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Good. It was insane that we were subsidizing shipping from China. This, more than anything, will shift to a more balanced manufacturing model. It was more expe

Good. It was insane that we were subsidizing shipping from China. This, more than anything, will shift to a more balanced manufacturing model. It was more expensive to ship within the US and Canada than from China. Pretty much crushed the small retailers (I know I refused to spend $7 shipping for a $12 item). Now that that’s improved the rates should more normalize, because they won’t have to subsidize the loss on China shipping.

Waterluvian 7y ago
This has been so frustrating. Last week I shipped a tightly packed t-shirt from Ontario to Oregon. $11.50. Months ago I bought replacement shelves for my fridge. Together about the size of two phone books stacked. Shelves were $40 and shipping was $40 from Illinois to Ontario. Life itself feels so frustrating when it's wildly cheaper just to buy more crap from China than to recycle stuff from within North America.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  I've recently become exposed to the DIY electric skateboard scene, which has a fascinating dynamic going on where people in NA and Europe design parts (motor mounts, electronics modules, enclosures, etc) and then advertise them for sale to other forum participants. See: https://www.electric-skateboard.builders/c/electric-skateboard-parts-market/new-items-for-sale https://www.electric-skateboard.builders/c/electric-skateboa... What's interesting about it is that there are some users who order 50x of whatever the item is and then just sell them out of their garage, but there are others who have an arrangement with their contract manufacturer in China to actually do drop-shipping through eBay storefronts and similar. This latter group are obviously the more professionalized ones, but it's funny just to see a tiny microcosm of this issue, where the guys who are sending stuff within North America and Europe struggle to compete against dirt-cheap overseas shipping.
  - rwmurrayVT 7y ago
    This might be the wildest community I have stumbled on in a long time. Have you noticed particular pricing discrepancies between similar items sold different ways?
    - mikepurvis 7y ago
      Hard to say specifically, but for example I'm planning out my first build for this winter, and wheel pulleys are a big one that varies widely, even for something as relatively standard as a 5M one that fits on an ABEC11 hub. For example: $16ea + $5 shipping to Canada from China: https://www.ebay.com/itm/302678192585 https://www.ebay.com/itm/302678192585 Compare this to Metroboard, an established e-commerce storefront, who currently has their similar pulley marked down to $15 from a regular $30, but when I emailed to asked about shipping to Canada I was told it would be a $55 flat rate box: https://metro-board.com/e-skate-shop/pulley-insert-for-abec-11-flywheels/ https://metro-board.com/e-skate-shop/pulley-insert-for-abec-...
      - pravda 7y ago
        >I was told it would be a $55 flat rate box You can send that for $10.50 from USA to Canada as an International Small Package [1]. They just don't care enough about you as a customer to bother. Thank god for China! You are not at the mercy of the douchebags. [1] https://www.nerdylorrin.net/jerry/postages/ https://www.nerdylorrin.net/jerry/postages/
        Scoundreller 7y ago
        Or too afraid to consider sending something without insurance. Even though it will have tracking.
        sokoloff 7y ago
        Who would (have their customer) pay $40 for insurance on under $100 (retail) of product?
  - nerdponx 7y ago
    Similar problem in the custom keyboard community. The cheapest custom aluminum keyboard cases cost something like $50-80 shipped. It's often cheaper to buy a brand new one from China than to buy used domestically in NA or Europe. It obviously helps the Chinese manufacturers, but it totally kills the entry-level resale market.
- davidw 7y ago
  Fun fact: there's actually an Ontario, Oregon.
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    There's also an Ontario California. So Ontario, CA and Ontario Canada. Sigh naming things is hard.
    - kryogen1c 7y ago
      And you thought refactoring a code base was hard
    - benj111 7y ago
      To be fair most places in North America seem to be named after European places, possibly with a 'new' prefix. So I don't think it's fair to single out Ontario here.
      - davidw 7y ago
        Not in this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario#Etymology However, it'd be fascinating to see some mapping showing in detail where most place names are from in a region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_state_and_territory_name_etymologies_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_state_and_territory_na... has the states, but it'd be more fun to dive into towns, rivers, mountains, etc...
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - mehrdadn 7y ago
      What sucks about this one is it's too easy to get a cheap flight to Ontario, CA thinking it was a bargain, not realizing you're not going where you thought you're going...
- musicale 7y ago
  >Life itself feels so frustrating when it's wildly cheaper just to buy more crap from China than to recycle stuff from within North America. It's really an astonishing situation, but I guess the purpose was to subsidize China and other countries in order to help them develop economically, and to increase imports. It seems to have worked, so we can probably end the program now for China at least. What's interesting is that there doesn't seem to have been a lot of debate or media coverage before now.
  - sumedh 7y ago
    > I guess the purpose was to subsidize China and other countries in order to help them develop economically, or you can say the purpose of the subsidy was to make goods cheaper for American consumers?
    - haimez 7y ago
      Except they aren’t, because subsidies are paid by someone (the government) who are themselves getting that money (I know there are other mechanisms) from your tax dollars.
      - megous 7y ago
        Oh, so your taxes will be lower now?
        sokoloff 7y ago
        In the long run, anything that reduces wasteful government expenditure will tend to reduce tax burden.
        InitialLastName 7y ago
        Or, perhaps, be replaced with less wasteful government expenditure.
        megous 7y ago
CountSessine 7y ago
Maybe - but why do you think the USPS won’t just pocket the difference? Are they in a competitive market for the class of packages they ship in the US? I don’t think I understand the competitive landscape for shipping well enough to understand your assumption.
- pavpanchekha 7y ago
  For packages the USPS is in a very competitive market, against UPS, DHS, and Fedex. The only market they have something approaching a monopoly on is regular letters. This ruling affects (IIRC) only small packages, but that's still a place where USPS competes. Also note that where USPS has a monopoly it's often where it is required by law to sell below costs. For example, delivering mail to Alaska and Hawaii is quite expensive, but US law requires uniform postage costs. The USPS is hampered by law in other ways. The UPU decision is one example; they also have fairly strict pension laws and they cannot raise prices without agreement from overseers (a price increase to 55¢ was just struck down in court). It's not totally clear that it's possible for USPS to run in the black while also being the mailer of last resort that it is today. (That said, perhaps mail is a government service worth subsidizing, though we can debate how much, and running in the black would be preferable.)
  - CountSessine 7y ago
    Are FedEx and UPS subject to the UPU? Will this decision affect them? And are they currently shipping packages at a price that is comparable to USPS? If USPS is subsidizing international shipping from China by keeping domestic shipping charges high, how are they competing with FedEx and UPS? (BTW I agree with the other responders - this was an excellent summary for those of us not in the US)
    - davchana 7y ago
      IMO, no, they are not members of UPU. USPS is cheaper for domestic packages & letters for regular time, but fastest ones are almost same price.
khuey 7y ago
Fixing this is good but it isn't going to change much. Most imports of Chinese-manufactured goods are not shipped directly to Americans via the mail.
ikeboy 7y ago
I often hear the claim that it's more expensive to ship within the US than from China but rarely see it backed up. I've yet to see anyone give a specific size box, weight, and locations for comparison, and the few times they have I find the US shipping rate is cheaper.
- mcphage 7y ago
  Have you ever... like, tried to buy something off the internet before?
  - ikeboy 7y ago
    Quite often. But I've also read every report the USPSOIG released about ePacket, including the last two showing it's profitable (i.e. no subsidies), along with reading the price charts published by the USPS.
    - ineedasername 7y ago
      And you've never come across items on Ebay/Amazon for ~$3 with free shipping from China? There's tons. They sell items for less than item cost + shipping than my shipping alone costs.
      - ikeboy 7y ago
        I'm sure that's true, but that's because you're a low volume seller and can't get the same rates that China Post can get shipping hundreds of millions of packages. (And because you don't do the research to ship through the programs that do allow smaller volume sellers, such as flats.) Your example in the other comment was 4 oz. The commercial rate for pre-sorted flats is $1.249. There's even lower rates if you can do higher levels of sorting and injection, cheapest is $0.936. See https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm#_c104 https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm#_c104 "First-Class Mail Commercial Flats (Large Envelopes)"
        7y ago
pilif 7y ago
> the rates should more normalize They won’t. The rates for shipments from China will go up and some executives will get higher bonuses
- cptskippy 7y ago
  > The rates for shipments from China will go up That's normalization. Instead of shipping a cog from 1 state over for $5 or China for $.05, it will now cost China closer to the same rates everyone else pays. The argument want never that shipping domestically was too expensive, it's that shipping from China to domestic was cheaper.
  - pilif 7y ago
    I think the hope of OP was that the rates for shipments from China would go up and the rates for non-China shipments would do down because they wouldn't have to subsidize the China shipments any more. I countered with the assumption that while the former will happen for sure, the latter won't, but instead the additional revenue coming from the increased shipping costs from China will subsidize higher bonuses for executives rather than be used to lower the costs for non-china packages.
    - selectodude 7y ago
      I’m not sure the postmaster general is eligible for a bonus at the end of the year.
scarejunba 7y ago
I'm pretty sure rates won't go down for that. The domestic volume overwhelmed the foreign volume anyway.
ineedasername 7y ago
Yeah, it was pretty awful that you could buy a $5 item on ebay with free shipping from China. That kind of subsidy is anti-competitive. On the other hand, leaving the union all together would have been extremely disruptive to international shipping to/from the US. I'm glad a compromise was reached.
bubmiw 7y ago
helps climate change marginally too
rodgerd 7y ago
Frankly, while I'm pleased that it puts local vs remote on a fairer footing, I was appalled to learn that there was a huge carbon cost externality being subsidized by this model.

Waterluvian 7y ago

This has been so frustrating. Last week I shipped a tightly packed t-shirt from Ontario to Oregon. $11.50. Months ago I bought replacement shelves for my fridge. Together about the size of two phone books stacked. Shelves were $40 and shipping was $40 from Illinois to Ontario. Life itself feels so frustrating when it's wildly cheaper just to buy more crap from China than to recycle stuff from within North America.

mikepurvis 7y ago
I've recently become exposed to the DIY electric skateboard scene, which has a fascinating dynamic going on where people in NA and Europe design parts (motor mounts, electronics modules, enclosures, etc) and then advertise them for sale to other forum participants. See: https://www.electric-skateboard.builders/c/electric-skateboard-parts-market/new-items-for-sale https://www.electric-skateboard.builders/c/electric-skateboa... What's interesting about it is that there are some users who order 50x of whatever the item is and then just sell them out of their garage, but there are others who have an arrangement with their contract manufacturer in China to actually do drop-shipping through eBay storefronts and similar. This latter group are obviously the more professionalized ones, but it's funny just to see a tiny microcosm of this issue, where the guys who are sending stuff within North America and Europe struggle to compete against dirt-cheap overseas shipping.
- rwmurrayVT 7y ago
  This might be the wildest community I have stumbled on in a long time. Have you noticed particular pricing discrepancies between similar items sold different ways?
  - mikepurvis 7y ago
    Hard to say specifically, but for example I'm planning out my first build for this winter, and wheel pulleys are a big one that varies widely, even for something as relatively standard as a 5M one that fits on an ABEC11 hub. For example: $16ea + $5 shipping to Canada from China: https://www.ebay.com/itm/302678192585 https://www.ebay.com/itm/302678192585 Compare this to Metroboard, an established e-commerce storefront, who currently has their similar pulley marked down to $15 from a regular $30, but when I emailed to asked about shipping to Canada I was told it would be a $55 flat rate box: https://metro-board.com/e-skate-shop/pulley-insert-for-abec-11-flywheels/ https://metro-board.com/e-skate-shop/pulley-insert-for-abec-...
    - pravda 7y ago
      >I was told it would be a $55 flat rate box You can send that for $10.50 from USA to Canada as an International Small Package [1]. They just don't care enough about you as a customer to bother. Thank god for China! You are not at the mercy of the douchebags. [1] https://www.nerdylorrin.net/jerry/postages/ https://www.nerdylorrin.net/jerry/postages/
      - Scoundreller 7y ago
        Or too afraid to consider sending something without insurance. Even though it will have tracking.
        sokoloff 7y ago
        Who would (have their customer) pay $40 for insurance on under $100 (retail) of product?
- nerdponx 7y ago
  Similar problem in the custom keyboard community. The cheapest custom aluminum keyboard cases cost something like $50-80 shipped. It's often cheaper to buy a brand new one from China than to buy used domestically in NA or Europe. It obviously helps the Chinese manufacturers, but it totally kills the entry-level resale market.
davidw 7y ago
Fun fact: there's actually an Ontario, Oregon.
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  There's also an Ontario California. So Ontario, CA and Ontario Canada. Sigh naming things is hard.
  - kryogen1c 7y ago
    And you thought refactoring a code base was hard
  - benj111 7y ago
    To be fair most places in North America seem to be named after European places, possibly with a 'new' prefix. So I don't think it's fair to single out Ontario here.
    - davidw 7y ago
      Not in this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario#Etymology However, it'd be fascinating to see some mapping showing in detail where most place names are from in a region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_state_and_territory_name_etymologies_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_state_and_territory_na... has the states, but it'd be more fun to dive into towns, rivers, mountains, etc...
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    What sucks about this one is it's too easy to get a cheap flight to Ontario, CA thinking it was a bargain, not realizing you're not going where you thought you're going...
musicale 7y ago
>Life itself feels so frustrating when it's wildly cheaper just to buy more crap from China than to recycle stuff from within North America. It's really an astonishing situation, but I guess the purpose was to subsidize China and other countries in order to help them develop economically, and to increase imports. It seems to have worked, so we can probably end the program now for China at least. What's interesting is that there doesn't seem to have been a lot of debate or media coverage before now.
- sumedh 7y ago
  > I guess the purpose was to subsidize China and other countries in order to help them develop economically, or you can say the purpose of the subsidy was to make goods cheaper for American consumers?
  - haimez 7y ago
    Except they aren’t, because subsidies are paid by someone (the government) who are themselves getting that money (I know there are other mechanisms) from your tax dollars.
    - megous 7y ago
      Oh, so your taxes will be lower now?
      - sokoloff 7y ago
        In the long run, anything that reduces wasteful government expenditure will tend to reduce tax burden.
        InitialLastName 7y ago
        Or, perhaps, be replaced with less wasteful government expenditure.
        megous 7y ago

CountSessine 7y ago

Maybe - but why do you think the USPS won’t just pocket the difference? Are they in a competitive market for the class of packages they ship in the US? I don’t think I understand the competitive landscape for shipping well enough to understand your assumption.

pavpanchekha 7y ago
For packages the USPS is in a very competitive market, against UPS, DHS, and Fedex. The only market they have something approaching a monopoly on is regular letters. This ruling affects (IIRC) only small packages, but that's still a place where USPS competes. Also note that where USPS has a monopoly it's often where it is required by law to sell below costs. For example, delivering mail to Alaska and Hawaii is quite expensive, but US law requires uniform postage costs. The USPS is hampered by law in other ways. The UPU decision is one example; they also have fairly strict pension laws and they cannot raise prices without agreement from overseers (a price increase to 55¢ was just struck down in court). It's not totally clear that it's possible for USPS to run in the black while also being the mailer of last resort that it is today. (That said, perhaps mail is a government service worth subsidizing, though we can debate how much, and running in the black would be preferable.)
- CountSessine 7y ago
  Are FedEx and UPS subject to the UPU? Will this decision affect them? And are they currently shipping packages at a price that is comparable to USPS? If USPS is subsidizing international shipping from China by keeping domestic shipping charges high, how are they competing with FedEx and UPS? (BTW I agree with the other responders - this was an excellent summary for those of us not in the US)
  - davchana 7y ago
    IMO, no, they are not members of UPU. USPS is cheaper for domestic packages & letters for regular time, but fastest ones are almost same price.

khuey 7y ago

Fixing this is good but it isn't going to change much. Most imports of Chinese-manufactured goods are not shipped directly to Americans via the mail.

ikeboy 7y ago

I often hear the claim that it's more expensive to ship within the US than from China but rarely see it backed up. I've yet to see anyone give a specific size box, weight, and locations for comparison, and the few times they have I find the US shipping rate is cheaper.

mcphage 7y ago
Have you ever... like, tried to buy something off the internet before?
- ikeboy 7y ago
  Quite often. But I've also read every report the USPSOIG released about ePacket, including the last two showing it's profitable (i.e. no subsidies), along with reading the price charts published by the USPS.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    And you've never come across items on Ebay/Amazon for ~$3 with free shipping from China? There's tons. They sell items for less than item cost + shipping than my shipping alone costs.
    - ikeboy 7y ago
      I'm sure that's true, but that's because you're a low volume seller and can't get the same rates that China Post can get shipping hundreds of millions of packages. (And because you don't do the research to ship through the programs that do allow smaller volume sellers, such as flats.) Your example in the other comment was 4 oz. The commercial rate for pre-sorted flats is $1.249. There's even lower rates if you can do higher levels of sorting and injection, cheapest is $0.936. See https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm#_c104 https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm#_c104 "First-Class Mail Commercial Flats (Large Envelopes)"
      - 7y ago

pilif 7y ago

> the rates should more normalize They won’t. The rates for shipments from China will go up and some executives will get higher bonuses

cptskippy 7y ago
> The rates for shipments from China will go up That's normalization. Instead of shipping a cog from 1 state over for $5 or China for $.05, it will now cost China closer to the same rates everyone else pays. The argument want never that shipping domestically was too expensive, it's that shipping from China to domestic was cheaper.
- pilif 7y ago
  I think the hope of OP was that the rates for shipments from China would go up and the rates for non-China shipments would do down because they wouldn't have to subsidize the China shipments any more. I countered with the assumption that while the former will happen for sure, the latter won't, but instead the additional revenue coming from the increased shipping costs from China will subsidize higher bonuses for executives rather than be used to lower the costs for non-china packages.
  - selectodude 7y ago
    I’m not sure the postmaster general is eligible for a bonus at the end of the year.

scarejunba 7y ago

I'm pretty sure rates won't go down for that. The domestic volume overwhelmed the foreign volume anyway.

ineedasername 7y ago

Yeah, it was pretty awful that you could buy a $5 item on ebay with free shipping from China. That kind of subsidy is anti-competitive. On the other hand, leaving the union all together would have been extremely disruptive to international shipping to/from the US. I'm glad a compromise was reached.

bubmiw 7y ago

helps climate change marginally too

rodgerd 7y ago

Frankly, while I'm pleased that it puts local vs remote on a fairer footing, I was appalled to learn that there was a huge carbon cost externality being subsidized by this model.