Amazon third party seller (low 8s) here: last time this happened was during COVID and it ended up being a permanent FBA shipping price increase.
Practically speaking shipping accounts for 10-20% of the sale price, so realistically it's the seller who will absorb it and maybe pass on costs to the buyers, but we're talking about 3.5% of 10-20%, which is really a 1% price increase, so a noticeable but not make-or-break issue in the death-by-1000-cuts.
The Andy-led Amazon is less forgiving than the Jeff "your margin is my opportunity"-led Amazon on profitability so price shocks have passed through to sellers much more immediately than prior years where Amazon would just move slowly and stably.
The bigger Amazon news recently is on DD+7 and how Amazon basically increased their float and delayed payments on all sellers, and that's been kinda a pain to navigate.
Amazon still charges ebook publishers the same “delivery fee” for each sold digital copy (US$0.15/megabyte) as it did in the mid 2000s when Kindles came with 3g chips.
Maybe the technical requirements at the time were a good excuse but as soon as you demonstrate the market will tolerate that why on earth would you remove it?
To turn around the famous quote: "Amazon's margin is someone else's opportunity". :)
The Amazon flywheel is all about reducing costs to consumers. The moment that stops happening, consumers can get caught by offers elsewhere, and the flywheel can start to go backwards.
That's not exactly true, they expanded the free tier from 1 to 100GB/mo (1TB/mo out of CloudFront) and dropped egress from ~20c/GB to ~9c/GB. This was due to pressure from the Bandwidth Alliance formed by all the other Clouds and spearheaded by Cloudflare.
It may or may not be anyone of scale (I haven't been keeping track of the seller names), but there sure are a LOT of sellers who do that. Practically every search result I've looked for on Amazon in the past few years is flooded with people reselling Chinese brand goods or Chinese no-name brand goods. Even when I search for a specific US -brand product, the results are filled with similar (or similar-ish) Chinese goods that are all selling the same few product variations.
Glad to hear that's not you, though. Amazon definitely doesn't need any more people reselling like that. And good luck! I used to sell used books on Amazon (both seller-fulfilled and FBA) when I worked at a book store and year after year it became more and more of a nightmare until it simply wasn't worth our time anymore.
It's prob the other way around -- for almost a decade, Amazon's made it incredibly accessible for any Chinese factory, trading company, and middleman to spin up new brands on Amazon to reduce American brands and resellers' pricing powers. So the guys on Temu are selling their stuff rebranded on Amazon because it's fairly easy to spin up new stores and brands, while making it difficult for US sellers to do likewise.
Even worse (this actually happened to us a couple years back), Chinese companies outright steal our images/assets and then put them on other channels like Temu or Aliexpress, selling their knockoffs there pretending to be us. We were only made aware of this when we noticed products asking to be RMA'd from our support email, but with order receipts coming in from Aliexpress.
I digress, but the beatings will continue until morale improves...
We could immediately provide relief to fuel prices, while doing the climate a huge favor, by immediately suspending the USPS accepting marketing material through the mail.
My mailbox is permanently jammed with paper that useless paper that is both produced and hauled away to a landfill by diesel fuel.
A lot of the USPS budget is from delivering bulk mail. They already fail to break even (albeit with absurd retirement funding rules imposed on them). Without the fees from bulk mail they would need to raise prices, and it's not entirely clear they could given they face strong competition.
I don't really understand why we need a US Postal Service in 2026. Yes, the Constitution grants congress the power to establish "post offices and post roads" but it doesn't mandate it AFAIK.
Other countries (Denmark is an example) have completely privatized physical mail delivery. All official mail is electronic. There's some nostalgia for the postman on his red bicycle (or in the USA, walking the neighborhood or driving their funny looking trucks) but are they really necessary?
Edit to add: since running post offices is explicitly a Federal power, a conversion of US Mail to being electronically based would be completely within scope. There would be no arguing over "states rights" that tends to become a logjam for any other national infrastructure or policy changes.
Practically speaking, USPS does a lot of last mile package delivery that no one else wants to do, including Amazon. If USPS wasn't delivering to those locations no one would be. And we're not talking middle-of-no-where-Wyoming locations, plenty of places east of the Mississippi have only USPS too.
There's all sorts of philosophical arguments as well: government services shouldn't need to turn a profit, all citizens need to be able to interact with the State and the post office provides a way to do that, mail-in voting, Post Offices can offer stuff like general delivery for those without permanent addresses, etc.
There are lots of rural places the USPS doesn't deliver to. They require you to get your mail at a PO Box at the nearest post office, or have a mailbox at a common spot on the nearest public road (which might be a fair distance from your house).
They won't deliver to the house but they'll still deliver to that area. Amazon/etc wouldn't even deliver to the area without the infrastructure of the USPS.
You need a non-electronic way to bill land owners for property taxes. That's it. Physical snail-mail is the de-facto way for the government to legally serve property taxes and other bills to private citizens. Yes we live in 2026 and everyone has email, but there's no legal requirement to give the government your email address, or even have one. You are however, legally required to provide a mailing address for your property tax bill to be sent to.
Sure, by that standard we could probably reduce to weekly or even monthly mail service. It's been suggested since at least 2008 we drop Tuesday mail service as almost nobody sends mail on Saturdays and there's no mail service on Sundays.
Who says anything about e-mail? Government could legislate specific government electronic inboxes, with e-mail and SMS notifications of delivery, as has been happening in several, if not all EU countries.
I haven't got a snail mail from my government for years at this point, nor did I needed to send one that way.
That's wonderful: the option of a payment portal isn't the point. The purpose of snail mail is process can be served prior to seizing/applying a lien on the property when you don't pay (online or otherwise.)
I'm not sure I'd put "reliable" in any description of the USPS. I get my neighbors mail in my box often. I can only assume some of my mail gets delivered to them as well.
I think it's mostly not needed, but there are a lot of edge cases or narrow situations where it's important. They could be fixed, but no one is doing that.
IMO, a better option is to switch to 3 days/week delivery, and where addresses are very spread out, require centralized boxes.
Those other countries are much, much smaller in land mass than the US making it much easier for private companies to be competitive. Privatizing post in the US would be potentially life threatening to some rural communities. More than just mail is delivered. Saying we don't need one is pretty out of touch IMO.
It provides the best service of all of them. I'm not sure why you would want to add a profit-seeking middleman when you can just fund the service at cost.
It indeed has a fishy smell to it. But as I thought through it, if it were free then some bozo would spam an entire address database and then we can't have nice things anymore. The ten year expiration is sketchy, but I guess someone is hoping you'll let it expire (I've never received a "renewal notice", as it were.) And, yeah, "nice mailbox, shame if it got filled with shit you didn't ask for."
OTOH, for less than a dollar a year, I can go find other clouds to shake my fist at.
Percentage of mass is probably the wrong metric to look at, because it assumes that the USPS could simply eliminate the X% of mass used by junk mail and save roughly X% on fuel/delivery costs.
But of course the issue is that the junk mail is subsidizing the actual mail. There's likely no way the USPS could be financially solvent, at least with the current level of service, if junk mail were eliminated. Personally I'd be fine with that. One or two mail deliveries per week would be more than enough!
I think the real issue in this context is the 3.5% surcharge that Amazon may add, and whether or not elimination of USPS junk mail could ever make a dent in that 3.5% figure.
(My gut says that it would not; that the fuel use of junk mail constitutes a very small drop in a very large bucket. But I'd love to be wrong about this.)
If the majority of mail stops are junk mail only, I would love to see some napkin math of the effect of all those diesel/gasoline accelerations per mailbox, dropped across the daily fleet of drop offs.
Stopping marketing mail wouldn’t change the number of accelerations per mailbox. USPS would still need to check each stop for outgoing mail. The only difference would be in weight carried.
USPS would still need to check each stop for outgoing mail.
No they don’t, that’s what the red flag on the mailbox is for. Everywhere I’ve lived, if you don’t put the flag up and there’s no incoming mail for you, they don’t stop.
Depends. Where I live outgoing mail goes into the closest blue USPS bin. And given that most days all mail I receive is slop, removing the slop would remove the need to come to my house.
Of course, where I live the USPS person stops in a general area and does all the outgoing deliveries on foot, but it's conceivable that some days an entire block may receive no incoming mail. Also, we need to take into account things like fuel costs for planes & such throughout the entire supply chain.
It's not just the vehicular fuel that goes into this process, it's the growing the trees, harvesting them, making them into paper, then combining that paper with ink that likely has a similarly complex supply chain on a printing press that consumes a lot of power.
Getting flyers that are subsidized by the post office for stuff like lawnmowers and patio furniture even though I live in an apartment is peak absurdity.
I live in what was a family member's house before her passing in 2014.
I still receive her mail.
Here's the kicker: the mail is addressed to a name she hadn't legally had since the late 1970s. She divorced and remarried - which meant taking her new husband's last name - then lived another 30-ish years, died, I moved in, and it's been ten years of me there.
In FY2022, fuel consumption was 221 million gallons of gasoline equivalent, with gasoline or diesel making up 99%. USPS fleet greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) made up 70% of overall GHGs for federal fleet vehicles in FY2022.
Mail delivery vehicles have to travel roughly the same paths as long as there is most anything to deliver.
That's what makes it a public service.
Junk mail just makes stamps cheaper. That route had to be driven anyway. You have generally what amounts to a right to put a stamped letter in your box at the end of the driveway, put up the flag, and get serviced. The route has to be driven regardless.
We could eliminate all marketing mail, make a large push to make all billing digital, and USPS would still have to drive most routes most days.
A fix would have to reduce service significantly, or introduce a new "Register for pickup" process to signal your need of service.
We could have also made those brand new mail vehicles hybrid or something.
I made a living selling on Amazon about 15 years ago. It all came crashing down when they held all of my money (around $50,000) and had to 'investigate'.
Nothing ever came of it and they released my money, but banned my seller account for 10 years.
It was actually a good thing. I started my own site and made a good living for a decade. Covid shutdown the business.
It seems like there are still healthy ways to do it, I see some products sold by third party sellers that clearly are real small businesses. I google them find their real site and sometimes they offer pricing better than what they can offer after amazon fees etc.
I see that as the absolute best approach for someone like that, leverage the platform but don't allow it to be your entire online presence.
My own use case was sadly, just leveraging the platform and as all the margins tighten not only on the amazon platform itself but on shipping costs, it just gets tougher and tougher. Happy for the experiences they offered me freedom wise, but also happy to be moving on.
Please don't tell anyone but I've been a delivery driver for Amazon's Flex program (where we use our own cars). If my route has an especially long number of miles, they slip me an extra $5 in my pay.
Normally it's around 100 miles per route, with around 45 deliveries, but if it creeps over 120 or so, that's when I see it.
Sometimes I wonder if we just do these wars so that companies can raise prices and when the war ends, not lower them. Do we ever see "oil prices are down 3.5%, we are lowering our prices by 3.5%"? Never. "But the free market will force someone to do this to gain marketshare." But Amazon is the only Amazon, so I doubt that will happen.
> Do we ever see "oil prices are down 3.5%, we are lowering our prices by 3.5%"? Never.
Companies lower prices all the time. It's the competitive market at work. They just don't tend to say why, because nobody cares about the reason, so it's not necessary.
There’s an argument to be made that Amazon has so much of the online buying market that’s it’s not competitive and can likely get away with increasing price. And I tend to agree with that
Walmart.com is a major competitor to Amazon, including for third-party vendors. So are brands choosing to sell direct. Lots of people regularly compare prices like that. And tons of people use Google Shopping for price comparison.
Amazon is in an extremely competitive market. They can raise prices for fulfillment because everybody has to because everybody's fuel prices are going up.
I disagree. There are many other sites to buy anything you find on Amazon. If they raise prices and don't drop them, but other online retailers either don't increase or lower after they do, Amazon loses.
People Google things they're going to buy. Or at the very least they go to other places they're familiar with like Walmart (for the US).
> Those who could but didn't vote aren't blameless either.
The harsh reality is that "lesser of two evils" thinking is what got us here.
In the 2024 election, the two mainstream party positions on immigration were:
- Let's not enforce any immigration law, and subsidize those here illegally
- Let's round up illegal aliens, indefinitely detain them without habeas corpus, maybe deport them to a country they aren't from
These are both insane, radical policies, neither of which represents the vast majority of the voting populous.
But since the picture is painted as "you just gotta pick the lesser of two evils", we end up with parties continually toeing the line of policy sanity.
> Well, the city government is no more responsible for enforcing immigration laws than it is enforcing IRS fraud.
Oh, so these Democrat sanctuary cities are in open rebellion against the party?
Wouldn't it be crazy if the Democratic Party sourced their presidential candidates from sanctuary cities, especially candidates with law enforcement careers in said cities?
On the off chance you're sincere but not well educated on this topic:
> What are you talking about?
Kamala Harris was DA for SF during the early 2010s, where she explicitly backed the city's sanctuary policies.
As CA AG she opposed the "Stop Sanctuary Policies and Protect Americans Act", which was aimed at deterring sanctuary cities through withholding of federal funding.
In the 2024 presidential election she was the Democratic candidate.
This is all on her Wikipedia page.
Can you answer my question?
> Oh, so these Democrat sanctuary cities are in open rebellion against the party?
> It’s not the city or states job to enforce federal immigration laws.
This has never been claimed nor intimated in this entire thread.
I can tell you're having a difficult time understanding what I'm saying. Let me rephrase it for you:
- If the policy of the Democratic Party is that immigration laws should be enforced
- Why does the party tolerate Democratic sanctuary cities?
- Why does the Democratic party source presidential candidates who have in practice (not simply in word) opposed the immigration law enforcement policy?
Flagging my comments doesn't make you right by the way.
> The Supreme Court has just as often struck down gun laws where a city couldn’t do anything about it.
You're exposing your ignorance by showing you don't know what "sanctuary city" means.
Sanctuary cities aren't contrasted with non-sanctuary cities where a sanctuary city's police officers don't arrest people for immigration offenses.
The contrast is because the city impedes federal investigations into immigration matters.
It's patently false to say that cities "can't do anything" about gun violations. There are plenty of examples of cities not impeding, or even assisting, the ATF in these scenarios.
It's been pointed out to you repeatedly that city police officers don't arrest people for immigration violations. That's not their job. It was never their job.
So is your piling on, not adding anything substantive to the discussions
, and raw_anon_1111's repeated strawmanning of my point (the claim was never that sanctuary cities were illegal, simply that their existence is a reflection of the Democratic Party's view towards immigration laws).
Yet here we are. You build the community you deserve through your words and actions.
I'm more than happy to have good faith discussion, and legitimately strive to take every point in the best light as possible. That's falling out of favor here, especially for political topics.
If you want to roll in the dirt don't think I'm just going to walk away.
There's no dirt. You said those cities' police wouldn't enforce immigration laws. I merely pointed out to you misunderstand their job, so that point you made isn't relevant.
> You said those cities' police wouldn't enforce immigration laws.
Please quote where I said that.
The point I am making has nothing to do with whether sanctuary cities are "legal", whether the cops in them are or aren't required to enforce immigration laws, etc.
Speaking of what's appropriate for Hacker News, if I wanted discourse like "bazinga! The Supreme Court already ruled that sanctuary cities are allowed to exist. Checkmate xD" I would be on Reddit.
I (obviously wrongly) thought HN could handle higher level conversation that repeating the same "gotcha" 7 times in a thread.
> There's no dirt.
The dirt is your derisive, self righteous comment, which you had to make to get your little jab in, which added nothing past the repeated, redundant statements of raw_anon_1111. Hope you feel proud of your contribution to this site.
> Let's not enforce any immigration law, and subsidize those here illegally
How does this square with Biden deporting the most people since the early 2000s. He certainly removed more people than Trump 1. Obama was removing approximately a million people per year.
I think it's fair to say that's a long, long ways from not enforcing any immigration law.
Amazon third party seller (low 8s) here: last time this happened was during COVID and it ended up being a permanent FBA shipping price increase.
Practically speaking shipping accounts for 10-20% of the sale price, so realistically it's the seller who will absorb it and maybe pass on costs to the buyers, but we're talking about 3.5% of 10-20%, which is really a 1% price increase, so a noticeable but not make-or-break issue in the death-by-1000-cuts.
The Andy-led Amazon is less forgiving than the Jeff "your margin is my opportunity"-led Amazon on profitability so price shocks have passed through to sellers much more immediately than prior years where Amazon would just move slowly and stably.
The bigger Amazon news recently is on DD+7 and how Amazon basically increased their float and delayed payments on all sellers, and that's been kinda a pain to navigate.
Amazon still charges ebook publishers the same “delivery fee” for each sold digital copy (US$0.15/megabyte) as it did in the mid 2000s when Kindles came with 3g chips.
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200634500
Maybe the technical requirements at the time were a good excuse but as soon as you demonstrate the market will tolerate that why on earth would you remove it?
To turn around the famous quote: "Amazon's margin is someone else's opportunity". :)
The Amazon flywheel is all about reducing costs to consumers. The moment that stops happening, consumers can get caught by offers elsewhere, and the flywheel can start to go backwards.
I physically twitch every time I hear a flywheel mentioned. Intended to be evocative of certain physics without actually substantiating any of it.
What does it mean, really? I see it used more like catalyst or enablar than momentum storage. I'm still unsure.
Are record companies still charging artists for vinyl breakage on mp3 downloads?
AWS egress prices have been the same for a decade despite massive networking advancements.
In two decades, since 2006, they've only come down by about 50%.
That's not exactly true, they expanded the free tier from 1 to 100GB/mo (1TB/mo out of CloudFront) and dropped egress from ~20c/GB to ~9c/GB. This was due to pressure from the Bandwidth Alliance formed by all the other Clouds and spearheaded by Cloudflare.
~20c/GB to ~9c/GB was the 2006-2026 halving I mentioned. Two decades to drop by half.
Accounting for inflation that's more like dropped by 75%. As AWS position as market leader erodes we'll likely see further drops.
And it costs them nothing, because they have free peering agreements with every network.
i fully expect it yo be permanent. they know its likely to come back down.
Do you buy off Temu and re-sell on amazon?
I dunno why that's a whole meme, but nobody of any scale is doing that. We produce products through factories like most established sellers.
It may or may not be anyone of scale (I haven't been keeping track of the seller names), but there sure are a LOT of sellers who do that. Practically every search result I've looked for on Amazon in the past few years is flooded with people reselling Chinese brand goods or Chinese no-name brand goods. Even when I search for a specific US -brand product, the results are filled with similar (or similar-ish) Chinese goods that are all selling the same few product variations.
Glad to hear that's not you, though. Amazon definitely doesn't need any more people reselling like that. And good luck! I used to sell used books on Amazon (both seller-fulfilled and FBA) when I worked at a book store and year after year it became more and more of a nightmare until it simply wasn't worth our time anymore.
It's prob the other way around -- for almost a decade, Amazon's made it incredibly accessible for any Chinese factory, trading company, and middleman to spin up new brands on Amazon to reduce American brands and resellers' pricing powers. So the guys on Temu are selling their stuff rebranded on Amazon because it's fairly easy to spin up new stores and brands, while making it difficult for US sellers to do likewise.
Even worse (this actually happened to us a couple years back), Chinese companies outright steal our images/assets and then put them on other channels like Temu or Aliexpress, selling their knockoffs there pretending to be us. We were only made aware of this when we noticed products asking to be RMA'd from our support email, but with order receipts coming in from Aliexpress.
I digress, but the beatings will continue until morale improves...
Title could really use "for third-party sellers who use fulfillment services" (this is not a 3.5% surcharge on AWS, Prime, or Amazon orders)
It was pretty clear to me. AWS is Web Services after all
We could immediately provide relief to fuel prices, while doing the climate a huge favor, by immediately suspending the USPS accepting marketing material through the mail.
My mailbox is permanently jammed with paper that useless paper that is both produced and hauled away to a landfill by diesel fuel.
No I do not want your credit card offer.
No I do not want to switch phone plans.
No I do not want an extended warranty.
Reducing the frequency of mail delivery would have a much larger impact, since most of fuel is probably consumed by last mile delivery.
Delivering less mail each day doesn't really make much difference if the mail carrier still has to come to my neighborhood 6 times a week.
Fewer mail carriers could hit twice as many places in a given time-frame and reduce overall gas usage.
A lot of the USPS budget is from delivering bulk mail. They already fail to break even (albeit with absurd retirement funding rules imposed on them). Without the fees from bulk mail they would need to raise prices, and it's not entirely clear they could given they face strong competition.
I don't really understand why we need a US Postal Service in 2026. Yes, the Constitution grants congress the power to establish "post offices and post roads" but it doesn't mandate it AFAIK.
Other countries (Denmark is an example) have completely privatized physical mail delivery. All official mail is electronic. There's some nostalgia for the postman on his red bicycle (or in the USA, walking the neighborhood or driving their funny looking trucks) but are they really necessary?
Edit to add: since running post offices is explicitly a Federal power, a conversion of US Mail to being electronically based would be completely within scope. There would be no arguing over "states rights" that tends to become a logjam for any other national infrastructure or policy changes.
Practically speaking, USPS does a lot of last mile package delivery that no one else wants to do, including Amazon. If USPS wasn't delivering to those locations no one would be. And we're not talking middle-of-no-where-Wyoming locations, plenty of places east of the Mississippi have only USPS too.
There's all sorts of philosophical arguments as well: government services shouldn't need to turn a profit, all citizens need to be able to interact with the State and the post office provides a way to do that, mail-in voting, Post Offices can offer stuff like general delivery for those without permanent addresses, etc.
There are lots of rural places the USPS doesn't deliver to. They require you to get your mail at a PO Box at the nearest post office, or have a mailbox at a common spot on the nearest public road (which might be a fair distance from your house).
They won't deliver to the house but they'll still deliver to that area. Amazon/etc wouldn't even deliver to the area without the infrastructure of the USPS.
You need a non-electronic way to bill land owners for property taxes. That's it. Physical snail-mail is the de-facto way for the government to legally serve property taxes and other bills to private citizens. Yes we live in 2026 and everyone has email, but there's no legal requirement to give the government your email address, or even have one. You are however, legally required to provide a mailing address for your property tax bill to be sent to.
Sure, by that standard we could probably reduce to weekly or even monthly mail service. It's been suggested since at least 2008 we drop Tuesday mail service as almost nobody sends mail on Saturdays and there's no mail service on Sundays.
Who says anything about e-mail? Government could legislate specific government electronic inboxes, with e-mail and SMS notifications of delivery, as has been happening in several, if not all EU countries.
I haven't got a snail mail from my government for years at this point, nor did I needed to send one that way.
I pay all of my property taxes online.
That's wonderful: the option of a payment portal isn't the point. The purpose of snail mail is process can be served prior to seizing/applying a lien on the property when you don't pay (online or otherwise.)
Because you can’t make money serving rural areas and no for profit company would touch deliverying to those areas
Another case of the evil, unamerican cities subsidizing the real Americans
Traditionally, the state has certain duties it needs to perform for every member of the population.
Passports, driving licenses, polling cards, draft registration, pensions, company registrations, patents, copyrights, court summons, speeding fines, inheritance, tax paperwork, census, etc etc.
It’s much simpler to perform these duties if you have a means of communication that can reliably reach every citizen.
I'm not sure I'd put "reliable" in any description of the USPS. I get my neighbors mail in my box often. I can only assume some of my mail gets delivered to them as well.
That's still far more reliable than trying to email someone who doesn't have a computer or smartphone.
I think it's mostly not needed, but there are a lot of edge cases or narrow situations where it's important. They could be fixed, but no one is doing that.
IMO, a better option is to switch to 3 days/week delivery, and where addresses are very spread out, require centralized boxes.
Those other countries are much, much smaller in land mass than the US making it much easier for private companies to be competitive. Privatizing post in the US would be potentially life threatening to some rural communities. More than just mail is delivered. Saying we don't need one is pretty out of touch IMO.
It provides the best service of all of them. I'm not sure why you would want to add a profit-seeking middleman when you can just fund the service at cost.
> I don't really understand why we need a US Postal Service in 2026
Mail in voting.
Denmark is like twice the size of Massachusetts.
Danskjävlarna ruined posten.
>They already fail to break even
It doesn't need to make money or "break even." We just pay the cost in tax or postage that is needed to run the service.
I don’t mind a public subsidy, but that’s not current law or the majority attitude
yeah... I'll take clean air and pay a few extra bucks the 3 times a year I actually need to mail something.
Not sure how it is in America, but in Canada you can post a note inside your mailbox stating that you don't want unaddressed mail.
https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/personal/consu...
I'm tried that, I've even plasterd the inside of my mailbox with a mini-poster directing to not leave it, and it hasn't worked at all.
$8, and that all stops for ten years: https://www.dmachoice.org/static/consumer_choice_tools.php
I’ve done it (several times, ‘cuz ten years), you’ll notice an almost immediate reduction in junk mail.
Sounds like a racketeering operation (not saying it doesn't work).
Smells fishy indeed by it's just $8 per 10 years...
Also I'm sure that if a bill were ever passed to stop junk mail by default, it would be utilizing the infrastructure built by this service
It indeed has a fishy smell to it. But as I thought through it, if it were free then some bozo would spam an entire address database and then we can't have nice things anymore. The ten year expiration is sketchy, but I guess someone is hoping you'll let it expire (I've never received a "renewal notice", as it were.) And, yeah, "nice mailbox, shame if it got filled with shit you didn't ask for."
OTOH, for less than a dollar a year, I can go find other clouds to shake my fist at.
What percentage of overall vehicular fuel use does junk mail (from inception to landfill) constitute, might you suppose?
Percentage of mass is probably the wrong metric to look at, because it assumes that the USPS could simply eliminate the X% of mass used by junk mail and save roughly X% on fuel/delivery costs.
But of course the issue is that the junk mail is subsidizing the actual mail. There's likely no way the USPS could be financially solvent, at least with the current level of service, if junk mail were eliminated. Personally I'd be fine with that. One or two mail deliveries per week would be more than enough!
I think the real issue in this context is the 3.5% surcharge that Amazon may add, and whether or not elimination of USPS junk mail could ever make a dent in that 3.5% figure.
(My gut says that it would not; that the fuel use of junk mail constitutes a very small drop in a very large bucket. But I'd love to be wrong about this.)
If the majority of mail stops are junk mail only, I would love to see some napkin math of the effect of all those diesel/gasoline accelerations per mailbox, dropped across the daily fleet of drop offs.
Stopping marketing mail wouldn’t change the number of accelerations per mailbox. USPS would still need to check each stop for outgoing mail. The only difference would be in weight carried.
USPS would still need to check each stop for outgoing mail.
No they don’t, that’s what the red flag on the mailbox is for. Everywhere I’ve lived, if you don’t put the flag up and there’s no incoming mail for you, they don’t stop.
Depends. Where I live outgoing mail goes into the closest blue USPS bin. And given that most days all mail I receive is slop, removing the slop would remove the need to come to my house.
Of course, where I live the USPS person stops in a general area and does all the outgoing deliveries on foot, but it's conceivable that some days an entire block may receive no incoming mail. Also, we need to take into account things like fuel costs for planes & such throughout the entire supply chain.
It's not just the vehicular fuel that goes into this process, it's the growing the trees, harvesting them, making them into paper, then combining that paper with ink that likely has a similarly complex supply chain on a printing press that consumes a lot of power.
Getting flyers that are subsidized by the post office for stuff like lawnmowers and patio furniture even though I live in an apartment is peak absurdity.
I live in what was a family member's house before her passing in 2014.
I still receive her mail.
Here's the kicker: the mail is addressed to a name she hadn't legally had since the late 1970s. She divorced and remarried - which meant taking her new husband's last name - then lived another 30-ish years, died, I moved in, and it's been ten years of me there.
It's an insanely wasteful practice.
Write “rejected” on all the mail you don’t want and leave it unopened in your box. Cuts it down nearly to zero after a few months.
Will give that a try, thanks
If you live in the US you can stop almost all junk mail for $6 for a 10 year registration to DMA Choice
https://consumer.ftc.gov/node/77522
In FY2022, fuel consumption was 221 million gallons of gasoline equivalent, with gasoline or diesel making up 99%. USPS fleet greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) made up 70% of overall GHGs for federal fleet vehicles in FY2022.
50-60% of all mail is marketing slop
Mail delivery vehicles have to travel roughly the same paths as long as there is most anything to deliver.
That's what makes it a public service.
Junk mail just makes stamps cheaper. That route had to be driven anyway. You have generally what amounts to a right to put a stamped letter in your box at the end of the driveway, put up the flag, and get serviced. The route has to be driven regardless.
We could eliminate all marketing mail, make a large push to make all billing digital, and USPS would still have to drive most routes most days.
A fix would have to reduce service significantly, or introduce a new "Register for pickup" process to signal your need of service.
We could have also made those brand new mail vehicles hybrid or something.
Honestly I'd be surprised if it's that low. My guess is by weight its closer to 85%-95%.
Your numbers show exactly what I was guessing to be true though. Incredible this has never been enforced.
Last year, Amazon backed down from sharing tariff pricing. I assume the same will happen here.
I immediately thought of that move.
This time I think the surcharge will stay until the war is concluded.
Yeah, but amazon isn't going to list it as a line item. Which they should.
Concluded by "mission accomplished" or when the troops withdraw in another 20 years?
I made a living selling on Amazon about 15 years ago. It all came crashing down when they held all of my money (around $50,000) and had to 'investigate'.
Nothing ever came of it and they released my money, but banned my seller account for 10 years.
It was actually a good thing. I started my own site and made a good living for a decade. Covid shutdown the business.
Building a business on Amazon is a mistake.
It seems like there are still healthy ways to do it, I see some products sold by third party sellers that clearly are real small businesses. I google them find their real site and sometimes they offer pricing better than what they can offer after amazon fees etc.
I see that as the absolute best approach for someone like that, leverage the platform but don't allow it to be your entire online presence.
My own use case was sadly, just leveraging the platform and as all the margins tighten not only on the amazon platform itself but on shipping costs, it just gets tougher and tougher. Happy for the experiences they offered me freedom wise, but also happy to be moving on.
Please don't tell anyone but I've been a delivery driver for Amazon's Flex program (where we use our own cars). If my route has an especially long number of miles, they slip me an extra $5 in my pay.
Normally it's around 100 miles per route, with around 45 deliveries, but if it creeps over 120 or so, that's when I see it.
How much does it pay on average? And how is the payment broken down/do you earn per mile or package?
I wonder how visible it will be when showing final charges for an order.
I'd definitely be more likely to "wait it out" when considering purchases in my cart if I can see what I expect will be a temporary levy.
Sometimes I wonder if we just do these wars so that companies can raise prices and when the war ends, not lower them. Do we ever see "oil prices are down 3.5%, we are lowering our prices by 3.5%"? Never. "But the free market will force someone to do this to gain marketshare." But Amazon is the only Amazon, so I doubt that will happen.
> Do we ever see "oil prices are down 3.5%, we are lowering our prices by 3.5%"? Never.
Companies lower prices all the time. It's the competitive market at work. They just don't tend to say why, because nobody cares about the reason, so it's not necessary.
E.g. snack prices are coming down, to pick one recent example: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/03/nx-s1-5697941/pepsi-prices-ch...
But it's human bias to notice when things get worse, but not when things get better.
Absolutely in a competitive market.
There’s an argument to be made that Amazon has so much of the online buying market that’s it’s not competitive and can likely get away with increasing price. And I tend to agree with that
Walmart.com is a major competitor to Amazon, including for third-party vendors. So are brands choosing to sell direct. Lots of people regularly compare prices like that. And tons of people use Google Shopping for price comparison.
Amazon is in an extremely competitive market. They can raise prices for fulfillment because everybody has to because everybody's fuel prices are going up.
I disagree. There are many other sites to buy anything you find on Amazon. If they raise prices and don't drop them, but other online retailers either don't increase or lower after they do, Amazon loses.
People Google things they're going to buy. Or at the very least they go to other places they're familiar with like Walmart (for the US).
There is an argument to be made yes, but not a particularly good one.
I'm sure they'll pass it on to the end consumers - there goes the inflation bit by bit on every front ...
Does that 3.5% get passed to the seller if they are not using Amazon to ship the product?
FBA products only
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>> (generous exemption for those who didn't vote for the orange dildo).
Those who could but didn't vote aren't blameless either.
> Those who could but didn't vote aren't blameless either.
The harsh reality is that "lesser of two evils" thinking is what got us here.
In the 2024 election, the two mainstream party positions on immigration were:
- Let's not enforce any immigration law, and subsidize those here illegally
- Let's round up illegal aliens, indefinitely detain them without habeas corpus, maybe deport them to a country they aren't from
These are both insane, radical policies, neither of which represents the vast majority of the voting populous.
But since the picture is painted as "you just gotta pick the lesser of two evils", we end up with parties continually toeing the line of policy sanity.
> - Let's not enforce any immigration law, and subsidize those here illegally
This isn't an accurate description of the Democrat party's platform and repeating it uncritically is contributing to the problem.
> This isn't an accurate description of the Democrat party's platform and repeating it uncritically is contributing to the problem.
I welcome your critical interpretation of the existence of sanctuary cities and CFAP/California DREAM Act/related programs.
Well, the city government is no more responsible for enforcing immigration laws than it is enforcing IRS fraud.
> Well, the city government is no more responsible for enforcing immigration laws than it is enforcing IRS fraud.
Oh, so these Democrat sanctuary cities are in open rebellion against the party?
Wouldn't it be crazy if the Democratic Party sourced their presidential candidates from sanctuary cities, especially candidates with law enforcement careers in said cities?
What are you talking about?
On the off chance you're sincere but not well educated on this topic:
> What are you talking about?
Kamala Harris was DA for SF during the early 2010s, where she explicitly backed the city's sanctuary policies.
As CA AG she opposed the "Stop Sanctuary Policies and Protect Americans Act", which was aimed at deterring sanctuary cities through withholding of federal funding.
In the 2024 presidential election she was the Democratic candidate.
This is all on her Wikipedia page.
Can you answer my question?
> Oh, so these Democrat sanctuary cities are in open rebellion against the party?
Well, your original statement was “Let's not enforce any immigration law, and subsidize those here illegally” and then brought up sanctuary cities.
It’s not the city or states job to enforce federal immigration laws. This was confirmed by the Supreme Court
https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/07/supreme-court-denies-flor...
In other words your argument is prima facie irrelevant. The city or state is not responsible for “enforcing immigration laws”
Just on the off chance you don’t know this…
> It’s not the city or states job to enforce federal immigration laws.
This has never been claimed nor intimated in this entire thread.
I can tell you're having a difficult time understanding what I'm saying. Let me rephrase it for you:
- If the policy of the Democratic Party is that immigration laws should be enforced
- Why does the party tolerate Democratic sanctuary cities?
- Why does the Democratic party source presidential candidates who have in practice (not simply in word) opposed the immigration law enforcement policy?
> Let's not enforce any immigration law, and subsidize those here illegally
And then sanctuary cities was mentioned.
Whether they supported or opposed anything on the state level is completely irrelevant - it’s not there job
Once you brought up sanctuary cities - you are making a completely irrelevant argument.
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Again your argument is irrelevant. The Supreme Court has just as often struck down gun laws where a city couldn’t do anything about it.
Your question isn’t in good faith. Desantis also tried to do something about immigration and the Supreme Court said he couldn’t do it .
What part of immigration is not the purvue of state government is hard to understand?
Oh and Obama deported more people than Trump..
Flagging my comments doesn't make you right by the way.
> The Supreme Court has just as often struck down gun laws where a city couldn’t do anything about it.
You're exposing your ignorance by showing you don't know what "sanctuary city" means.
Sanctuary cities aren't contrasted with non-sanctuary cities where a sanctuary city's police officers don't arrest people for immigration offenses.
The contrast is because the city impedes federal investigations into immigration matters.
It's patently false to say that cities "can't do anything" about gun violations. There are plenty of examples of cities not impeding, or even assisting, the ATF in these scenarios.
It's been pointed out to you repeatedly that city police officers don't arrest people for immigration violations. That's not their job. It was never their job.
Oh, thanks Ben. It's not like I said that in the parent comment:
> Sanctuary cities aren't contrasted with non-sanctuary cities where a sanctuary city's police officers don't arrest people for immigration offenses.
> The contrast is because the city impedes federal investigations into immigration matters.
You sanctuary city defenders are real sharp.
Hope you find some time this year to figure out "Your Strategy", god knows you need one.
This is really inappropriate for Hacker News.
So is your piling on, not adding anything substantive to the discussions , and raw_anon_1111's repeated strawmanning of my point (the claim was never that sanctuary cities were illegal, simply that their existence is a reflection of the Democratic Party's view towards immigration laws).
Yet here we are. You build the community you deserve through your words and actions.
I'm more than happy to have good faith discussion, and legitimately strive to take every point in the best light as possible. That's falling out of favor here, especially for political topics.
If you want to roll in the dirt don't think I'm just going to walk away.
There's no dirt. You said those cities' police wouldn't enforce immigration laws. I merely pointed out to you misunderstand their job, so that point you made isn't relevant.
> You said those cities' police wouldn't enforce immigration laws.
Please quote where I said that.
The point I am making has nothing to do with whether sanctuary cities are "legal", whether the cops in them are or aren't required to enforce immigration laws, etc.
Speaking of what's appropriate for Hacker News, if I wanted discourse like "bazinga! The Supreme Court already ruled that sanctuary cities are allowed to exist. Checkmate xD" I would be on Reddit.
I (obviously wrongly) thought HN could handle higher level conversation that repeating the same "gotcha" 7 times in a thread.
> There's no dirt.
The dirt is your derisive, self righteous comment, which you had to make to get your little jab in, which added nothing past the repeated, redundant statements of raw_anon_1111. Hope you feel proud of your contribution to this site.
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> Let's not enforce any immigration law, and subsidize those here illegally
How does this square with Biden deporting the most people since the early 2000s. He certainly removed more people than Trump 1. Obama was removing approximately a million people per year.
I think it's fair to say that's a long, long ways from not enforcing any immigration law.
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Fuel surcharges are a regular thing for UPS, Fedex, and others
https://www.fedex.com/en-us/shipping/historical-fuel-surchar...
https://www.ups.com/us/en/support/shipping-support/shipping-...