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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday October 21 2018, @04:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-going-postal dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by iadnah on Sunday October 21 2018, @08:39PM

    by iadnah (5968) on Sunday October 21 2018, @08:39PM (#751769)

    The Amazon sellers where the item is sold and shipped by someone in China will become sold by someone in China and shipped by Amazon. They'll send Amazon an assload of product as freight for consignment, just like others already do.

    The big change is that the USPS won't be forced to take a loss on every package.

    It would have been better to use pulling out as the threat in order to negotiate a different rate, but Trump isn't good at negotiation since that requires listening to someone else and at least temporarily seeing their side of things.

    I work for a "cross border warehousing" company, and I see this kind of thing a lot. There's an aspect I doubt many are familiar with, however.

    We see a lot of "breakbulk" shipments. This is where a 1st leg shipper collects packages in China, applies USPS labels (or maybe UPS/Fedex) and then ships them freight to the US. Once it gets here a company like mine handles the customs clearance, opens the freight, and then takes all the packages to the post office. This is a lot of your "ships in 2-4 weeks" kind of stuff.

    The thing about it is, US companies can typically only qualify for USPS Commercial Plus pricing. Think like, $2.66 for a 1oz package. The 1st leg shippers are getting prices closer to $2.00 for 1oz because of this treaty.

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