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...
(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.
I think you meant to say "operate in a market that is regulated in precisely the way they want it to be".
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.)
They banned him eventually.
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?"
Can you send a letter thousands of miles for only 61 cents? That's amazing!
>the USPS faced financial difficulties, posting losses of $6.5 billion in fiscal 2023 and $8 billion in fiscal 2024, leading to a request for $14 billion in government assistance.
It would appear that the USPS operates at a loss at these prices
Letter, no. 61 cents is the post card rate, so you can send a post card thousands of miles for that. If you introduce an outside envelope its 78 cents to mail that thousands of miles, up to 1oz.
Classic Dutch privatization
https://www.usps.com/international/first-class-mail-internat...
Why yes, I am fun at parties.
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?
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
Domestic overnight mail / express mail was prohibitively expensive, something equivalent to $150 for small items.
However, if I ordered something via USPS International Express, those items would automatically be shipped as overnight / express mail once inside Norway, and handed to the Norwegian postal system. A parcel from New York to where I lived would take 2-3 working days, and as a bonus, USPS Int'l Express only cost around $50 for the same size parcel!
So while not the same type of arbitrage as OP posted about (where items become cheaper due to free shipping), I could save a lot of time and money.
Maybe a more extreme example would be the ultra cheap shipping prices from China. You paid like $1 in shipping, which would have cost $10 if you bought the same service domestically.
IIRC, the root of these practices go back many, many decades. And has a been a thorn on the side of modern shipping ever since Chinese e-commerce exploded.
If I order something locally, maybe it'll have made it to the departure sorting office in that time.
It’s either "ultra cheap shipping" or "ultra low shipping prices". Prices can't be cheap. /nitpick
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.)
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?
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).
At the very least they should charge more for bulk mail, not give out discounts.
I was shocked when I moved to SF and found out there was no way to opt out of unaddressed mail (or "current resident").
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
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.
And then there are these people. Sending a pregnancy test to their grandma. What a hoot!
I have no idea why sellers would do this with eBay fees and USPS small package shipping costing well over 13 cents.
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?
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.
$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.
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!
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.
This is fun, https://walzr.com/weather-watching
That means you would have to do these shenanigans roughly 1/3 of the year without ceasing before you even started to touch Amazon's profit margin for your account alone.
When I try to ship a lemon to a friend I get "There was a problem with some of the items in your order (see below for more information): Sorry, Lemon can't be shipped to the address you selected. Please remove the item or select another address."
Pity, my friend needed a lemon, to know I was thinking of him.
Edit: I can ship a lemon for $3 shipping if I select my friends address prior to adding the lemon to the cart, but with no option for a gift note that I can see.
https://www.digikey.com/en/help-support/delivery-information...
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?
note the last three sentences, $80, $160, $200 MININMUM
> The duty was initially set at 30% of the value of the postal item, but on April 8, the duty was increased to 90% of the value of the postal item. On April 9, President Trump increased the de minimis duty to 120%.
> Then, on May 12, the president issued an executive order lowering the duty rate for de minimis mail shipments to 54% effective May 14, 2025, at 12:01 a.m. ET.
> The per postal item containing goods duty for low-value postal shipments is $100 as of May 2 (after being increased by executive orders dated April 8 and April 9) This fee increased to $200 on June 1, 2025.
> There are new duty rates for international postal shipments in the executive order that eliminates de minimis for all countries, as described here. The specific duty for postal shipments:
> $80 per item for countries with an effective IEEPA tariff rate of less than 16%.
> $160 per item for countries with an effective IEEPA tariff rate between 16% and 25%.
> $200 per item for countries with an effective IEEPA tariff rate above 25%.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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 ...
Prime seems to only offer free shipping if it’s over $25?
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.
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.
Try giving the USPS $139 per year and see what you can send with them.
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.
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.
