Thanks for the detailed explanation. Another example how bureaucrats manipulate a system.
I knew exactly nothing about it, but I had a specific instance where I bought some things, about $20 each (they were cheap, wireless network extenders) and they were absolute crap.
So I tried to arrange sending them back to the company, and the company just told me to keep them and returned my money.
This puzzled me. What the hell was with that? Just keep them?
And when this Universal Postal Service thing came up during Trump’s Presidency, as I read more about it and drilled into it, that made all the sense in the world.
It is one of the reasons we have difficulty competing with them head to head (and it is just one of many factors)
If you are an American manufacturer, you have to have customer support to handle returns, broken product, etc. and shipping costs are a good portion of that.
Chinese firms don’t have the same issue with shipping costs to us, only from us to them, so they can just say “keep it” and come out ahead.
It is a bizarre dynamic.