Yes becasue it'll go on an airplane and make it in under a day. Also economies of scale will apply.Traveling through continents like Asia is just cheaper in general too.
I'm not talking about overnight postage; I'm talking standard 3 or 4 day ground. It ends up on the same trucks after it clears the port. There's no choice of postage that makes it cost less to mail something I made in my own home to my family 300mi away (no matter how long I choose it to be) than to ship the same kind of thing from China within a week. In fact, I've often found it just cheaper to buy a new item with their home be the shipping address than mail the thing I already have to them.
Once again, tell me how that makes any goddamn sense.
I'm pretty sure the disparity here is retail shipping rates versus bulk commercial ones. The days of foreign shippers dumping their packages onto our domestic USPS per UPU rules have been over for years. Most items on Aliexpress these days are their managed logistics Choice, with free shipping over $10. I ordered a bunch of stuff before the de minimis tax exemption went away, and it was all delivered by courier (probably gig work).
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.
I believe your point that UPU rates from China are still lower than USPS domestic. I just haven't paid much attention, and I don't know what Shein/Temu deliveries look like. But my point is that at least recent Aliexpress shipments seem to be completely independent of USPS, at least for my deliveries (I've seen comments from other people that got their last mile Aliexpress Choice via USPS, but I think that was still domestic postage). So even if there are still ways of saving using international mail, the subsidy is close enough that commercial operations are still competitive for some packages.
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.
