Thank you, this was a fun rabbit hole to dive down. That blog also has a well-argued article about Zero Interest Rate Policy which relates to the doordash story: https://www.readmargins.com/p/zirp-explains-the-world
ryanjshaw [3 hidden]5 mins ago
They could have made another $5 per 10 pizzas after order #1 by just delivering the pizza to themselves and sending the same boxes back out in the next delivery, and so on.
mattmaroon [3 hidden]5 mins ago
An actual DoorDash driver had to do the delivery though. So you risk being reported and also, if they take awhile, pizza gets cold.
But they also could have just raised prices on everything but the cheap one DoorDash was using for pricing.
bruce511 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
No, he means recycling the boxes not the pizza inside the box.
The pizza itself can be literally given away (although if not on the premises, then presumably a box would be required.)
dyauspitr [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I mean you can just have a silicone mold in there, no actual pizza required.
akoboldfrying [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Junkfoodconomists term this "the velocity of pizza".
xg15 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Maybe that's my EU mindset, but I'm baffled how it's even legal to add a company to your public listing - complete with fake phone number - and just declare they're taking deliveries, all against the explicit wishes of the company.
(Complete with "chill bro, I was just <s>joking</s>demand testing you" at the end)
The blogger calls this being "tricked" to sign up for DoorDash. Seems to me, this is the same way a burglar "tricks" you into giving them your valuables.
eru [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Well, you can probably add some fine print somewhere that listings are just for educational purposes or something and may not represent the actual company.
rhplus [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Ha! It’s the trick Richard used in Silicon Valley season 5 episode 1 (2 years before the blog post) to bankrupt “SliceLine” and buy out their devs.
If you want to fight the VCs, you have to pull stunts like this. If they want to destroy local infrastructure because "free market", in an attempt to secure monopolies for themselves, then let them operate in a free market.
PaulDavisThe1st [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> then let them operate in a free market.
I think you meant to say "operate in a market that is regulated in precisely the way they want it to be".
wizzwizz4 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I said what I meant: most VC-backed startups could not survive in a real-world environment. Thank you for highlighting the distinction. Note that a free market isn't necessarily an unregulated market (see: Adam Smith).
Personally, I don't believe that free markets are a sensible way to manage local affairs. They work well on a medium scale, where goods are fungible and efficiency matters: but for something like the local pizza place, customer behaviour doesn't match that of a market participant. I don't think it's sensible to expect the local pizza place to be free of arbitrage opportunities. Someone who identifies and exploits such opportunities (e.g. "free meals available on request") would be taking advantage of goodwill, and the reason we can't have nice things. However, if a large corpo comes along and starts trying to undercut the locals, absolutely mug them for all they're worth: they're playing a different game, and it's not one you should want them to win.
pdonis [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> for something like the local pizza place, customer behaviour doesn't match that of a market participant.
I'm not sure why you think that. "Market participant" doesn't mean "always takes the lowest priced deal". People are willing to pay higher prices for food from local restaurants, as opposed to chains, fast food, etc., because they feel that the extra value they are getting (better quality, knowing the people who make the food, the atmosphere of the restaurant, etc.) is worth it. That's a free market.
What is not a free market is large corporations who get all kinds of government favors to prop them up coming in and taking advantage of arbitrage opportunities that the locals don't have the time or the energy to protect against--still more if such opportunities involve "marketing" the locals' products in ways the locals didn't agree to, and would not agree to if they were given the opportunity to make a choice. I completely agree with you that such things should be shut down.
Terr_ [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> What is not a free market is
A bit of a tangent, but price transparency is another factor.
At least when economists publish their "it's the bestest and most efficient option" analyses their definition involves perfect information: No secret prices, no non-disclosure agreements, everybody knows what was paid for inputs and labor, etc.
I bring this up because there is an unavoidable conflict between "the market that moves freely as a whole" version versus "the market where I'm free to keep secrets."
mattmaroon [3 hidden]5 mins ago
But why do you think they’re harming “local infrastructure”? The food delivery services didn’t hurt anything but their investors in the end. And they kept the restaurant industry alive during the pandemic, the fallout would have been so much worse. I work in the industry and know several bar/restaurant owners who will tell you DoorDash and competitors are the only reason they made it through 2020-21.
Early on they stopped prohibiting restaurants from upcharging, so restaurants all did. They ended up with some extra sales and profits. The customer got VC funded free delivery.
Enough alternatives kept the market place efficient. DoorDash can’t get too abusive when UberEats and Instacart are competing, restaurants have no switching cost.
The whole thing worked for basically everyone involved except maybe the investors (DoorDash has significantly underperformed the S&P since it debuted on the market.)
horsawlarway [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This has not been my experience.
From my side, as someone old enough to remember Domino's running the "there in thirty minutes or it's free" promotions... These delivery services absolutely tanked the quality of delivery.
Now you can basically only get slow delivery of over priced, cold food. Sure, you can get it from far more places, but it's a pyrrhic victory if I've ever seen one.
Used to be if a restaurant offered delivery, it was ok food for delivery, at ok prices, and their drivers had gear to keep it warm and presentable.
Now we basically only do pick up because these universal delivery companies suck at the one fucking thing they're supposed to do. But they've run all the local restaurants out of the delivery game.
hattmall [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yeah, as someone else pointed out, the gig-delivery services killed the delivery industry. Sure I can get food from a bunch of shitty fast food places now, but deliveries are way more expensive and take forever. The only place that still does good delivery around me is Jimmy Johns and Dominoes. I used to have 15-20 good quality delivery places that were fast with free delivery. And I'm as talking on the phone averse as anyone but calling a delivery place was just easier than using an app and they could give you updates on when they were out of something or whatever.
Uber eats / Door Dash suck so much I have no desire to order delivery food at all other than the two that run their own delivery and I know it will be a consistent experience. Anything else I either pick it or go without.
It was also shady how they paid for ads to supplant the phone numbers on Google so you were calling Door dash instead of the food place.
kergonath [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> Uber eats / Door Dash suck so much I have no desire to order delivery food at all other than the two that run their own delivery and I know it will be a consistent experience.
Same. It’s about the only reason why I order from Dominos occasionally. But last week it got delivered by Uber even though I ordered directly on their website. It also took 45 minutes to get delivered instead of the usual 10. So now the only Uber-free delivery I can get is a Japanese restaurant.
tjchear [3 hidden]5 mins ago
My understanding is food delivery companies take a huge cut (like 30%) so restaurants are forced to raise their prices significantly or risk losing customers. Even with that cut, food delivery customers still have to pay a significant delivery/service fee.
BobbyTables2 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
DoorDash finds a way to consistently screw up orders.
Order A,B,C - receive only A+B, or A,B,D. No explanation. Tipped generously.
For a long time, I myself drove and picked up my orders. The same restaurants rarely made mistakes. I never had to ask for missing item to be included. They always had everything in the bag.
It’s happened so often, it has to be malice from one of the parties involved.
drnick1 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> Tipped generously.
You shouldn't tip delivery drivers, it's literally their job.
gaudystead [3 hidden]5 mins ago
While I would love to agree with you, in America restaurants of all sizes (and personal transportation companies) seemingly often rely on tips from customers to supplement the wages of their workers instead of just paying them fairly.
vasco [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yeah so you shouldn't help them do that if you disagree with the practice
fuzzer371 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Have fun when no one wants to deliver food to you.
I feel I should point out that USPS has a lower rate for postcards (currently $0.61), so the threshold might be a bit lower.
I know that this is tongue-in-cheek and would be pretty funny to receive, but it isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. The experience of getting a little message printed on receipt paper is nothing like the experience of receiving a note or card in the mail. Through the mail you receive something physically from someone with their handwriting and some personality to it. Getting the Amazon message is more like printing out a text message on crummy paper.
Also, I don't have Prime, so it definitely isn't cost competitive for me anyway.
hatthew [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I agree in general, but as a one-off thing I'd very much enjoy getting a lime with a message saying "this was cheaper than sending a letter myself"
hoistbypetard [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I've started sending paperbacks instead of greeting cards when someone I know needs a get-well-soon card. In stores around here, greeting cards are often $7ish + postage. I can frequently ship a paperback with a gift receipt for $5 total. I include a gift message on the gift receipt, and choose a book I think someone might like to read while they're out of commission.
I guess it's a bit like postal arbitrage, if I accept the cost of greeting cards themselves as part of the cost of the activity.
To the extent that anyone has commented much, those who have commented had very positive reactions to what amounts to a book recommendation and a copy of the book I'm recommending along with a little note.
tempestn [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Haven't done it in a long time, but years ago I had a similar realization that picture frames were cheaper than cards. So you can frame a little note, either with a picture or just suggest they can reuse it if they like. Buying greeting cards always felt like kind of a waste.
Lately our kids' schools have been doing a thing each year where the kids do some art and then you can buy cards (and other things) with it, so we've been using those as they're at least a bit personal. Once that's done, maybe I'll give picture frames again (or paperbacks or cans of tomato soup...)
pastel8739 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is a good idea, but I also want to point out that a regular piece of paper makes a perfectly good greeting card
dizhn [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Reminds me of the old collect call trick. Rather than state your name when prompted you transmit a short, perhaps even coded, message. Then the receiving party declines the call.
LeifCarrotson [3 hidden]5 mins ago
"You have a collect call from MomWe'reAtTheArcadeCanYouPickUsUp?
Would you like to accept the charges?"
intrasight [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Ahh, the 70s. Good memories.
tempestn [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I recall using this occasionally in the 90s even.
There was also a period where I would regularly "one ring" my parents as code to call me back. IIRC that was because my cell plan had unlimited (or at least more) incoming minutes.
Ah, luckily the climate doesn't mind that oil was extracted, a phone case was produced out of it, shipped from China, to end up not even being used but just as a "greeting card".
Why yes, I am fun at parties.
xxpor [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The oil used for shipping from Shenzhen to Long Beach is completely trivial compared to what the truck used getting it from Long Beach to Pasadena.
> While nearly three-quarters of the world’s cargo is carried by ocean-going ships, road vehicles like trucks and vans make up the majority, 65%, of freight’s emissions. Most ships burn fossil fuels and emit carbon, but they carry large amounts of freight at the same time, making them the most efficient way to move cargo. Road freight, however, can emit more than 100 times as much CO2 as ships to carry the same amount of freight the same distance. Road transport is also a fast-growing sector—80% of the global increase in diesel consumption can be attributed to trucks. E-commerce and home delivery are two reasons for this growth.
BobbyTables2 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Not disagreeing but it’s amazing a ship plowing water out of the way is so much more efficient.
Perhaps trains beat road transport efficiency to a similar degree.
tdeck [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is why European cities had so many canals back in the day.
butvacuum [3 hidden]5 mins ago
classic volume grows faster than surface area.
also, fuel is a huge cost (maybe even the main cost), and drag has a >linear relationship with speed- so the ships will slow down based on fuel prices.
OrderlyTiamat [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The distance the boat has to cover is 11800 kilometers, and the truck covers only 54 kilometers. Taking that average of 12 times more usage from the table of sibling comment means the ship is still 20x worse.
BrenBarn [3 hidden]5 mins ago
But what if you apportion the fuel usage over the items transported? Presumably the ship carries far more items than the truck.
OrderlyTiamat [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is already taken into account: Shagie's table is based on [1], which is per kilogram-kilometer
I suspect they are underestimating how efficient ocean shipping really is.
cinnamonteal [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The distance from Shenzhen to Long Beach is some 300 times the distance from Long Beach to Pasadena, depending on where exactly in Pasadena and which route you take. The CO2 emissions factor for a truck is some 10-100x that of a container ship. The exact ratio depends on what kind of truck, and what scope of emissions are being included. The more one accounts for, the more it will favor the boat. But overall, the emissions from the oceanic leg of the trip are probably anywhere from 1-3x those of the truck.
However at some point branching is required, and the bulk rates also add latency.
conductr [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You have to normalize for package volume. There’s one ship involved, how many delivery vehicles and other auto related logistics until that whole shipload has reached its final destination?
hi-wintermute [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I did some napkin math on this as I recently picked up a 3D Printer and wondered the environmental comparison to print-at-home vs pick something up at the store and I was surprised. Had some help from Claude but "last mile delivery" is absolutely where the majority of the kWh is burned in the supply chain.
Container ships use ~0.015 kWh per ton-km[1] and a car is ~1.35 kWh/km.
If you go to the store and end up getting >10 things it becomes "worth it" from an energy standpoint. Anything less printing at home seemed to be more economical... Not an expert though just saying it opened my eyes to how inefficient "last mile delivery" energy consumption is.
> In 2022, researchers from the University of Michigan and Ford Motor Co. modeled a single 36-item grocery cart to compare greenhouse emissions from an e-commerce grocery delivery and a traditional trip to the store to get the same items. Gregory Keoleian and colleagues at the university's Center for Sustainable Systems found that using an electric vehicle to pick up groceries could cut emissions by as much as half, compared to a gas-powered vehicle.
> They also found that home delivery could be an even better option. That's because with a delivery vehicle, orders are often clustered, with a driver dropping off not just your groceries, but also hitting neighbors during the same run. "Delivery is actually going to be more efficient in general than driving yourself in a gasoline SUV to the store to pick up your groceries," Keoleian says.
> A recent USDA survey found that in 88% of U.S households, people hop in their car to buy groceries, driving an average of 4 miles to their preferred store. ... All these car trips result in carbon pollution: over 17 million metric tons of CO2 come from car tailpipes just from driving back and forth to the grocery store.
> While it is common for the consumer to associate convenience in the food industry with increased greenhouse gas emissions, this is not always the case. Results from a 2013 University of Washington study indicate that grocery delivery has the potential to reduce carbon emissions anywhere from 20 to 75 percent (Ma 2013), while another study out of Finland found the potential for grocery delivery to reduce emissions by up to 87 percent (Siikavirta et al. 2002).
> Buying goods online can be better for the environment than in-store shopping for one fundamental reason: With online shopping, a single truck or van can replace multiple car trips, by multiple households, to stores. It helps to think of it this way: In most of the United States, almost every purchase means putting a vehicle on the road—either your own or a delivery company’s.
And those articles come with their own citations to other articles.
sdenton4 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
My quixotic bicycle grocery buying system still wins, though.
eru [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You need to take into account your system requires there to be a nice store (presumably with aircon and lights on) within your cycling distance.
With online shopping and delivery, the warehouse can be a dark, cramped, hot, robot-filled pandemonium in the worst part of town.
badc0ffee [3 hidden]5 mins ago
That's better than the situation in Vancouver, where containers from the port go by rail 1000 km/600 miles and over Rogers Pass (1300 m/4400 ft), to logistics centres near Calgary, and then back by truck to Vancouver.
chrneu [3 hidden]5 mins ago
oh okay then that consumption is totally fine. no worries here mate!
shagie [3 hidden]5 mins ago
If the goal is reducing carbon emissions, making shipping emit half as much (650 Megatonne to 325 Mt) would be less of a gain than making trucking emit only 80% of its carbon (2,230 Mt to 1,830 Mt).
The question is which is easier to do (ROI)... to cut the shipping fuel carbon footprint by half, or over the road trucking (that's about 1/4th of all the shipping) by 20%? For that matter, moving 25% of the over the road trucking to rail would accomplish that too.
codebje [3 hidden]5 mins ago
EV trucking is a growing thing and might get that 20% reduction in trucking carbon footprints.
crumpled [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I'd send a free text message to a family member, offering them money in exchange for them not sending me trash from Amazon.
einpoklum [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I call, and raise you my own sardonic answer (not this one, the top-level one). :-\
robrain [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I’m in the same corner of the parties with you.
Also I’m passionately opposed to feathering billionaires’ nests, even with fractions of pennies of profit.
This story is funny, but also so so sad.
graup [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Last time I checked (a few years ago), it was cheaper to send letters and small packages from South Korea to Germany than from Germany to Germany. The delay was also not that big (maybe 1-2 weeks instead of 3-5 days). I already envisioned an arbitrage business for this: a simple page where people upload their non-urgent letters as PDFs, and I just print and mail them from Korea.
Sesse__ [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is already a thing; political parties sending out their mass mailings from Poland to Norway.
eru [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I'm surprised Poland is still cheap enough to make that worthwhile. (Compared to poorer EU countries you could send from.)
mystifyingpoi [3 hidden]5 mins ago
In Poland, OLX (basically equivalent eBay) commonly has promotional campaigns, where you can buy something from a select category with 1 PLN shipping to box machine (around $0.30).
So people figured out, that you can abuse it to send anything to anyone in the country. Just create a fake listing for 1 PLN, let the receiver "buy" it (there is some extra service fee, but like $1) and there you go - probably the cheapest shipping possible, much cheaper than regular ~$5-7 box machine package.
corentin88 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Same thing in France with Vinted
johnfn [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Somewhat off-topic, but when I click on "Case-Mate - Case for 2009 LG Xenon - Marsala"[1], the "About this item" section simply states:
It might be a placeholder product to hold the ASIN.
Some (many?) vendors on Amazon will recycle pages this way. Sell some item, change the item and description to dummy values when it stops selling, change to another item that will be sold, repeat.
This is usually done to keep the reviews, though I've also heard about this being used for money laundering.
tdeck [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It's amazing that this has been going on for decades and Amazon still doesn't give a shit.
ornornor [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Amazon gets a commission on the sale and doesn’t bear the cost of the returns. What’s not to like/where is the problem/everybody wins/nothing to see here
brk [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It’s an 18 pound phone case for less than a dollar. How bad could it be?
jp191919 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You can pre-order it...
I actually used to have(maybe still have?) a LG Xenon
crumpled [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Jeff Bezos has more money than the Federal Trade Commission. That's how we pick the winner in any conflict.
systemerror [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Don't give money to amazon that is better spent on an amazingly efficient postal service. Amazon is subsidized by imaginary money until they put all their competition out of business(including USPS).
Fwirt [3 hidden]5 mins ago
My honest question is: If you pull shenanigans like this, isn't it actually making Amazon burn through said imaginary money, thus hastening its demise? The cost of delivering a potato has to be on the order of at least a couple dollars.
roncesvalles [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I don't think Amazon is losing money. It's really just that efficient.
E.g. an Amazon van rolls through my street multiple times a day. What is the marginal cost of them stopping at my house and dropping off a potato?
PaulDavisThe1st [3 hidden]5 mins ago
At your house it might be fractions of a cent.
At my house, it's a 140 mile round trip between the fulfillment center ("are you feeling fulfilled yet?") and the drop off location.
OTOH, there's likely more of "you" than there are of "me" ...
ajdlinux [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Assuming it's the US we're talking about, the federal minimum wage is $7.25, which means that if every worker involved is paid at the minimum wage, you incur a cent of labour costs every 4.97 person-seconds. AFAICT, most Amazon workers are paid substantially higher than the federal minimum wage. And that's just labour costs.
While Amazon is efficient, "fractions of a cent" is probably the wrong order of magnitude for even the most efficient order.
hekkle [3 hidden]5 mins ago
That's not even mentioning their additional overheads, like the cost of fuel for their idling van as they drop off your potato.
saaaaaam [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You might be 140 miles round trip to the nearest fulfilment centre, but you're almost certainly closer to your nearest neighbours who regularly buy stuff from Amazon, so the van is probably coming pretty close to you any way.
relaxing [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Amazon will close your account before you can impact their bottom line.
crumpled [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I think they let you (not YOU necessarily, but the proverbial you.) get away with stuff because they know your habits and you probably make more money for them than you realize.
I can almost guarantee that everyone mentioned in that blog post is a habitual Amazon user. They're all renewing Prime each year at full price and making a ton of regular purchases. The family has even turned on the FOMO by making Prime a family social network with social pressure to stay. I see it as a self-own, personally.
Edit: I'm taking part of this to the root of the thread
vidarh [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Can you explain? Amazon is wildly profitable, and while AWS is far higher margin than their retail businesses, everything I can find suggests their retail segment also has a healthy operating margin.
bandrami [3 hidden]5 mins ago
If you put all of the money Amazon as a whole has taken since it was founded in 1994 in a stack on the left, and all of the money Amazon as a whole has spent since then in a stack on the right, the stack on the left is slightly larger, but this has only been true for a couple of years now.
It's the difference in 1990s billionaires and 2020s billionaires. Bill Gates was so rich because he owned a lot of Microsoft shares and received profits from those shares as dividends. Jeff Bezos is so rich because he owns a lot of Amazon shares and people keep being willing to pay more and more for those shares so his notional net worth increases (AMZN has never paid a dividend).
ornornor [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> his notional net worth increases (AMZN has never paid a dividend).
But that’s exactly the loophole: you can borrow for very cheap against this notional equity without incurring a cent in taxes (since divodends are never paid out)
umanwizard [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Can you share numbers? What are Amazon’s margins?
dec0dedab0de [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I hate USPS, and will not be doing anything to benefit them until they offer a way to limit my deliveries to once a month, and opt out of anything that has "or current resident"
At the very least they should charge more for bulk mail, not give out discounts.
SoftTalker [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Unfortunately bulk mail is the only thing paying the bills. That and being a last mile delivery service for Amazon.
umanwizard [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Which is a totally valid reason to hate USPS.
The USPS is a government-run spam delivery service that there is no way to opt out of. Those of us who do banking and other administrative tasks online would be better off if the government shut it down completely, or better yet subsidized it slightly so it doesn't have to deliver spam to survive.
But as it is, I don't see any good reason to have any more respect for USPS than I do for any other spammer.
lkbm [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Doesn't seem like USPS is the spammer. They're Gmail. People send spam and USPS/Gmail delivers it.
umanwizard [3 hidden]5 mins ago
No, it’s completely different. Gmail actively tries to prevent spam. If they catch you sending it, you will be banned, and they let individual users block whoever they want. A huge part of their product is automated spam filtering.
On the other hand, spam delivery is the business model of USPS. They actively and intentionally market and sell their services to spammers, and not surprisingly, give normal users no way to opt out.
kmoser [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There are mail forwarding services[0] that let you automatically filter out junk mail. Yes, they cost money, but at least you can accomplish your goal of opting out (or in) from receiving postal mail from certain senders.
[0] E.g. https://www.usglobalmail.com/virtual-mailbox/
weird-eye-issue [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You will still get mail to your address though...
kmoser [3 hidden]5 mins ago
If your goal is to receive zero mail at your address, simply have all your email forwarded to this service and configure it to opt-out of all notifications.
Alternately, you can forward your mail to an entirely different address. (This is just a Gedankenexperiment; please don't spam strangers by forwarding your mail to them.)
dec0dedab0de [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yes, exactly. I wish the post office were subsidized and acted in the interests of the public. But it is not, and does not.
jonpurdy [3 hidden]5 mins ago
In Canada, you can place a red dot (or write no unsolicited mail) on your mailbox and they will withhold delivering anything not directly addressed to you.
I was shocked when I moved to SF and found out there was no way to opt out of unaddressed mail (or "current resident").
euroderf [3 hidden]5 mins ago
In Finland AFAICT there's no bulk postal rate. Instead, paper spam is delivered thru mail slots by private services that hit all the buildings in the neighborhood and drop collections of paper spam. So, many people post a note on their door opting out from this stuff. (Ei mainoksia = No ads.) It must be saving absolutely huge amounts of paper.
bombcar [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I've used something like this list to get "over the hump" for $35 to reach free shipping without prime.
It's horribly annoying to have a product that is $34.99 and you want it, but it'll cost shipping unless you get the damn Volkswagen screw; and then Amazon ships them individually anyway.
ornornor [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You can also get preorder items, it adds to the total. Your actual items hips right away but the preorder doesn’t. Once you get your item, cancel the preorder and you’re done.
mystifyingpoi [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Just play their stupid game. My wife does this all the time, buys random items just to go past the free shipping range, then the item goes into trash (or is returned, if possible).
Even sellers started doing this, but instead of selling random items, they sell "extra hardened packaging material" conveniently at $1, $2, $3... prices. Of course when item arrives, no extra material to be seen. When questioned, one of them said "well, the package had cardboard box - that's it, wink wink, please do not report us".
lkbm [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I recently bought a small pack of pens because 1. I keep not having pens when I need them, but mostly 2. Subscribe and Save discount on some much higher priced increased by 5%-10%, easily overwhelming the price of the pens.
koyote [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I have done this specifically with the second item in the list in the OP.
Not only did I do it to get free shipping, I got it to get free international shipping.
For extra bonus CO2 points, the other item was coming from a different country.
So I basically paid $0.42 to have a single packet of kool-aid shipped across the pacific ocean.
(I'd never had kool-aid before and I must say I was disappointed.)
yujzgzc [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It's not arbitrage until you can make money by selling something that costs you less than what you bought it for. What it is is bundled product (item + shipping) being priced lower than just one of the elements in the bundle (shipping) therefore making a case that one might as well always buy the bundle.
stevage [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yeah, "arbitrage" is not the right term here. This is just a complicated way to get a lower quality version of a service (sending a letter by mail) at a lower price.
kmoser [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Theoretically you can offer a service that sends a physical message for less than the cost of a letter, and use this hack to do it profitably.
pruetj [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Funny seeing this. I've been working on a site to allow people to send a letter as cheaply and conveniently as possible. I actually think letters (physical) are a great way to make an impression, often times much more so than an email. Had never considered sending an actual object lol.
At current scale (which is very small), the cheapest I can get it down to without losing money is $1.55 per letter (postage, paper, print, envelope, stripe fees, misc. hosting fees, etc.). Sadly, I have no way to compete with a $0.25 lime!
What if you also start providing the 0.25$ lime feature as well (by making use of the amazon prime itself as well?) xD?
weird-eye-issue [3 hidden]5 mins ago
At any scale your Amazon prime account would be shut down, you can't do account sharing in that way
tempestn [3 hidden]5 mins ago
However, you could offer a service to existing Amazon prime users to help find these fun, cheap gift items. Maybe generate punny jokes people could include in the notes if they want. Join the Amazon affiliate program and earn a few cents from each...
cellular [3 hidden]5 mins ago
"Include a note with this purchase"
=
Free postage for a letter!
jackfranklyn [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The DoorDash pizza arbitrage comparison is apt. Both cases expose the same fundamental thing: venture-subsidised pricing creates artificial market conditions that clever people will exploit.
What I find interesting is how long these windows stay open. You'd think someone at Stamps.com or UPS would notice the pricing anomaly, but large organisations are often too siloed. The team setting international rates probably doesn't talk to whoever monitors small parcel economics.
The author mentions making a few hundred dollars - but the real question is scalability. At what volume does this become attractive enough for the postal services to close the loophole? There's probably a sweet spot between "not worth their attention" and "actually profitable."
alexfoo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The USPS have been on the receiving end of it themselves back in 1916 when someone mailed a building:
At the time of writing, the cheapest item in the list is a $0.25 lime.
When I add that to my basket and go to checkout, the only available delivery option 'Fast - Tomorrow' costs $2.99.
There is a non-food item in the list, which costs $0.51+tax, i.e. $0.54 including free shipping.
sambaumann [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Turns out, at least in my area, for the grocery items you need to buy at least $25 worth to qualify for the free shipping.
modeless [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yeah, this is misleading. You can't send a lime for $0.25. It's $3.24 minimum.
sciurus [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I checked the first five items while logged in with Amazon Prime. They all required a minimum order of either $25 or $100 to get free shipping.
andy99 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I canceled prime ~8 years ago because where I am, half the stuff I wanted was considered an “add on item” that could only be shipped free if you had > $35 of other stuff, which is a complete scam because you get that without prime.
Maybe that was just for me (in a large Canadian city at the time) or maybe they don’t do that anymore?
I haven’t considered getting prime since, it would be a lot more interesting if it actually provided the shipping terms they advertise.
ics [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It was like that in NYC at the time as well. I'm not sure when it stopped but have not seen add-on items in a long time and most things seem to ship immediately regardless of price (with Prime).
crazygringo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yeah, haven't seen in a long time either. I can't help but wonder if it's related to Amazon building its own delivery infrastructure instead of relying on UPS/USPS like it once did? (At least where I am.)
s0rce [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I checked the lime listed and it seems to be a regular amazon prime item for me (norcal) and not the grocery you described, which we also have.
modeless [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Did you press the buy button? The shipping fee is $2.99
s0rce [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Ah, you're right. Sneaky.
TheJoeMan [3 hidden]5 mins ago
To the author, would you consider changing the “key photo”? I sent the weblink to a friend, and the key photo in iMessage is the pregnancy test and they got the wrong impression about the site/prank. Pick the lemon or can of beans perhaps?
kyleee [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Link previews were a mistake
jervant [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There are also things on eBay with a starting price of less than a dollar with free shipping that never get bids. I "won" two auctions like this the other week for brand new USB-C cables, each of them costing me 13 cents shipped.
I have no idea why sellers would do this with eBay fees and USPS small package shipping costing well over 13 cents.
qingcharles [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I did this on a mass scale. There are auction items that close at 1 cent with free shipping, so I signed up for the eBay API and wrote a bot to scrape all the auctions and bid one cent on them a minute before they closed.
I ended up with an enormous overflowing mountain of packages every day for weeks. I might have gone crazier, but there was a serious bug in eBay's checkout. Try checking out with 400 items in your cart. It really gets upset.
99% of the packages were Chinese sellers but the packages all came from Mongolia, so there must be some sort of postal arbitrage going on there.
It was all random stuff. Hairclips, 500 bicycle lamps. Dozens of tubes of ICs of every flavor. Crazy times.
tempestn [3 hidden]5 mins ago
What did you do with all the random stuff?
crazygringo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Presumably they are inexperienced sellers who haven't learned about reserve prices?
Now you're part of their education.
Or... they are sophisticated and trying to get a ton of relatively inexpensive positive ratings before selling things that are actually expensive?
stevage [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There are some of us going to great lengths to reduce the amount of plastic we consume, the crap we buy and then throw out, distances travelled on our behalf.
And then there are these people. Sending a pregnancy test to their grandma. What a hoot!
globular-toast [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Sometimes it's a curse to think. My friend group years ago started "Secret Santa" at Christmas and I quickly realised it wasn't about giving useful or even entertaining gifts, it was just about the joke of the item itself. The more useless or stupid the better! I didn't realise this and chose a gift I thought would be appreciated but they were super disappointed that they weren't part of the joke. I've boycotted Secret Santa ever since.
munificent [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I would delight to receive birthday cards in Maruchan Ramen form.
sixothree [3 hidden]5 mins ago
As is tradition.
dawnerd [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This needs to be updated to check if an item is just local delivery. Most of the items are not available for delivery unless you live close to a fresh.
notherhack [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The lowest I found is two clip-on CAT5e cable termination jacks for $0.80 + 0.08 tax. Available in a rainbow of colors and shipped free to Seattle by Sunday if you order in the next 10 hours.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08T63ST97
Send a $0.01 check with your bank’s Bill Pay feature, and write your message in the memo.
tempestn [3 hidden]5 mins ago
As a Canadian, the free printing and mailing of paper checks anywhere in the country is perhaps the wildest US bank feature to me.
euroderf [3 hidden]5 mins ago
As an ex-pat, I'm really surprised by the pervasiveness of Amazon in the US. I guess if you wanted to quickly convert the US economy to market socialism, the first step might be to nationalize Amazon, fix the treatment of its workers, fix the IPR-related crap, electrify all of its transport, and then base the country's consumer economy (of non-perishables, for simplicity) around the resultant post-Amazonian logistics spiderweb. "Now with delivery drones on land, sea, and air!"
babelfish [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Riley Walz is easily one of the most creative people in tech today.
cypherpunks01 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yes, Jmail.world and the entire Jmail suite is mind-blowingly impressive, apparently Walz and @lukeigel co-created it.
crazygringo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I get the point, but this seems pretty out of date. Seems like it needs a [2025] (?) at least.
A couple of these are still valid with Prime, but most of them are Amazon Fresh items ($9.95 service fee for orders under $50), or out of stock, or the price is now way more.
blauditore [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I'm super surprised there is still free shipping for small things. In (some) other parts of the world, they will charge significant delivery fürs for anything below $50 or so. It basically changed during Covid, and since every shop is now doing it, there's no competition on that.
keepamovin [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is beautiful. Thank you for this! Beautifully execute, beautiful idea :)
cadamsdotcom [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Tempted to start paying cash to mates to drive us to and from the airport. We have to pay for the ride either way - may as well put it in a friend’s pocket.
Tempted to vibecode a little tool to manage ride requests..
bee_rider [3 hidden]5 mins ago
A cheaper option (if we’re going to do away with the restriction that the post card should be sent by the sender) would be for the recipient to hook their printer up to the network, and just send bits.
It is better, actually, you can even scan a real hand written post card.
wizzwizz4 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
We could even make a standardised protocol, where anyone could send messages to any connected printer: like letters, except a facsimile of the original document is produced. I'm struggling to think of a catchy name for this, though.
kennywinker [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It’s not a fax unless it’s from the facsimile region of france. What you’re describing is just sparkling email.
sudobash1 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You can even still do fax machines if you really wanted to.
dec0dedab0de [3 hidden]5 mins ago
owning a printer is never the cheaper option.
rationalist [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I'm sorry the ink cartel hurt you. May I introduce you to the world of laser printers?
My color laser printer has definitely been cheaper than me driving to the store hundreds of times to print thousands of color prints.
itintheory [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I think it depends. I bought a Dell 1700 laser printer for the low price of $0 at a second hand store about 19 years ago. They said it was failing to pull paper from the tray, and I could have it if I wanted. I fixed the rollers responsible for feeding (turned the rubber wheels inside out), and used it for another 10 years without issue. Sure, toner costs some money, but an off-brand toner cartridge is $25, rated for 3000 pages. I have also needed to replace the drum, and at one point picked up a second 1700 into which I had to put the old drum and toner after some failure or another.
I'd estimate I've put in $200 at most, and probably put 15-20k pages through it. Still prints just fine. It doesn't have color, or networking features, but I can share it on the network from the connected computer. I'm not sure they make anything this reliable these days, but I bet there's quite a few old laser printers floating around still.
Dylan16807 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
When compared to amazon prime, a laser printer can be cheaper than a single year. Add a pile of paper and the printer is cheaper even if it breaks every year and a half.
focusedone [3 hidden]5 mins ago
All of these items appear to have received the HN hug of death. They're all showing as unavailable for me, who just wanted to drop a friendly lime hello to a friend across town.
kazinator [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Has this person tried it?
Doesn't Amazon shipping have to go to the billing address on the credit card?
Being able to purchase on a credit card and have it sent anywhere makes it that much easier to use stolen credit cards.
AnssiH [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> Doesn't Amazon shipping have to go to the billing address on the credit card?
No, I've had stuff shipped to plenty of addresses.
kazinator [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It looks like the billing address restriction was a "thing" years ago, but is simply too impractical for modern day e-commerce. People want to do gifting, or get things delivered to temporary accomodations like vacation spots. They are relying on approaches like heuristics (sudden purchase for something expensive going to an unusual address), plus CVV verification to help ensure that the purchaser physically has the card (still allows theft, but adds a layer).
astura [3 hidden]5 mins ago
No, it was never a "thing," "mark as gift" has always been an option on Amazon to send gifts to family and friends.
toast0 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You have to provide the billing address for the card. But you don't have to ship there.
Plenty of people ship to the office. I buy stuff for my parents from time to time. When I'm on vacation, I might ship to the hotel or a friend I'm visiting or ...
SoftTalker [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Pretty sure if you buy something as a "gift" (which is what allows the inclusion of a message) then you can send it to a different address. I rarely use Amazon and never have used it to send a gift so could be wrong.
umanwizard [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You can send things to other addresses regardless of whether it's a gift or not.
kazinator [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Like so many awaited packages, it is neither here nor there. :)
umanwizard [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> Doesn't Amazon shipping have to go to the billing address on the credit card?
No and that would be crazy. I'm not aware of any e-commerce site that has a restriction like that.
> Being able to purchase on a credit card and have it sent anywhere makes it that much easier to use stolen credit cards.
Well, it's probably one fraud signal among many, but it's absolutely not generally prohibited. I've sent things from Amazon to other people (or to myself while staying in a hotel), and other people have sent things to me, many times.
kazinator [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Why stick to strictly under $78? Something that costs $2 with free shipping has a built in $0.78 discount if you consider its free postcard function.
ekropotin [3 hidden]5 mins ago
But the cost of Amazon Prime have to be factored in as well
bigstrat2003 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Only if you weren't already paying for Prime. If you were, then it's irrelevant as this usage adds no marginal cost.
moralestapia [3 hidden]5 mins ago
"If you already pay for shipping then shipping adds no marginal cost."
OkayPhysicist [3 hidden]5 mins ago
well, yeah. That's what the phrase "marginal cost" means: if it costs $x to do something N times, and $x + $y to do something N+1 times, $y is the marginal cost.
happyopossum [3 hidden]5 mins ago
No, for anyone considering doing this it does not have to be factored in as it’s a sunk cost.
JSR_FDED [3 hidden]5 mins ago
There’s an even better way to send an actual letter for free.
Simply switch the destination address on the envelope with the sender address, and drop it in the mailbox.
When then post office returns the letter to sender because of insufficient postage it will have delivered the letter for you.
lkbm [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Keep in mind that in the US this is illegal, and it's unreliable, since insufficient postage mail isn't necessarily returned. This is one of the oldest forms of mail fraud, and they're well aware of it.
astura [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Mail fraud is illegal, dude.
scottmcdot [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Is there a simple way to search for everything and order by price descending? I'm in Australia so those items aren't much use.
Jill_the_Pill [3 hidden]5 mins ago
How much did they pay to have Prime? Have to add that in.
autoexec [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Exactly. It'd probably take a while before you actually cost amazon more than what you'd already paid them in shipping plus the cost of all the <78 cent items you sent along with your messages.
While screwing over amazon is noble enough, the end result of people doing this would only result in higher fees for prime and fewer items being eligible for "free" shipping. At the same time, you'd be depriving a very valuable public service of the few cents they ask to offset the cost of message delivery to anywhere in the nation. I'm sure they'd be happy to deliver something besides spam too.
gowld [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Debunked in the first click:
$0.25 - Lime - Amazon Fresh -FREE 2-hour delivery on orders over *$100*
Other products have similar shipping restrictions, or the prices are higher than claimed.
Also, most of the cheapest products (at least before tariff effects kicked in) don't allow customized messages that postcards allow, for obvious reasons.
languagehacker [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Isn't postal arbitrage how the original Ponzi scheme started?
wat10000 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Indeed. Ponzi attempted to buy International Reply Coupons in countries where they were cheap, then exchange them for stamps in the US and sell the stamps for much more than the purchase price of the IRC.
Of course, it didn't work. There wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with the arbitrage scheme, but the profit per coupon was way too low to make it feasible as a business. Ponzi pivoted to paying off older investments with new investments, and the rest is history.
sanex [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Just sent my friend a bag of gravy mix, thank you!
ada1981 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The lime is .25 but the s&h is 2.99 even with Prime; and tax too.
Prime seems to only offer free shipping if it’s over $25?
einpoklum [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> You're not only saving money.
That's right, you're also cementing Amazon's control of the US economy. Both by doing more business there, and by spending time on that site which will lead to you doing even more of your business there. Not to mention having to be an "Amazon Prime" person to begin with.
This may sound weird to some, but - you should really avoid using Amazon where possible.
ck2 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
A more recent question I have is how Amazon is skipping DeMinimis fees which are now massive on 50 cent or $1 items from their "Amazon Haul" which come from overseas
It arrives in a few weeks by Amazon's own carriers, not USPS/UPS/FedEx
Who is paying the $80 DeMinimis fee on the $1 cable I got last week from China?
rootusrootus [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Is it always $75 minimum, or is it alternatively 90% ad valorem?
reader9274 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
What a waste
dheera [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I mean, you just gave Amazon free advertising, which is kinda what they probably were looking for.
deviation [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Here in Ireland, a stamp is 1.85eur.
So. Many. Possibilities.
pkaye [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Wow didn't realize its much more expensive in some places outside the US. I'd think the smaller land area would make it cheaper.
autoexec [3 hidden]5 mins ago
The USPS is an amazing service. Extremely dependable and affordable. They service places that no sane company ever would and they do a pretty good job. The only real downside is that it centralizes government surveillance, but the same can be said for the other large/popular private delivery services.
Symbiote [3 hidden]5 mins ago
In Denmark it is €3.08 for a 100g letter.
This appears to be the cost without subsidy, with the mail service now run by a private company.
It's fine. I receive less than the average 10 letters per year (including junk mail). I check the mail box every two weeks or so.
autoexec [3 hidden]5 mins ago
> This appears to be the cost without subsidy, with the mail service now run by a private company.
That just means that whatever it actually costs to deliver mail to/from whatever parts of Denmark they provide service for, the people who use the service will pay that cost plus an additional cost on top of it so that the private owner (and perhaps their shareholders) can line their pockets. The nice thing about public services is that you avoid paying that extra money just so that a small number of people can personally profit from it. You can also lose a lot of transparency and control over how the service is run.
That said, I'm a bit envious of the lack of junk mail.
m-hodges [3 hidden]5 mins ago
lol everyone in the comments is taking this way too seriously
chatmasta [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is just being rude to delivery drivers.
rationalist [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I think they would prefer to deliver small items than large, heavy items.
crumpled [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I can almost guarantee that everyone mentioned in that blog post is a habitual Amazon user. They're all renewing Prime each year at full price and making a ton of regular purchases. The family has even turned on the FOMO by making Prime a family social network with social pressure to stay. I see it as a self-own, personally.
HN.zip
A pizzeria owner made money buying his own $24 pizzas from DoorDash for $16
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/18/21262316/doordash-pizza-p...
But they also could have just raised prices on everything but the cheap one DoorDash was using for pricing.
The pizza itself can be literally given away (although if not on the premises, then presumably a box would be required.)
(Complete with "chill bro, I was just <s>joking</s>demand testing you" at the end)
The blogger calls this being "tricked" to sign up for DoorDash. Seems to me, this is the same way a burglar "tricks" you into giving them your valuables.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_season_5
I think you meant to say "operate in a market that is regulated in precisely the way they want it to be".
Personally, I don't believe that free markets are a sensible way to manage local affairs. They work well on a medium scale, where goods are fungible and efficiency matters: but for something like the local pizza place, customer behaviour doesn't match that of a market participant. I don't think it's sensible to expect the local pizza place to be free of arbitrage opportunities. Someone who identifies and exploits such opportunities (e.g. "free meals available on request") would be taking advantage of goodwill, and the reason we can't have nice things. However, if a large corpo comes along and starts trying to undercut the locals, absolutely mug them for all they're worth: they're playing a different game, and it's not one you should want them to win.
I'm not sure why you think that. "Market participant" doesn't mean "always takes the lowest priced deal". People are willing to pay higher prices for food from local restaurants, as opposed to chains, fast food, etc., because they feel that the extra value they are getting (better quality, knowing the people who make the food, the atmosphere of the restaurant, etc.) is worth it. That's a free market.
What is not a free market is large corporations who get all kinds of government favors to prop them up coming in and taking advantage of arbitrage opportunities that the locals don't have the time or the energy to protect against--still more if such opportunities involve "marketing" the locals' products in ways the locals didn't agree to, and would not agree to if they were given the opportunity to make a choice. I completely agree with you that such things should be shut down.
A bit of a tangent, but price transparency is another factor.
At least when economists publish their "it's the bestest and most efficient option" analyses their definition involves perfect information: No secret prices, no non-disclosure agreements, everybody knows what was paid for inputs and labor, etc.
I bring this up because there is an unavoidable conflict between "the market that moves freely as a whole" version versus "the market where I'm free to keep secrets."
Early on they stopped prohibiting restaurants from upcharging, so restaurants all did. They ended up with some extra sales and profits. The customer got VC funded free delivery.
Enough alternatives kept the market place efficient. DoorDash can’t get too abusive when UberEats and Instacart are competing, restaurants have no switching cost.
The whole thing worked for basically everyone involved except maybe the investors (DoorDash has significantly underperformed the S&P since it debuted on the market.)
From my side, as someone old enough to remember Domino's running the "there in thirty minutes or it's free" promotions... These delivery services absolutely tanked the quality of delivery.
Now you can basically only get slow delivery of over priced, cold food. Sure, you can get it from far more places, but it's a pyrrhic victory if I've ever seen one.
Used to be if a restaurant offered delivery, it was ok food for delivery, at ok prices, and their drivers had gear to keep it warm and presentable.
Now we basically only do pick up because these universal delivery companies suck at the one fucking thing they're supposed to do. But they've run all the local restaurants out of the delivery game.
Uber eats / Door Dash suck so much I have no desire to order delivery food at all other than the two that run their own delivery and I know it will be a consistent experience. Anything else I either pick it or go without.
It was also shady how they paid for ads to supplant the phone numbers on Google so you were calling Door dash instead of the food place.
Same. It’s about the only reason why I order from Dominos occasionally. But last week it got delivered by Uber even though I ordered directly on their website. It also took 45 minutes to get delivered instead of the usual 10. So now the only Uber-free delivery I can get is a Japanese restaurant.
Order A,B,C - receive only A+B, or A,B,D. No explanation. Tipped generously.
For a long time, I myself drove and picked up my orders. The same restaurants rarely made mistakes. I never had to ask for missing item to be included. They always had everything in the bag.
It’s happened so often, it has to be malice from one of the parties involved.
You shouldn't tip delivery drivers, it's literally their job.
Win everything you need from sweepstakes!
I know that this is tongue-in-cheek and would be pretty funny to receive, but it isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. The experience of getting a little message printed on receipt paper is nothing like the experience of receiving a note or card in the mail. Through the mail you receive something physically from someone with their handwriting and some personality to it. Getting the Amazon message is more like printing out a text message on crummy paper.
Also, I don't have Prime, so it definitely isn't cost competitive for me anyway.
I guess it's a bit like postal arbitrage, if I accept the cost of greeting cards themselves as part of the cost of the activity.
To the extent that anyone has commented much, those who have commented had very positive reactions to what amounts to a book recommendation and a copy of the book I'm recommending along with a little note.
Would you like to accept the charges?"
Why yes, I am fun at parties.
> While nearly three-quarters of the world’s cargo is carried by ocean-going ships, road vehicles like trucks and vans make up the majority, 65%, of freight’s emissions. Most ships burn fossil fuels and emit carbon, but they carry large amounts of freight at the same time, making them the most efficient way to move cargo. Road freight, however, can emit more than 100 times as much CO2 as ships to carry the same amount of freight the same distance. Road transport is also a fast-growing sector—80% of the global increase in diesel consumption can be attributed to trucks. E-commerce and home delivery are two reasons for this growth.
Perhaps trains beat road transport efficiency to a similar degree.
also, fuel is a huge cost (maybe even the main cost), and drag has a >linear relationship with speed- so the ships will slow down based on fuel prices.
[1] https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/freight-transportation
However at some point branching is required, and the bulk rates also add latency.
Container ships use ~0.015 kWh per ton-km[1] and a car is ~1.35 kWh/km.
If you go to the store and end up getting >10 things it becomes "worth it" from an energy standpoint. Anything less printing at home seemed to be more economical... Not an expert though just saying it opened my eyes to how inefficient "last mile delivery" energy consumption is.
[1] https://www.withouthotair.com/c15/page_95.shtml (old reference)
One of the oddities of home shopping and delivery is that it can be more efficient.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/10/nx-s1-5020321/food-delivery-m...
> In 2022, researchers from the University of Michigan and Ford Motor Co. modeled a single 36-item grocery cart to compare greenhouse emissions from an e-commerce grocery delivery and a traditional trip to the store to get the same items. Gregory Keoleian and colleagues at the university's Center for Sustainable Systems found that using an electric vehicle to pick up groceries could cut emissions by as much as half, compared to a gas-powered vehicle.
> They also found that home delivery could be an even better option. That's because with a delivery vehicle, orders are often clustered, with a driver dropping off not just your groceries, but also hitting neighbors during the same run. "Delivery is actually going to be more efficient in general than driving yourself in a gasoline SUV to the store to pick up your groceries," Keoleian says.
The mentioned paper is https://css.umich.edu/publications/research-publications/car...
---
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/what-if-more-people-bought...
> A recent USDA survey found that in 88% of U.S households, people hop in their car to buy groceries, driving an average of 4 miles to their preferred store. ... All these car trips result in carbon pollution: over 17 million metric tons of CO2 come from car tailpipes just from driving back and forth to the grocery store.
---
https://csanr.wsu.edu/how-do-grocery-and-meal-kit-deliveries...
> While it is common for the consumer to associate convenience in the food industry with increased greenhouse gas emissions, this is not always the case. Results from a 2013 University of Washington study indicate that grocery delivery has the potential to reduce carbon emissions anywhere from 20 to 75 percent (Ma 2013), while another study out of Finland found the potential for grocery delivery to reduce emissions by up to 87 percent (Siikavirta et al. 2002).
---
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/shop-online-sustaina...
> Buying goods online can be better for the environment than in-store shopping for one fundamental reason: With online shopping, a single truck or van can replace multiple car trips, by multiple households, to stores. It helps to think of it this way: In most of the United States, almost every purchase means putting a vehicle on the road—either your own or a delivery company’s.
---
Some others:
https://blog.sevensenders.com/en/ecommerce-carbon-footprint-...
https://web.archive.org/web/20250302115526/https://sustainab... (this one is quite comprehensive also including the difference in packaging)
And those articles come with their own citations to other articles.
With online shopping and delivery, the warehouse can be a dark, cramped, hot, robot-filled pandemonium in the worst part of town.
The question is which is easier to do (ROI)... to cut the shipping fuel carbon footprint by half, or over the road trucking (that's about 1/4th of all the shipping) by 20%? For that matter, moving 25% of the over the road trucking to rail would accomplish that too.
Also I’m passionately opposed to feathering billionaires’ nests, even with fractions of pennies of profit.
This story is funny, but also so so sad.
So people figured out, that you can abuse it to send anything to anyone in the country. Just create a fake listing for 1 PLN, let the receiver "buy" it (there is some extra service fee, but like $1) and there you go - probably the cheapest shipping possible, much cheaper than regular ~$5-7 box machine package.
About this item
- Do
- Not
- Buy
- This
- Product
What on earth is going on here?
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09D51KNQM
Some (many?) vendors on Amazon will recycle pages this way. Sell some item, change the item and description to dummy values when it stops selling, change to another item that will be sold, repeat.
This is usually done to keep the reviews, though I've also heard about this being used for money laundering.
I actually used to have(maybe still have?) a LG Xenon
E.g. an Amazon van rolls through my street multiple times a day. What is the marginal cost of them stopping at my house and dropping off a potato?
At my house, it's a 140 mile round trip between the fulfillment center ("are you feeling fulfilled yet?") and the drop off location.
OTOH, there's likely more of "you" than there are of "me" ...
While Amazon is efficient, "fractions of a cent" is probably the wrong order of magnitude for even the most efficient order.
I can almost guarantee that everyone mentioned in that blog post is a habitual Amazon user. They're all renewing Prime each year at full price and making a ton of regular purchases. The family has even turned on the FOMO by making Prime a family social network with social pressure to stay. I see it as a self-own, personally.
Edit: I'm taking part of this to the root of the thread
It's the difference in 1990s billionaires and 2020s billionaires. Bill Gates was so rich because he owned a lot of Microsoft shares and received profits from those shares as dividends. Jeff Bezos is so rich because he owns a lot of Amazon shares and people keep being willing to pay more and more for those shares so his notional net worth increases (AMZN has never paid a dividend).
But that’s exactly the loophole: you can borrow for very cheap against this notional equity without incurring a cent in taxes (since divodends are never paid out)
At the very least they should charge more for bulk mail, not give out discounts.
The USPS is a government-run spam delivery service that there is no way to opt out of. Those of us who do banking and other administrative tasks online would be better off if the government shut it down completely, or better yet subsidized it slightly so it doesn't have to deliver spam to survive.
But as it is, I don't see any good reason to have any more respect for USPS than I do for any other spammer.
On the other hand, spam delivery is the business model of USPS. They actively and intentionally market and sell their services to spammers, and not surprisingly, give normal users no way to opt out.
Alternately, you can forward your mail to an entirely different address. (This is just a Gedankenexperiment; please don't spam strangers by forwarding your mail to them.)
I was shocked when I moved to SF and found out there was no way to opt out of unaddressed mail (or "current resident").
It's horribly annoying to have a product that is $34.99 and you want it, but it'll cost shipping unless you get the damn Volkswagen screw; and then Amazon ships them individually anyway.
Even sellers started doing this, but instead of selling random items, they sell "extra hardened packaging material" conveniently at $1, $2, $3... prices. Of course when item arrives, no extra material to be seen. When questioned, one of them said "well, the package had cardboard box - that's it, wink wink, please do not report us".
Not only did I do it to get free shipping, I got it to get free international shipping.
For extra bonus CO2 points, the other item was coming from a different country. So I basically paid $0.42 to have a single packet of kool-aid shipped across the pacific ocean.
(I'd never had kool-aid before and I must say I was disappointed.)
At current scale (which is very small), the cheapest I can get it down to without losing money is $1.55 per letter (postage, paper, print, envelope, stripe fees, misc. hosting fees, etc.). Sadly, I have no way to compete with a $0.25 lime!
If you're curious, https://mappymail.com
What I find interesting is how long these windows stay open. You'd think someone at Stamps.com or UPS would notice the pricing anomaly, but large organisations are often too siloed. The team setting international rates probably doesn't talk to whoever monitors small parcel economics.
The author mentions making a few hundred dollars - but the real question is scalability. At what volume does this become attractive enough for the postal services to close the loophole? There's probably a sweet spot between "not worth their attention" and "actually profitable."
https://postalmuseum.si.edu/object/npm_2022.2007.1
https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/bank-of-ver...
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mailing-babies-postal-servi...
Mailing a building is impressive!
When I add that to my basket and go to checkout, the only available delivery option 'Fast - Tomorrow' costs $2.99.
There is a non-food item in the list, which costs $0.51+tax, i.e. $0.54 including free shipping.
Maybe that was just for me (in a large Canadian city at the time) or maybe they don’t do that anymore?
I haven’t considered getting prime since, it would be a lot more interesting if it actually provided the shipping terms they advertise.
I have no idea why sellers would do this with eBay fees and USPS small package shipping costing well over 13 cents.
I ended up with an enormous overflowing mountain of packages every day for weeks. I might have gone crazier, but there was a serious bug in eBay's checkout. Try checking out with 400 items in your cart. It really gets upset.
99% of the packages were Chinese sellers but the packages all came from Mongolia, so there must be some sort of postal arbitrage going on there.
It was all random stuff. Hairclips, 500 bicycle lamps. Dozens of tubes of ICs of every flavor. Crazy times.
Now you're part of their education.
Or... they are sophisticated and trying to get a ton of relatively inexpensive positive ratings before selling things that are actually expensive?
And then there are these people. Sending a pregnancy test to their grandma. What a hoot!
Or 3.5oz filet mignon flavor dog food for $0.84+tax with FREE two day delivery. https://www.amazon.com//dp/B07VBFLCKT
Beat that!
A couple of these are still valid with Prime, but most of them are Amazon Fresh items ($9.95 service fee for orders under $50), or out of stock, or the price is now way more.
Tempted to vibecode a little tool to manage ride requests..
It is better, actually, you can even scan a real hand written post card.
My color laser printer has definitely been cheaper than me driving to the store hundreds of times to print thousands of color prints.
I'd estimate I've put in $200 at most, and probably put 15-20k pages through it. Still prints just fine. It doesn't have color, or networking features, but I can share it on the network from the connected computer. I'm not sure they make anything this reliable these days, but I bet there's quite a few old laser printers floating around still.
Doesn't Amazon shipping have to go to the billing address on the credit card?
Being able to purchase on a credit card and have it sent anywhere makes it that much easier to use stolen credit cards.
No, I've had stuff shipped to plenty of addresses.
Plenty of people ship to the office. I buy stuff for my parents from time to time. When I'm on vacation, I might ship to the hotel or a friend I'm visiting or ...
No and that would be crazy. I'm not aware of any e-commerce site that has a restriction like that.
> Being able to purchase on a credit card and have it sent anywhere makes it that much easier to use stolen credit cards.
Well, it's probably one fraud signal among many, but it's absolutely not generally prohibited. I've sent things from Amazon to other people (or to myself while staying in a hotel), and other people have sent things to me, many times.
Simply switch the destination address on the envelope with the sender address, and drop it in the mailbox.
When then post office returns the letter to sender because of insufficient postage it will have delivered the letter for you.
While screwing over amazon is noble enough, the end result of people doing this would only result in higher fees for prime and fewer items being eligible for "free" shipping. At the same time, you'd be depriving a very valuable public service of the few cents they ask to offset the cost of message delivery to anywhere in the nation. I'm sure they'd be happy to deliver something besides spam too.
$0.25 - Lime - Amazon Fresh -FREE 2-hour delivery on orders over *$100*
Other products have similar shipping restrictions, or the prices are higher than claimed.
Also, most of the cheapest products (at least before tariff effects kicked in) don't allow customized messages that postcards allow, for obvious reasons.
Of course, it didn't work. There wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with the arbitrage scheme, but the profit per coupon was way too low to make it feasible as a business. Ponzi pivoted to paying off older investments with new investments, and the rest is history.
Prime seems to only offer free shipping if it’s over $25?
That's right, you're also cementing Amazon's control of the US economy. Both by doing more business there, and by spending time on that site which will lead to you doing even more of your business there. Not to mention having to be an "Amazon Prime" person to begin with.
This may sound weird to some, but - you should really avoid using Amazon where possible.
It arrives in a few weeks by Amazon's own carriers, not USPS/UPS/FedEx
Who is paying the $80 DeMinimis fee on the $1 cable I got last week from China?
So. Many. Possibilities.
This appears to be the cost without subsidy, with the mail service now run by a private company.
It's fine. I receive less than the average 10 letters per year (including junk mail). I check the mail box every two weeks or so.
That just means that whatever it actually costs to deliver mail to/from whatever parts of Denmark they provide service for, the people who use the service will pay that cost plus an additional cost on top of it so that the private owner (and perhaps their shareholders) can line their pockets. The nice thing about public services is that you avoid paying that extra money just so that a small number of people can personally profit from it. You can also lose a lot of transparency and control over how the service is run.
That said, I'm a bit envious of the lack of junk mail.