Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Trump to pull US out of postal treaty
The US has announced plans to withdraw from a 144-year-old postal treaty, which the White House says lets China ship goods at unfairly low prices.
Under the treaty, a UN body sets lower international rates for packages from certain countries, a move originally designed to support poorer nations.
But the US says the discounts put American businesses at a disadvantage.
Officials said they hoped the notice of withdrawal would set the stage to agree a better deal.
"We're looking for a fair system," a senior administration official told reporters. "We do hope that ultimately we achieve a negotiated outcome."
The BBC's Asia business correspondent Karishma Vaswani says the move to pull out of the treaty is aimed at forcing the Chinese to give up the developing nation status they had when they first entered the pact back in 1969.
[...] The process of withdrawing from the treaty takes at least a year and the White House said it would be willing to remain in the UPU if negotiations were successful.
The US Postal Service and companies such as Amazon and FedEx have complained about the discounts for foreign shippers for many years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 21 2018, @06:35PM
This has been going on for years, it's not just the USA and it could had been fixed time ago:
http://www.ecommercebytes.com/C/letters/blog.pl?/pl/2012/4/1334191984.html [ecommercebytes.com]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9794971 [ycombinator.com] (translation of Norwegian news https://www.tek.no/artikler/guide-verdenspostkonvensjonen/157151?key=NGNvhkZx [www.tek.no] , 2014, mentions deal could have changed in 2016 and obviously did not)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/the-postal-service-is-losing-millions-a-year-to-help-you-buy-cheap-stuff-from-china/ [washingtonpost.com]
http://fortune.com/2015/03/11/united-nations-subsidy-chinese-shipping/ [fortune.com]
As you can see, the stupid expensive prices that post has in "wealthy"* countries is to compensate the work they do for "free", making internal or "wealthy to wealthy/anyone" insane. A fair system would be "internal shipping at start" + "country to country" + "internal shipping at end". No excuses, a computer, or even a small book of tables, is enough. Shipping one way or the inverse should be pretty much the same price.
*: small business trying to sell and stay alive are far from wealthy. If you ever followed a crowdfunding campaign for a boardgame, you know what I mean about the impact of shipping costs.