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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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).
https://www.fedex.com/en-us/shipping/historical-fuel-surchar...
https://www.ups.com/us/en/support/shipping-support/shipping-...
