8 ms·

Postal traffic to US down by over 80% amid tariffs, UN says

127 points by geox 1y ago

reify 1y ago
[flagged]
jmclnx 1y ago
I wonder how that will impact the USPS ? I tend to think it will help their bottom line a bit due to the international price agreements many countries have. Now, UPS and FedeX and other such companies, I think they could be in for a world of hurt if this is really true and continues for a while.
- gpapilion 1y ago
  I think that the private carriers are more likely to be helped by this, since they will manage the paperwork. It’s more likely a set of products that were shipping directly from factories disappears from the market. For example, the direct from factory Halloween costume. It could end up being a step backwards in living standards and access to daily luxuries.
  - 2b3a51 1y ago
    Old man in a different country: we used to make Hallows'een costumes out of old shirts worn backwards and sacks and stuff. Yes, I'm going back half a century plus but it was fun and involved time with parents. Best of luck.
enraged_camel 1y ago
Like many others, I'm of the opinion that shit is about to hit the fan in terms of the economy. Too many alarm bells, too many attempts by the admin to cover up and distract from the pillars starting to show cracks. I hope the recession ends up being smaller in length and magnitude than the 2008-2009 recession because that one wrecked an entire generation in terms of wealth and psychology.
- orochimaaru 1y ago
  If 80% of postal traffic was commercial and just being used to not pay duty/tariffs, then the tariffs are achieving what was intended. I don’t like the broad application of tariffs that is implemented today. They should have been better targeted. But this is one area where they are achieving what was intended.
  - maxerickson 1y ago
    Prior to the across the board tariffs, there mostly weren't tariffs to avoid. The de minimus exception was for the administrative overhead rather than any tax.
  - nothercastle 1y ago
    In think a lot of those good are simply not flowing anymore. Suddenly a bunch a products are from companies around the world are no longer viable to sell until current stock is purged and the price of everything goes up. A lot of vendors are still locked in with pre-tarrif pricing to big box stores so all of them need to go bankrupt before the full price increase takes effect.
    - wqaatwt 1y ago
      EU did this years ago when they started applying VAT on small packages. You can still easily buy as much Chinese stuff as you lik, though. Chaos and uncertainty seem like a much bigger issue in the US than forcing foreign retailers to compete on an even footing with local sellers.
      - swasheck 1y ago
        chaos and uncertainty are the result of what appears to be fundamental ignorance of how complex economic systems work. policies are being drafted and executed based on a cursory understanding of how things work, and undergirded by barely-suppressed racism.
        1y ago
jstummbillig 1y ago
That's what was supposed to happen, right?
- kaitai 1y ago
  There has long been a desire to privatize the USPS, so this also fits neatly into the narrative that the USPS should not be a public good.
  - master_crab 1y ago
    This is affecting private carriers as well.
    - JJMcJ 1y ago
      Friend ordered a widget from China. Needed for a project he was prototyping. Widget $30 Shipping $60 Shipped via DHL which did have the mechanisms in place to declare contents and pay the tariffs, but not for free. For people ordering tube socks off of AliBaba, the economics is entirely different and the result is not unexpected.
      - DanielHB 1y ago
        When Alibaba first became big I remember ordering stuff from there and it taking about one month and a half to arrive in Brazil. Turns out they packaged a lot of shipments together into a single cargo container and then distributed them internally within Brazil. IMO it should go back to been that way. It is ridiculous to ship these small packages by air. I am not in favor of tariffs, but the shipping needs to be included in the bill.
    - chuckadams 1y ago
      There's no goal for the privatized USPS to actually be successful, only to destroy the public good. It's government, it works, so therefore it must be destroyed. This is really how Republicans think.
walterbell 1y ago
There's a six-month period for new systems to be implemented. > 88 operators worldwide fully or partially suspending services, the Universal Postal Union.. said operators didn't have enough time to prepare for the changes, or to put in place mechanisms to collect the duties and establish a link with the relevant US authorities.. The agency is working on "the rapid development of a new technical solution that will help get mail moving to the United States again," UPU Director General Masahiko Metoki said
xyst 1y ago
demented don and pedophile of the united states strikes again. This administration continues to find new ways to make this country shittier for the common man. Lower courts recently found his tariffs to be illegal but given the corrupt state of the SCOTUS. It’s only a matter of time until it’s overturned. It’s sad that the best we can do is _delay_ the damage this demented fool is doing to this country.
- swasheck 1y ago
  maybe there’s a new application of delay, defer, deny
- cmxch 1y ago
  Only for left leaning definitions of “common man”.
  - xyst 1y ago
    This has to be a joke, right? Doesn’t matter if you are "right" or "left". Arkansas farmers getting steam rolled by this awful tariff policy from orange man administration [1] to the point where they are asking for bailouts. The only people benefiting from those tariffs are billionaires hoping to put the common man into more debt or continue to buy up depreciating assets due to squeezing from all angles. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/arkansas-farmers-pleading-us-government-193000999.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/arkansas-farmers-pleading-us-...
1oooqooq 1y ago
the gang solves plastic pollution.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- gooob 1y ago
  yes! good way to look at it
  - karakot 1y ago
    No, all that useless shit will be sold by wal-mart etc, instead of thousands of small businesses.
xhkkffbf 1y ago
As much as I like getting cheap things for next to nothing, I have always been horrified about the way that the Chinese firms were able to price things at next to nothing on eBay. Why? All because the postal treaty allowed the Chinese post office to dump all of the delivery costs on the Americans. The costs need to be apportioned accurately and the Chinese firms were getting a great deal on the backs of the regular postal users in the US.
- scottbez1 1y ago
  This used to be true but was adjusted with a correction to the internation postage rates. These days things like AliExpress have stopped using local postal delivery and instead use their own local logistics partners for last mile delivery, and it's surprisingly still just about as cheap. I'm guessing these last mile deliveries are gig workers, considering I seem to get deliveries from people in unmarked personal vehicles nowadays. The US is already far behind the economies of scale of Chinese production, and has higher labor costs and higher regulatory costs (both good and bad), so it's fundamentally not possible to compete on price alone, regardless of any postal treaty issues, which, again, are not a huge factor these days. The new logistics services have been pretty interesting, and don't bode well for UPS/FedEx who have been content to focus only on large packages and charge ridiculous fees for a long time without innovating.
gsky 1y ago
Even tourists like me are afraid to visit america now. So much hatred
- moduspol 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - gsky 1y ago
    Maybe should read mainstream media or ask your neighbor Canada
    - chongli 1y ago
      Canadian here. I have no plans to visit the US for the foreseeable future. This is upsetting to me since I have multiple long-term friends who live there that I'd like to visit. I don't feel safe so I'm not going!
      - linotype 1y ago
        You’re only hurting yourself and your friends. At least in LA we’re as pissed off about the current admin as anyone else and love it when people visit.
        estebank 1y ago
        Individuals in the US, even if a vast majority, being nice and happy that you visit doesn't stop the possibility of legally being held at a port of entry for any reason, even with a valid visa. This isn't new, although the frequency of this happening and reported has gone up.
        linotype 1y ago
        Canada stopped and denied entry to my wife for a five year old DUI until we coughed up a $250 fee which felt like a bribe. This was ten years ago.
jmyeet 1y ago
I suspect most of this is about the elimination of the de minimis exemption (which the article explains) rather than tariffs per se. A lot of countries previously had 10% tariffs and whether tariffs are 10% or 50% or 100%, that's just a number in a spreadsheet. You will have systems to collect and handle that regardless. But de minimis elimination suddenly means collecting tariffs on something you previously never did. That's new. I actually support eliminating de minimis. The rest of the tariffs nonsense we've been going through for 8 months is objetcively insane. Another aspect to this is international agreements that make domestic delivery free for an international sender who just needs get parcels to a port. Such an agreement was made when deliveries were so one-sided. So we had a situation where shipping between China and the US was cheap (by sea) and there were no charges for domestic delivery and no tariffs.
- baby_souffle 1y ago
  > But de minimis elimination suddenly means collecting tariffs on something you previously never did. That's new. This is my bet, too. De minimis was a good idea for high volume low value. Eliminating it is a dumb idea but the 800§ threshold was probably a bit too high.
TheRealPomax 1y ago
Has anyone done a study on the environmental effect of not flying all that stuff to the US anymore? Is it notable, or an irrelevant blip?
- gooob 1y ago
  good question
karaterobot 1y ago
If it turns out the dip is caused by a lag between the implementation of new tariff rules and the implementation of processes to handle them, and that in a short time traffic to the U.S. goes back to essentially its prior levels, what will that mean to the commenters in this thread? All of the hyper-rational, fact-based people in this thread, I mean. Because that seems like the most likely outcome to me.
- bitshiftfaced 1y ago
  Presumably it should have some effect for no other reason than how there's no longer a de minimis exemption.
- Tadpole9181 1y ago
  I mean, you've biased answers here. Does "hyper-rational" allow for arguments about how this affects soft power and the relationships with foreign businesses? Does it allow adding additional tallies in the ongoing list of reasons other countries should not trust us or the dollar as a reserve? The US economy is currently being operated by a single man, who has no actual long-term plan and randomly flips levers and switches beyond his legal power to do so. He randomly targets companies and policies based on whoever last spoke to him or whatever social media post he saw at 3 AM. And now he's shut down an entire lane of trade for several months. Just... Dead. Many businesses will simply not take US orders anymore after this fiasco. Some may go out of business by the time things come back. And that's before any discussion about the actual de minimus changes. Changes which will effectively kill the ability for the average American citizen to custom order anything from any other country. As an example: in my part of the woods, women don't really like to buy from retail stores anymore. The quality is crap and they're often ugly clothes with inconsistent sizing. So a lot of them would be custom stuff from Etsy, slightly more expensive but MUCH higher quality and made to fit. A lot of it came from eastern Europe. That market is dead. Guess it's back to cheap Chinese T-shirts. But don't, worry 5 billionaires came to the white house and worshipped Trump on camera like some weird North Korea / Stalinistic shit.
  - conscion 1y ago
    > And that's before any discussion about the actual de minimus changes. Changes which will effectively kill the ability for the average American citizen to custom order anything from any other country. How does it kill the ability to custom order? My understanding of removing de minimus is only that the tariffs now apply to all orders. And because most tariffs now have been set ~30%, an order that was previously $100 is now $130. It seems like many willing to order custom made clothing would also be willing to pay an extra 30%.
segmondy 1y ago
I ordered misc gadgets from aliexpress/alibaba to tinker with at least once every 2 months. I'm not buying anything else and moving from hardware experiments to software for now until the dust settles.
- nisegami 1y ago
  I think china is fine because they already had their de minimis exemption end earlier this year.
linotype 1y ago
Oh darn, people buying less cheap shit.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45152829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45152829
pacomerh 1y ago
My friends from other countries aren't coming anymore, fearing they'll be wrongfully detained. It's a sad situation. I never thought anything could be worse than the COVID era, and the worst part is that some people actually cheer for this. This isn't speculation it's really happening and it's pretty disheartening.

127 points by geox 1y ago

[flagged]

I wonder how that will impact the USPS ? I tend to think it will help their bottom line a bit due to the international price agreements many countries have. Now, UPS and FedeX and other such companies, I think they could be in for a world of hurt if this is really true and continues for a while.

gpapilion 1y ago
I think that the private carriers are more likely to be helped by this, since they will manage the paperwork. It’s more likely a set of products that were shipping directly from factories disappears from the market. For example, the direct from factory Halloween costume. It could end up being a step backwards in living standards and access to daily luxuries.
- 2b3a51 1y ago
  Old man in a different country: we used to make Hallows'een costumes out of old shirts worn backwards and sacks and stuff. Yes, I'm going back half a century plus but it was fun and involved time with parents. Best of luck.

enraged_camel 1y ago

Like many others, I'm of the opinion that shit is about to hit the fan in terms of the economy. Too many alarm bells, too many attempts by the admin to cover up and distract from the pillars starting to show cracks. I hope the recession ends up being smaller in length and magnitude than the 2008-2009 recession because that one wrecked an entire generation in terms of wealth and psychology.

orochimaaru 1y ago
If 80% of postal traffic was commercial and just being used to not pay duty/tariffs, then the tariffs are achieving what was intended. I don’t like the broad application of tariffs that is implemented today. They should have been better targeted. But this is one area where they are achieving what was intended.
- maxerickson 1y ago
  Prior to the across the board tariffs, there mostly weren't tariffs to avoid. The de minimus exception was for the administrative overhead rather than any tax.
- nothercastle 1y ago
  In think a lot of those good are simply not flowing anymore. Suddenly a bunch a products are from companies around the world are no longer viable to sell until current stock is purged and the price of everything goes up. A lot of vendors are still locked in with pre-tarrif pricing to big box stores so all of them need to go bankrupt before the full price increase takes effect.
  - wqaatwt 1y ago
    EU did this years ago when they started applying VAT on small packages. You can still easily buy as much Chinese stuff as you lik, though. Chaos and uncertainty seem like a much bigger issue in the US than forcing foreign retailers to compete on an even footing with local sellers.
    - swasheck 1y ago
      chaos and uncertainty are the result of what appears to be fundamental ignorance of how complex economic systems work. policies are being drafted and executed based on a cursory understanding of how things work, and undergirded by barely-suppressed racism.
      - 1y ago

jstummbillig 1y ago

That's what was supposed to happen, right?

kaitai 1y ago
There has long been a desire to privatize the USPS, so this also fits neatly into the narrative that the USPS should not be a public good.
- master_crab 1y ago
  This is affecting private carriers as well.
  - JJMcJ 1y ago
    Friend ordered a widget from China. Needed for a project he was prototyping. Widget $30 Shipping $60 Shipped via DHL which did have the mechanisms in place to declare contents and pay the tariffs, but not for free. For people ordering tube socks off of AliBaba, the economics is entirely different and the result is not unexpected.
    - DanielHB 1y ago
      When Alibaba first became big I remember ordering stuff from there and it taking about one month and a half to arrive in Brazil. Turns out they packaged a lot of shipments together into a single cargo container and then distributed them internally within Brazil. IMO it should go back to been that way. It is ridiculous to ship these small packages by air. I am not in favor of tariffs, but the shipping needs to be included in the bill.
  - chuckadams 1y ago
    There's no goal for the privatized USPS to actually be successful, only to destroy the public good. It's government, it works, so therefore it must be destroyed. This is really how Republicans think.

walterbell 1y ago

There's a six-month period for new systems to be implemented. > 88 operators worldwide fully or partially suspending services, the Universal Postal Union.. said operators didn't have enough time to prepare for the changes, or to put in place mechanisms to collect the duties and establish a link with the relevant US authorities.. The agency is working on "the rapid development of a new technical solution that will help get mail moving to the United States again," UPU Director General Masahiko Metoki said

xyst 1y ago

demented don and pedophile of the united states strikes again. This administration continues to find new ways to make this country shittier for the common man. Lower courts recently found his tariffs to be illegal but given the corrupt state of the SCOTUS. It’s only a matter of time until it’s overturned. It’s sad that the best we can do is _delay_ the damage this demented fool is doing to this country.

swasheck 1y ago
maybe there’s a new application of delay, defer, deny
cmxch 1y ago
Only for left leaning definitions of “common man”.
- xyst 1y ago
  This has to be a joke, right? Doesn’t matter if you are "right" or "left". Arkansas farmers getting steam rolled by this awful tariff policy from orange man administration [1] to the point where they are asking for bailouts. The only people benefiting from those tariffs are billionaires hoping to put the common man into more debt or continue to buy up depreciating assets due to squeezing from all angles. [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/arkansas-farmers-pleading-us-government-193000999.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/arkansas-farmers-pleading-us-...

1oooqooq 1y ago

the gang solves plastic pollution.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
gooob 1y ago
yes! good way to look at it
- karakot 1y ago
  No, all that useless shit will be sold by wal-mart etc, instead of thousands of small businesses.

xhkkffbf 1y ago

As much as I like getting cheap things for next to nothing, I have always been horrified about the way that the Chinese firms were able to price things at next to nothing on eBay. Why? All because the postal treaty allowed the Chinese post office to dump all of the delivery costs on the Americans. The costs need to be apportioned accurately and the Chinese firms were getting a great deal on the backs of the regular postal users in the US.

scottbez1 1y ago
This used to be true but was adjusted with a correction to the internation postage rates. These days things like AliExpress have stopped using local postal delivery and instead use their own local logistics partners for last mile delivery, and it's surprisingly still just about as cheap. I'm guessing these last mile deliveries are gig workers, considering I seem to get deliveries from people in unmarked personal vehicles nowadays. The US is already far behind the economies of scale of Chinese production, and has higher labor costs and higher regulatory costs (both good and bad), so it's fundamentally not possible to compete on price alone, regardless of any postal treaty issues, which, again, are not a huge factor these days. The new logistics services have been pretty interesting, and don't bode well for UPS/FedEx who have been content to focus only on large packages and charge ridiculous fees for a long time without innovating.

gsky 1y ago

Even tourists like me are afraid to visit america now. So much hatred

moduspol 1y ago
[flagged]
- gsky 1y ago
  Maybe should read mainstream media or ask your neighbor Canada
  - chongli 1y ago
    Canadian here. I have no plans to visit the US for the foreseeable future. This is upsetting to me since I have multiple long-term friends who live there that I'd like to visit. I don't feel safe so I'm not going!
    - linotype 1y ago
      You’re only hurting yourself and your friends. At least in LA we’re as pissed off about the current admin as anyone else and love it when people visit.
      - estebank 1y ago
        Individuals in the US, even if a vast majority, being nice and happy that you visit doesn't stop the possibility of legally being held at a port of entry for any reason, even with a valid visa. This isn't new, although the frequency of this happening and reported has gone up.
        linotype 1y ago
        Canada stopped and denied entry to my wife for a five year old DUI until we coughed up a $250 fee which felt like a bribe. This was ten years ago.

jmyeet 1y ago

I suspect most of this is about the elimination of the de minimis exemption (which the article explains) rather than tariffs per se. A lot of countries previously had 10% tariffs and whether tariffs are 10% or 50% or 100%, that's just a number in a spreadsheet. You will have systems to collect and handle that regardless. But de minimis elimination suddenly means collecting tariffs on something you previously never did. That's new. I actually support eliminating de minimis. The rest of the tariffs nonsense we've been going through for 8 months is objetcively insane. Another aspect to this is international agreements that make domestic delivery free for an international sender who just needs get parcels to a port. Such an agreement was made when deliveries were so one-sided. So we had a situation where shipping between China and the US was cheap (by sea) and there were no charges for domestic delivery and no tariffs.

baby_souffle 1y ago
> But de minimis elimination suddenly means collecting tariffs on something you previously never did. That's new. This is my bet, too. De minimis was a good idea for high volume low value. Eliminating it is a dumb idea but the 800§ threshold was probably a bit too high.

TheRealPomax 1y ago

Has anyone done a study on the environmental effect of not flying all that stuff to the US anymore? Is it notable, or an irrelevant blip?

gooob 1y ago
good question

karaterobot 1y ago

If it turns out the dip is caused by a lag between the implementation of new tariff rules and the implementation of processes to handle them, and that in a short time traffic to the U.S. goes back to essentially its prior levels, what will that mean to the commenters in this thread? All of the hyper-rational, fact-based people in this thread, I mean. Because that seems like the most likely outcome to me.

bitshiftfaced 1y ago
Presumably it should have some effect for no other reason than how there's no longer a de minimis exemption.
Tadpole9181 1y ago
I mean, you've biased answers here. Does "hyper-rational" allow for arguments about how this affects soft power and the relationships with foreign businesses? Does it allow adding additional tallies in the ongoing list of reasons other countries should not trust us or the dollar as a reserve? The US economy is currently being operated by a single man, who has no actual long-term plan and randomly flips levers and switches beyond his legal power to do so. He randomly targets companies and policies based on whoever last spoke to him or whatever social media post he saw at 3 AM. And now he's shut down an entire lane of trade for several months. Just... Dead. Many businesses will simply not take US orders anymore after this fiasco. Some may go out of business by the time things come back. And that's before any discussion about the actual de minimus changes. Changes which will effectively kill the ability for the average American citizen to custom order anything from any other country. As an example: in my part of the woods, women don't really like to buy from retail stores anymore. The quality is crap and they're often ugly clothes with inconsistent sizing. So a lot of them would be custom stuff from Etsy, slightly more expensive but MUCH higher quality and made to fit. A lot of it came from eastern Europe. That market is dead. Guess it's back to cheap Chinese T-shirts. But don't, worry 5 billionaires came to the white house and worshipped Trump on camera like some weird North Korea / Stalinistic shit.
- conscion 1y ago
  > And that's before any discussion about the actual de minimus changes. Changes which will effectively kill the ability for the average American citizen to custom order anything from any other country. How does it kill the ability to custom order? My understanding of removing de minimus is only that the tariffs now apply to all orders. And because most tariffs now have been set ~30%, an order that was previously $100 is now $130. It seems like many willing to order custom made clothing would also be willing to pay an extra 30%.

segmondy 1y ago

I ordered misc gadgets from aliexpress/alibaba to tinker with at least once every 2 months. I'm not buying anything else and moving from hardware experiments to software for now until the dust settles.

nisegami 1y ago
I think china is fine because they already had their de minimis exemption end earlier this year.

linotype 1y ago

Oh darn, people buying less cheap shit.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45152829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45152829

pacomerh 1y ago

My friends from other countries aren't coming anymore, fearing they'll be wrongfully detained. It's a sad situation. I never thought anything could be worse than the COVID era, and the worst part is that some people actually cheer for this. This isn't speculation it's really happening and it's pretty disheartening.