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.
ilamont 14 days ago [-]
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?
PaulRobinson 14 days ago [-]
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.
morelandjs 14 days ago [-]
I physically twitch every time I hear a flywheel mentioned. Intended to be evocative of certain physics without actually substantiating any of it.
knollimar 14 days ago [-]
What does it mean, really? I see it used more like catalyst or enablar than momentum storage. I'm still unsure.
scns 14 days ago [-]
Are record companies still charging artists for vinyl breakage on mp3 downloads?
cma 14 days ago [-]
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%.
hnav 14 days ago [-]
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.
cma 14 days ago [-]
~20c/GB to ~9c/GB was the 2006-2026 halving I mentioned. Two decades to drop by half.
hnav 14 days ago [-]
Accounting for inflation that's more like dropped by 75%. As AWS position as market leader erodes we'll likely see further drops.
MagicMoonlight 14 days ago [-]
And it costs them nothing, because they have free peering agreements with every network.
zobzu 14 days ago [-]
i fully expect it yo be permanent. they know its likely to come back down.
Brainspackle 14 days ago [-]
Do you buy off Temu and re-sell on amazon?
binarysolo 14 days ago [-]
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.
joemi 14 days ago [-]
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.
binarysolo 14 days ago [-]
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...
14 days ago [-]
gnabgib 14 days ago [-]
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)
zoover2020 14 days ago [-]
It was pretty clear to me. AWS is Web Services after all
exabrial 14 days ago [-]
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.
usefulcat 14 days ago [-]
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.
browningstreet 14 days ago [-]
Fewer mail carriers could hit twice as many places in a given time-frame and reduce overall gas usage.
lokar 14 days ago [-]
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.
SoftTalker 14 days ago [-]
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.
stryan 14 days ago [-]
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.
SoftTalker 14 days ago [-]
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).
stryan 14 days ago [-]
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.
hadlock 14 days ago [-]
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.
precommunicator 14 days ago [-]
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.
exabrial 14 days ago [-]
I pay all of my property taxes online.
15155 14 days ago [-]
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.)
raw_anon_1111 14 days ago [-]
Because you can’t make money serving rural areas and no for profit company would touch deliverying to those areas
lokar 14 days ago [-]
Another case of the evil, unamerican cities subsidizing the real Americans
michaelt 14 days ago [-]
Traditionally, the state has certain duties it needs to perform for every member of the population.
It’s much simpler to perform these duties if you have a means of communication that can reliably reach every citizen.
SoftTalker 14 days ago [-]
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.
joemi 14 days ago [-]
That's still far more reliable than trying to email someone who doesn't have a computer or smartphone.
lokar 14 days ago [-]
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.
dawnerd 14 days ago [-]
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.
duskdozer 14 days ago [-]
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.
46493168 14 days ago [-]
> I don't really understand why we need a US Postal Service in 2026
Mail in voting.
conception 13 days ago [-]
Denmark is like twice the size of Massachusetts.
Hikikomori 14 days ago [-]
Danskjävlarna ruined posten.
duskdozer 14 days ago [-]
>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.
lokar 14 days ago [-]
I don’t mind a public subsidy, but that’s not current law or the majority attitude
exabrial 14 days ago [-]
yeah... I'll take clean air and pay a few extra bucks the 3 times a year I actually need to mail something.
jackling 14 days ago [-]
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.
I’ve done it (several times, ‘cuz ten years), you’ll notice an almost immediate reduction in junk mail.
youarentrightjr 14 days ago [-]
Sounds like a racketeering operation (not saying it doesn't work).
culi 14 days ago [-]
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
mikestew 14 days ago [-]
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.
ssl-3 14 days ago [-]
What percentage of overall vehicular fuel use does junk mail (from inception to landfill) constitute, might you suppose?
tshaddox 14 days ago [-]
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!
ssl-3 14 days ago [-]
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.)
digitalsushi 14 days ago [-]
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.
slillibri 14 days ago [-]
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.
mikestew 14 days ago [-]
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.
14 days ago [-]
jghn 14 days ago [-]
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.
Teever 14 days ago [-]
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.
lenerdenator 14 days ago [-]
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.
singleshot_ 14 days ago [-]
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.
lenerdenator 14 days ago [-]
Will give that a try, thanks
culi 14 days ago [-]
If you live in the US you can stop almost all junk mail for $6 for a 10 year registration to DMA Choice
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
mrguyorama 14 days ago [-]
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.
calvinmorrison 11 days ago [-]
yes a public advertising delivery service
exabrial 14 days ago [-]
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.
0cf8612b2e1e 14 days ago [-]
Last year, Amazon backed down from sharing tariff pricing. I assume the same will happen here.
djoldman 14 days ago [-]
I immediately thought of that move.
This time I think the surcharge will stay until the war is concluded.
cogman10 14 days ago [-]
Yeah, but amazon isn't going to list it as a line item. Which they should.
duskdozer 14 days ago [-]
Concluded by "mission accomplished" or when the troops withdraw in another 20 years?
jazz9k 14 days ago [-]
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.
sidrag22 14 days ago [-]
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.
assimpleaspossi 14 days ago [-]
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.
The_SamminAter 13 days ago [-]
How much does it pay on average? And how is the payment broken down/do you earn per mile or package?
11 days ago [-]
ulrashida 14 days ago [-]
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.
jrockway 14 days ago [-]
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.
crazygringo 14 days ago [-]
> 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.
But it's human bias to notice when things get worse, but not when things get better.
jeromegv 14 days ago [-]
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
crazygringo 14 days ago [-]
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.
Loughla 14 days ago [-]
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).
tt24 14 days ago [-]
There is an argument to be made yes, but not a particularly good one.
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GeoSys 14 days ago [-]
I'm sure they'll pass it on to the end consumers - there goes the inflation bit by bit on every front ...
t1234s 14 days ago [-]
Does that 3.5% get passed to the seller if they are not using Amazon to ship the product?
binarysolo 14 days ago [-]
FBA products only
jeremie_strand 14 days ago [-]
[dead]
LightBug1 14 days ago [-]
[flagged]
etiennebausson 14 days ago [-]
>> (generous exemption for those who didn't vote for the orange dildo).
Those who could but didn't vote aren't blameless either.
youarentrightjr 14 days ago [-]
> 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.
kentm 14 days ago [-]
> - 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.
youarentrightjr 14 days ago [-]
> 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.
raw_anon_1111 14 days ago [-]
Well, the city government is no more responsible for enforcing immigration laws than it is enforcing IRS fraud.
youarentrightjr 14 days ago [-]
> 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?
raw_anon_1111 14 days ago [-]
What are you talking about?
youarentrightjr 14 days ago [-]
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?
raw_anon_1111 14 days ago [-]
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
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…
youarentrightjr 14 days ago [-]
> 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?
raw_anon_1111 14 days ago [-]
> 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.
youarentrightjr 14 days ago [-]
[flagged]
raw_anon_1111 14 days ago [-]
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..
youarentrightjr 14 days ago [-]
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.
Schiendelman 14 days ago [-]
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.
youarentrightjr 14 days ago [-]
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.
Schiendelman 13 days ago [-]
This is really inappropriate for Hacker News.
youarentrightjr 13 days ago [-]
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.
Schiendelman 13 days ago [-]
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.
youarentrightjr 13 days ago [-]
> 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.
cindyllm 13 days ago [-]
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youarentrightjr 14 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ahhhhnoooo 14 days ago [-]
> 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.
rdevilla 14 days ago [-]
[flagged]
bdcravens 14 days ago [-]
Fuel surcharges are a regular thing for UPS, Fedex, and others
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.
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200634500
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.
In two decades, since 2006, they've only come down by about 50%.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I haven't got a snail mail from my government for years at this point, nor did I needed to send one that way.
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.
IMO, a better option is to switch to 3 days/week delivery, and where addresses are very spread out, require centralized boxes.
Mail in voting.
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.
https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/personal/consu...
I’ve done it (several times, ‘cuz ten years), you’ll notice an almost immediate reduction in junk mail.
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
OTOH, for less than a dollar a year, I can go find other clouds to shake my fist at.
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!
(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.)
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.
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.
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 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.
https://consumer.ftc.gov/node/77522
50-60% of all mail is marketing slop
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.
Your numbers show exactly what I was guessing to be true though. Incredible this has never been enforced.
This time I think the surcharge will stay until the war is concluded.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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…
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?
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.
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..
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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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