPS remain intact against the longstanding neofascist goal of gutting it.
You're right Chinese dumping through UPU got a bit better several years ago, but its still usually cheaper for a small parcel to get mailed from China through China Post than it would be for a US business to ship through USPS despite the trucks and sorting in the US is still all the same.
And yes, I agree the USPS does essential work. We need to have it work better for our businesses and quit having our domestic mail continue to subsidize cheap junk from China.
> contrast the published retail UPS/Fedex rates with the prices of items with free shipping that ultimately go UPS/Fedex
Look at sites that still break out the price for shipping. Then realize those sites with "free shipping" are just rolling that into their average margins, increasing the prices for everyone or reducing the quality of their products. Realize they pretty much have to subsidize the shipping on the cheap things or else they'll just continue to bleed customers to Amazon.
There's a high cost to "free" shipping.
My point about UPS/Fedex is I do not think large retailers are paying anywhere near the published UPS/Fedex rates. I assume that one of the reasons they can get such bulk discounts is from tightly integrating with UPS/Fedex operations such that UPS/Fedex receive whole trailers already sorted per-destination-distribution-center, etc. And I assume anywhere getting such a deal is contractually prohibited from making their actual rates known.
Why do I think this? From what I've seen businesses like Target/Walmart/HomeDepot/Amazon seem very unconcerned with shipping many small packages from different warehouses. This isn't them indulging the occasional shopper who makes a small order (hoping to make the cost up later), but them being actively content with shipping one or two items per package. If they were paying the steep per-package rates that retail and small businesses pay, we'd see a lot more pre-shipment consolidation.
A few possible factors off the top of my head:
1. Shipping is much cheaper in bulk.
2. A local delivery service has different markups for different kinds of delivery.
3. Local delivery services that pick up from you may have additional expenses, like a wide but shallow network of pickup locations and daily collections.
4. It costs more because somebody is charging what the market will bear and the local market is more affluent.
These are small parcels. Its not really "bulk", as in shipping whole pallets from point A to B. Even then its still cheaper even if you look at commercial bulk account rates. You're ignoring UPU rules.
> 2. Sea-shipping is extremely cheap compared to over land--and has been for literally thousands of years.
And then once it gets to the port it goes on the same trucks that would be driving to drive it across town. It's still driving hundreds to thousands of miles compared to driving 300mi between Dallas and Houston. So its paying for sea shipping and then paying to put it on a truck and drive it even further. It still doesn't make sense it would be cheaper overall, and massively cheaper at that.
For example, say you lived in LA, even right on the water across the street from the port.. Lets say you have widget A shipped from China and widget B shipped from a warehouse at the docks. Cost to ship widget A from China, which includes the cost to get it to their port, on to the boat, across the ocean, off the boat, inspected by customs, resorted, put on a truck, and sent to your home is probably several times cheaper than from that warehouse, sorted, put on a truck, and delivered to your house. Delivered by the same truck, sorted at the same parcel sorting facility.
Once again, tell me how that makes sense or how that should obviously be cheaper.
> 3. A local delivery service charges more for one kind of delivery so that they can charge less for another kind.
> 4. The local delivery service charges more to cover additional expenses, like a wide but shallow network of pickup locations and daily collections.
I didn't realize UPS and USPS and FedEx are bespoke local delivery services, news to me! In fact, the bespoke "local" delivery services that only offer specific services tend to be cheaper in those specific domains, such as overnighting documents between common city pairs (like DFW<->Austin, DFW<->Houston, etc). But they really only do documents and only do overnights between commercial buildings.
These orgs I'm talking about (USPS, for example) are the same people doing the delivery for those China Post parcels. It's not like China Post is driving through my neighborhood delivering these things. So any idea of that cost being a part of it is once again not based in reality, at least not in the way you're putting it.
> 5. It costs more because somebody is charging what the market will bear and the local market is more affluent.
Its shipping to the same people. This isn't a change of affluence at all. And once again, UPS, USPS, and FedEx aren't some local delivery companies at least to my knowledge.
The biggest factor are UPU rules.
> A few possible factors off the top of my head:
Try actually looking into the topics instead of just throwing out random ideas that aren't based in reality or facts and acting like I'm the one that has logical fallacies in my arguments. Yours is filled with logical fallacies such as an argument from ignorance and a hasty generalization. Maybe this doesn't make sense because it's an illogical state to be in outside of appeasing bullshit international laws.
Why do they choose to deliver it to me for so cheap while charging me a fortune to deliver my packages to my family the next town over? Because they're required to by international law. In fact, me paying a ton more to ship domestically subsidizes that cheap delivery from China.
What's "several times cheaper" in terms of dollars?
How does it change if both packages get sent to Chicago instead?
While I agree shipping from China shouldn't be cheaper, boats don't add much. Getting a 40 foot container to the port, across the ocean, and away from the port is several thousand dollars of costs. For small packages averaging 1 liter and .4kg, you can split that bill across 50 thousand of them. That leaves customs, but how many man-hours does it take to inspect a container of mail? Half the point of de minimis is that there's no detailed inspection per package.
As far as the price to ship cross-country versus cross-town, that's a whole different can of worms I don't want to open very far. Let's focus on "shipped from China" versus "shipped from a warehouse next to the US port".
What is the fundamental harm or injustice that needs to be fixed or reduced here?
I'm confident there are much better ways to tackle those things (e.g. pollution, consumer waste, moral failings) than a blanket import tax on an entire country-of-origin, even one done in a proper and legal way.