After reading thru this enite post, it occurs to me that everyone has forgotten the USPS is trying to be a real business and not just another branch of the government.
All the prices changes are simply an adjustments as USPS tries to become profitable and not be part of our inflated government structure.
In addition, they are still the best deal in town on rates compared to FedX and UPS and they deliver 6 days a week. And Amazon is now keeping the USPS buisness busy 7 days a week with Sunday deliveries.
Yes, it is painful to have to modify our prices, sometimes twice per year, but all of us are in the same boat. It just that some are not as smart as other and don't adjust their prices immediately and so they might be harder to compete with but they are making less money in the long run and most likely will disappear as a competitor.
Yes, it is painful to watch China come into the eBay market place and it feels unfair but this is not our general governement controlling the postal rates for China. It is the United Nations Universal Postal Union.
"The UPU helps coordinate rates and standards between nearly every national postal system, and has been a crucial piece of global infrastructure since its founding in 1874 (it was absorbed into the United Nations only in the 20th century). But critics argue that the system now amounts to a subsidy for international shipping from developing countries and net exporters."
Basically, the United Nations is helping subsidize Chinese shipping. All though, the United States goverment is the largest provider of financial contributions to the United Nations, providing 22 percent of the UN budget in 2015, and 28 percent of the peacekeeping budget. So one can hope that if someone in the Whitehouse could get their act together to leverage changes in the UPC to benefit the US more.
"The UPU system is extremely complex, with countries slotted into at least nine different categories, which are based on their level of development and effect the terminal dues rates they pay to each other. This means that in many if not most cases, the U.S. Postal Service received less compensation for a China Post package moved from a Los Angeles port to its final destination inland, than it would have from someone in Los Angeles who sent an identical package within the United States. In some cases, terminal dues are below, not just the domestic customer price, but the real underlying cost of shipping. Many developed countries, with higher postal costs in wages, services, or infrastructure, actually lose money on each piece of mail sent to them internationally. "
"The impact of this imbalance has grown over the past five years with the rise of international e-commerce through platforms like eBay nd Aliexpress, a consumer-oriented sister site of Alibaband Aliexpress, a consumer-oriented sister site of Alibaba. The volume of small packages from developing countries into developed nations has exploded as an ever-greater portion of international trade moves through national posts, rather than through commercial shipping routes to wholesalers.
The last UPU congress was in 2016. "National governments haven’t paid much attention to the UPU, and representation is largely left to loosely supervised postal service heads. This means high-cost postal systems like Norway’s will continue to lose money on inbound mail, while businesses in developed countries continue to face the pressure of artificially cheap international shipping."
In General, do not expect to see signs of big changes coming. We are going to have to embrace the China competitors for now until bigger forces than us eBayers, decide to revamp the outdate UPU system.
Let's hope that eBay does not allow massive influx of sellers from China in the mean time.
