Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

This has been so frustrating. Last week I shipped a tightly packed t-shirt from Ontario to Oregon. $11.50.

Months ago I bought replacement shelves for my fridge. Together about the size of two phone books stacked. Shelves were $40 and shipping was $40 from Illinois to Ontario.

Life itself feels so frustrating when it's wildly cheaper just to buy more crap from China than to recycle stuff from within North America.

View on HN

I've recently become exposed to the DIY electric skateboard scene, which has a fascinating dynamic going on where people in NA and Europe design parts (motor mounts, electronics modules, enclosures, etc) and then advertise them for sale to other forum participants. See: https://www.electric-skateboard.builders/c/electric-skateboa...

What's interesting about it is that there are some users who order 50x of whatever the item is and then just sell them out of their garage, but there are others who have an arrangement with their contract manufacturer in China to actually do drop-shipping through eBay storefronts and similar. This latter group are obviously the more professionalized ones, but it's funny just to see a tiny microcosm of this issue, where the guys who are sending stuff within North America and Europe struggle to compete against dirt-cheap overseas shipping.

This might be the wildest community I have stumbled on in a long time. Have you noticed particular pricing discrepancies between similar items sold different ways?

Hard to say specifically, but for example I'm planning out my first build for this winter, and wheel pulleys are a big one that varies widely, even for something as relatively standard as a 5M one that fits on an ABEC11 hub. For example:

$16ea + $5 shipping to Canada from China: https://www.ebay.com/itm/302678192585

Compare this to Metroboard, an established e-commerce storefront, who currently has their similar pulley marked down to $15 from a regular $30, but when I emailed to asked about shipping to Canada I was told it would be a $55 flat rate box: https://metro-board.com/e-skate-shop/pulley-insert-for-abec-...

>I was told it would be a $55 flat rate box

You can send that for $10.50 from USA to Canada as an International Small Package [1].

They just don't care enough about you as a customer to bother.

Thank god for China! You are not at the mercy of the douchebags.

[1] https://www.nerdylorrin.net/jerry/postages/

Or too afraid to consider sending something without insurance. Even though it will have tracking.

Who would (have their customer) pay $40 for insurance on under $100 (retail) of product?

Potentially a seller who a) doesn't really care about customers outside the US or b) is used to shipping $1000+ complete products and doesn't do enough volume of small spare parts to make it worth investing in a separate process for those orders.

Probably the former. As a Canadian, I would ship anywhere and generally made enough off the extra demand to pay for any losses.

And I was happy to make some Super Nintendo collector in Sweden happy.

They think everywhere outside the US is a 4th world country.

International shipping does require a bit of a knack for risk assessment. There are countries that most think are fine, but with terrible postal systems. Or annoying customs. Or people that flip out when a package takes more than 3 days to arrive.

Shipping to Sweden is fine. Shipping to Italy isn’t. German Customs will inspect a lot and send a bill, Canadian customs often doesn’t bother with American packages.

Similar problem in the custom keyboard community. The cheapest custom aluminum keyboard cases cost something like $50-80 shipped. It's often cheaper to buy a brand new one from China than to buy used domestically in NA or Europe. It obviously helps the Chinese manufacturers, but it totally kills the entry-level resale market.

>Life itself feels so frustrating when it's wildly cheaper just to buy more crap from China than to recycle stuff from within North America.

It's really an astonishing situation, but I guess the purpose was to subsidize China and other countries in order to help them develop economically, and to increase imports. It seems to have worked, so we can probably end the program now for China at least.

What's interesting is that there doesn't seem to have been a lot of debate or media coverage before now.

> I guess the purpose was to subsidize China and other countries in order to help them develop economically,

or you can say the purpose of the subsidy was to make goods cheaper for American consumers?

Except they aren’t, because subsidies are paid by someone (the government) who are themselves getting that money (I know there are other mechanisms) from your tax dollars.

Oh, so your taxes will be lower now?

In the long run, anything that reduces wasteful government expenditure will tend to reduce tax burden.

Or, perhaps, be replaced with less wasteful government expenditure.

Probably true, given that governemnt expenditure is the best measure of the level of real taxation.

Though I'm not sure the funds will not just be redirected elsewhere, and how wasteful this is, given that it helps give access to more affordable and efficient direct shopping from producers, and puts pressure on the government to lower spending because of the tax breaks that are given to people buying directly from China.

No, the purpose was to make it affordable for poor people to send letters and packages to richer countries, with the assumption that traffic both ways would be roughly equal. The UPU and its tariff agreements way predate online shopping and the concept that it would ever be feasible for somebody in the US to order items from a shop in China with a few clicks of a button.

Fun fact: there's actually an Ontario, Oregon.

There's also an Ontario California. So Ontario, CA and Ontario Canada. Sigh naming things is hard.

And you thought refactoring a code base was hard

To be fair most places in North America seem to be named after European places, possibly with a 'new' prefix. So I don't think it's fair to single out Ontario here.

Not in this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario#Etymology

However, it'd be fascinating to see some mapping showing in detail where most place names are from in a region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_state_and_territory_na... has the states, but it'd be more fun to dive into towns, rivers, mountains, etc...

What sucks about this one is it's too easy to get a cheap flight to Ontario, CA thinking it was a bargain, not realizing you're not going where you thought you're going...

There's a few stories of people buying tickets to Sydney NS (Nova Scotia Canada), instead of their desired Sydney NSW, and landing much earlier than expected.

Ouch!

When you're from Ontario and say you're from Ontario in California, people think they know what you're talking about, but they don't.

One of the worst offenders has to be Newark, NJ and New York, NY. How confusing is it for an international traveler, especially considering how international the area is! On top of that, a major train station in NYC is New York Penn Station, and a major train station in NJ is Newark Penn Station.

Someone can land at Newark Airport, and have to figure out the difference between going to Newark Penn Station or New York Penn Station, which are in opposite directions from the airport.

> between going to Newark Penn Station or New York Penn Station, which are in opposite directions from the airport.

They're in the same direction from the airport, and the train will stop in Newark Penn on the way to New York Penn. Some people will be confused and try to get off in Newark, although the conductors normally try to announce this really clearly.

Oops, my bad! I was thinking of going from Secaucus station, another big NJ train station, from which they are in opposite directions.

True - it's confusing from there as well!

I’ve seen foreign tourists get off at Newark instead of New York multiple times. I alwaya hoped they figured it out before it’s too late...

It makes more sense if you know that there used to be multiple competing private passenger railroads. Penn Station was the station for the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Pennsylvania Railroad had stops in Newark and in New York. Other railroads had their own stations. Some railroads had shared stations, hence Grand Central, and all of the stations called Union Station.

Of course the PRR hasn't existed in 50 years so maybe it's time to change the name...

There's also three Strawberry, Californias!

Found that out the hard way when I went to meet a fried at the general store in Strawberry, and wound up a few hours away from him.

At least once a year, something I buy from a US retailer for shipping to Ontario, Canada ends up in Ontario, CA if it transits from a Pacific time zone. It’s rather frustrating to have that extra delay, and I’m sure the shipping depots that service Ontario, CA or these other confusingly named areas don’t appreciate the extra workload...

In a world with easy to disambiguate postal codes, that's kind of sad.

Right, isn’t that the purpose of zip codes?

The thing that blows my east coast friends' minds, is that is a 6-hour drive to Portland if traffic is nice. All Interstate freeway, but never leaving Oregon, and the biggest town along the way is 20k people.

Lately the most standard response when people hear I'm from Oregon: "Oh, Portland! Cool."

It takes a minute to explain that Portland is to remote parts of Oregon like...New York City is to Morgantown, West Virginia in both distance and everything else.

Double fun fact, they’re technically on mountain time and not pacific because of their proximity to Boise[1]

1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Oregon

And the southern bit of the same county is back in Pacific time because it's nearer to Nevada. It's one of the few counties in the US with multiple time zones.

If you drive from Bend to, say, Winnemucca, you go from Pacific to Mountain and back to Pacific.

Fun fact: another Ontario, https://www.ontarioca.gov/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com