BoatBanter.com - A rip in the space-time continuum

wrote:
On Mon, 15 Aug 2011 20:25:11 -0400, L
wrote:

wrote:
On Sat, 13 Aug 2011 20:46:48 -0400, L
wrote:

wrote:
On Fri, 12 Aug 2011 17:12:32 -0700, wrote:

On Fri, 12 Aug 2011 18:20:45 -0400, wrote:

On Thu, 11 Aug 2011 22:51:24 -0400, I am Tosk
wrote:

On 8/11/2011 4:41 PM, wrote:
On Thu, 11 Aug 2011 12:17:02 -0700, wrote:

On Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:53:15 -0400, wrote:

FACT: I bought a disk enclosure on Ebay that ended up coming from
China. Total cost including shipping was $2.30 and came air mail USPS.
I suspect they are building the cost of shipping into the price that
is paid for the item. I pay about $14 (depending) to ship a skirt to
Australia. I pay less than $5 to ship the skirt anywhere in the US.
Where are they hiding the cost. I only paid $2.30 total.

My postal carrier said it is because the USPS does not get anything
near the regular postage on imported goods. The US part of the trip is
getting a special rate. There are a lot of people ****ed about this at
USPS.
So with the USPS running another loss this quarter, we are paying the
Chinese to ship their **** here??
It sure looks that way
Except that's not how it works, despite how it "looks."
Actually it is worse. I looked around a little and the best I can tell
we are still working under a Universal Postal Union treaty from 1991
where we collect postage for international shipments going out of the
country and people shipping into the country collect the postage on
that end. The receiving country carries the package internally for
free. The assumption is it will all come out in the wash.

We know the USPS has a significant charge for outgoing international
mail but it is unclear the chinese pay anything to ship things here.

Most Chinese merchandise is shipped by shipping containers. The USPS
would cost too much.
This stuff comes in too fast to be on a ship. When you get a China
shipment that says "30-40 days" that will come in a COSCO container. I
am guessing this comes in the belly of a China Air passenger plane.
I got the disk enclosure in about 8-10 days from Hong Kong.
It ends up being dumped into the USPS at the first available sorting
center from what I can tell. They carry it free from there to your
house.

If I see my post master again soon I will ask her about this. She
shops at the same Publix I do
Was that an eBay purchase? Large, retail, shipments travel by
container, not the USPS.
Yes it was Ebay. If you look at the "stars" on these guys you see this
is not just someone hustling out of their garage. It is a major retail
operation, run out of Hong Kong and there are hundreds of them.
I don't know what the shipping cost him but consider this:

A 40' container from China to Long Beach, CA is roughly $3.5K (with
insurance and other fees) and will hold whatever you can stuff into it
up to about 44,000#. If the part and packaging is 1.5#, it will cost
about $.12 to get it to Long Beach. Call it $.15 if you want. From
there add USPS and it's got to be cheaper than shipping them one at a
time from Asia.

You are correct that 30 days is about average for a shipment to the west
coast - usually a bit less.

-LG (I import from Asia for a living).