by vel0city | 2025-05-08 19:02:57+00:00
> 1. Shipping is much cheaper in bulk.

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.