This story comes to my mind.
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...
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.
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"
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.
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...)
This is a good idea, but I also want to point out that a regular piece of paper makes a perfectly good greeting card
It absolutely does! I like the addition of the thing to read (in the case of the book) or the thing to look at (usually a funny or interesting picture in the case of the greeting card) but I agree that the purchased thing is not truly necessary.
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.
"You have a collect call from MomWe'reAtTheArcadeCanYouPickUsUp?
Would you like to accept the charges?"
Ahh, the 70s. Good memories.
It will never stop being weird to me how US mobile plans make (or made) you pay for incoming calls and texts.
Collect calls would have been a thing until cell phones got very common because you had to use pay phones when you were outside and you somehow never had quarters.
How can it be that low? The Netherlands has a stamp rate of €1.40 for 20 grams and you can traverse that country in three hours. 20 to 50 grams is €2.80. If you have to cross a border that goes up to €4.22
Can you send a letter thousands of miles for only 61 cents? That's amazing!
https://www.britannica.com/question/How-is-the-USPS-funded
>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
In the same sense that public roads "operate at a loss", sure. Neither toll-free roads or the USPS were originally intended to somehow break-even. They're infrastructure services provided by the government towards a functioning society.
From the link I shared: "Today, the USPS receives no direct government or taxpayer funding."
>Can you send a letter thousands of miles for only 61 cents?
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.
That is still very impressive from my European viewpoint.
It's impressive to me too, as an American. Especially when you consider that rates include from the east coast of a continent to the west coast, faraway islands (Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa) as well as closer islands (Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands).
afaik PostNL has to make a profit and the USPS can operate at a loss.
Classic Dutch privatization
PostNL is a private company that used to be government owned. PostNL currently operates at a loss for mail delivery. They are mandated by law to deliver mail and that is something they can't get out of. There is not a maximum what PostNL can ask for stamps but the ACM (Authority Consumer & Market) can step in if they raise prices too much.
So it appears to be privatised but with strict government regulations.
Economy of scale. By the time it gets sorted and on a truck, 100 miles is roughly the same cost as 1000.
for $1.70 you can send a letter to almost anywhere in the world.
https://www.usps.com/international/first-class-mail-internat...
Not to mention that I would much rather give my $0.61 to a public service like the Post Office than to Amazon.
If they weren't the #1 purveyor of junk mail I would agree with you. It costs $0.71 to send a card to a family member, but much less than that for a scammy marketing company to mass mail junk that will go straight to the trash.
Eh, if the post office - which is a pretty efficient operation - thinks it costs $0.61 to mail a postcard, it probably costs Amazon more than $0.25 to ship someone a lime.
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.
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.
I'd love a napkin math calculation at this.
https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/freight-transportation
> 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.
Not just efficiency but you can use electric trains if your tracks are electrified. Add into that electricity production system that is mostly renewable+nuclear (the Nordics for example) and you get very very low emissions.
They do, trains are BAFFLINGLY fuel efficient in terms of pounds of cargo. Once they get up to speed, trains can move one ton of cargo about 480 mile per gallon, vs 130 with trucks
This is why European cities had so many canals back in the day.
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.
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.
Bulk rates and flatter surfaces win.
However at some point branching is required, and the bulk rates also add latency.
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?
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.
This is already taken into account: Shagie's table is based on [1], which is per kilogram-kilometer
[1] https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/freight-transportation
Unfortunately a video but this covers it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aH3ZTTkGAs It talks about the meme about "pears grown in Argentina, packed in Thailand, sold in the US"
Gemini's summary about the shipping CO2 sections:
Shipping accounts for 80% of all international transport but only 37% of transport's carbon emissions (9:13 - 9:18).
Road transport is highlighted as the "King of pollution," making up less than 10% of international transport but over half of emissions (9:26 - 9:32).
Ferrying pears across the Earth is actually less carbon intensive than driving them in a truck to a packing plant across one's own country (9:48 - 9:52).
All international shipping combined is responsible for only 2.5% of global emissions (9:58 - 10:15).
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.
[1] https://www.withouthotair.com/c15/page_95.shtml (old reference)
My quixotic bicycle grocery buying system still wins, though.
So the EPA report is bullshit interpretation of the USDA study: >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.2
USDA study: >Overall, households are, on average, 2.2 miles from the nearest SNAP-authorized supermarket or supercenter, but their usual store is 3.8 miles away.
Based on these questions: >This report presents initial findings from the FoodAPS survey on three key questions:
1. How do shoppers travel to their main store and how far do they travel to get there?
2. In what type of store (eg., supermarket, mass merchandiser, convenience store) do U.S. households typically shop for groceries?
3. Do store and travel mode differ by participation in food assistance programs or food security status?
This can only tell us the distance to the store and does not support "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."
In order to draw that conclusion, you need to show that the travel to and from grocery store was single purpose. Which is not supported by the data.
Most people I know don't go out of their way to go grocery shopping nor do they take specific trips to do so. It will be done in conjunction with another outing or when returning from work.
This could also! explain the reason that food secure people travel greater distance, as they tend to travel greater distance overall they choose a location closer to their travel route rather than their dwelling.
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.
oh okay then that consumption is totally fine. no worries here mate!
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.
EV trucking is a growing thing and might get that 20% reduction in trucking carbon footprints.
I'd send a free text message to a family member, offering them money in exchange for them not sending me trash from Amazon.
A lot of profit is really just finding ways to hide the costs. Climate change is a massive withdrawal made on future generations.
The climate does indeed not mind.
Ah yes the oil that you saved by not doing these got spent by the uber rich going to davos in private jets. Hell in fact even if a million of you saved it still would pale the damage done by private jets.
I call, and raise you my own sardonic answer (not this one, the top-level one). :-\
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.
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.
This is already a thing; political parties sending out their mass mailings from Poland to Norway.
I'm surprised Poland is still cheap enough to make that worthwhile. (Compared to poorer EU countries you could send from.)
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.
Same thing in France with Vinted
I used to import a lot of stuff from the US to Norway. I lived all the way up in northern Norway, so parcels would take roughly 5 working days from Oslo to where I lived.
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.
Yeah in Australia I remember seeing a lot of small electronic items on eBay that were $1 shipped from Hong Kong or China. You literally could not post a letter within Australia for that price.
It's similar here in Finland - I can get stuff from DigiKey with all taxes paid and whatnot, free shipping over 50eur and it'll arrive by DHL in less than 48hrs from the States.
If I order something locally, maybe it'll have made it to the departure sorting office in that time.
I'm guessing you quit after the small value toll exemption was removed?
> ultra cheap shipping prices
It’s either "ultra cheap shipping" or "ultra low shipping prices". Prices can't be cheap. /nitpick
Somewhat off-topic, but when I click on "Case-Mate - Case for 2009 LG Xenon - Marsala"[1], the "About this item" section simply states:
About this item
- Do
- Not
- Buy
- This
- Product
What on earth is going on here?
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.
It's amazing that this has been going on for decades and Amazon still doesn't give a shit.
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
which is why i've stopped my prime subscription many years ago and only buy items there as a last resort.
It’s an 18 pound phone case for less than a dollar. How bad could it be?
Jeff Bezos has more money than the Federal Trade Commission. That's how we pick the winner in any conflict.
You can pre-order it...
I actually used to have(maybe still have?) a LG Xenon
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.
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.
This is something I'd not thought of before ... diabolically efficient!
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".
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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?
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" ...
That's not even mentioning their additional overheads, like the cost of fuel for their idling van as they drop off your potato.
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.
Amazon will close your account before you can impact their bottom line.
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
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.
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).
None of which supports the argument of the person I replied to that what you buy from them today is somehow "subsidised by imaginary money"
> 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)
It is worth pointing out that many executives cash out the old fashioned way: by selling stock. That includes Bezos.
Can you share numbers? What are Amazon’s margins?
Across the board they're about 11%, I believe, though retail seems to be about 5% despite being the bulk of revenue. AWS has far higher margins.
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.
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").
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.
But when you have to push a rotten fish thru someone's mail slot, the law be damned.
Unfortunately bulk mail is the only thing paying the bills. That and being a last mile delivery service for Amazon.
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.
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.
Yes, exactly. I wish the post office were subsidized and acted in the interests of the public. But it is not, and does not.
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 $0.25 lime!
If you're curious, https://mappymail.com
What if you also start providing the 0.25$ lime feature as well (by making use of the amazon prime itself as well?) xD?
At any scale your Amazon prime account would be shut down, you can't do account sharing in that way
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...
"Include a note with this purchase" = Free postage for a letter!
"Special offer: 80% off if you send a lime with a note attached instead of a letter!"
This might actually blow up on the internet lol, very innovative ngl. GP should try to do it if its legally allowable xD
That's pretty neat. It's a little oblique to your project, but you might be interested in the QSL bureau system https://www.iaru.org/on-the-air/qsl-bureau/
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."
The USPS have been on the receiving end of it themselves back in 1916 when someone mailed a building:
https://postalmuseum.si.edu/object/npm_2022.2007.1
https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/bank-of-ver...
People used to mail their babies for a while, but the USPS put a kibosh on that.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mailing-babies-postal-servi...
Mailing a building is impressive!
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.
Yeah, this is misleading. You can't send a lime for $0.25. It's $3.24 minimum.
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.
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).
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.)
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.
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.
Did you press the buy button? The shipping fee is $2.99
Ah, you're right. Sneaky.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Link previews were a mistake
I would delight to receive birthday cards in Maruchan Ramen form.
As is tradition.
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!
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.
Jokes are one of the good parts of human existence, so - while I see your side of the story - there is another side.
Yes, that's why I said it's a curse.
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.
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?
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.
What did you do with all the random stuff?
I was mostly handing it out to anyone and everyone that wanted any. Someone left a space heater on and burned the entire building down, so I lost everything in the end. I kept debating about whether to take it further and just go nuts and order a million items, but while it was "lulzy" as hell, it was also pretty wasteful.
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.
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.
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
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!
> 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.
Riley Walz is easily one of the most creative people in tech today.
I believe it. There are a few more interesting projects at the site.
This is fun, https://walzr.com/weather-watching
Yes, Jmail.world and the entire Jmail suite is mind-blowingly impressive, apparently Walz and @lukeigel co-created it.
Yes, but Amazon Prime costs $140 a year.
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.
If you have Prime it's probably already justified by your normal usage. So shenanigans are effectively free.
Looks like they already closed this arbitrage opportunity?
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.
This reminds me of Digikey International Shipping rates - free for orders over $60. Without the massive bulk discount rates they presumably get the DHL Express International/FedEx International Priority cost is far more than $60.
https://www.digikey.com/en/help-support/delivery-information...
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?
Is it always $75 minimum, or is it alternatively 90% ad valorem?
good luck figuring it out, the king constantly changes his mind
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s not a fax unless it’s from the facsimile region of france. What you’re describing is just sparkling email.
You can even still do fax machines if you really wanted to.
owning a printer is never the cheaper option.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Send a $0.01 check with your bank’s Bill Pay feature, and write your message in the memo.
As a Canadian, the free printing and mailing of paper checks anywhere in the country is perhaps the wildest US bank feature to me.
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..
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.
> 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.
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).
No, it was never a "thing," "mark as gift" has always been an option on Amazon to send gifts to family and friends.
> 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.
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 ...
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.
You can send things to other addresses regardless of whether it's a gift or not.
Like so many awaited packages, it is neither here nor there. :)
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.
But the cost of Amazon Prime have to be factored in as well
Only if you weren't already paying for Prime. If you were, then it's irrelevant as this usage adds no marginal cost.
"If you already pay for shipping then shipping adds no marginal cost."
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.
No, for anyone considering doing this it does not have to be factored in as it’s a sunk cost.
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.
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.
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?
This is beautiful. Thank you for this! Beautifully execute, beautiful idea :)
Isn't postal arbitrage how the original Ponzi scheme started?
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.
How much did they pay to have Prime? Have to add that in.
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.
Just sent my friend a bag of gravy mix, thank you!
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!"
This is why my AWS bill is so high?
This is just being rude to delivery drivers.
I think they would prefer to deliver small items than large, heavy items.
The alternative is delivering no items. Spamming all your friends with $0.83 items is a waste of resources, period. When Temu did this on an industrial scale the USPS was not happy about it and it shouldn’t be any different when you’re abusing the postal system as a gag.
This is madness. Prime costs $139 per year. It may be a sunk cost for you, but it's explicitly a cost.
Try giving the USPS $139 per year and see what you can send with them.
this is a litte bit like the AI bubble works. I can't point to the thing with my finger but it feels wrong.
I mean, you just gave Amazon free advertising, which is kinda what they probably were looking for.
What a waste
lol everyone in the comments is taking this way too seriously
Here in Ireland, a stamp is 1.85eur.
So. Many. Possibilities.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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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.
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.
Mail fraud is illegal, dude.
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.
Note: the Verge article links to this blog post, describing the situation in more detail: https://www.readmargins.com/p/doordash-and-pizza-arbitrage
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
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.
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.
Risk being reported? To the company that you don't want interacting with you anyhow?
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.)
I mean you can just have a silicone mold in there, no actual pizza required.
Junkfoodconomists term this "the velocity of pizza".
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.
I can baffle you even more: if you register your company in Delaware, you don't even need to specify who owns the company.
You only need to specify the name and address of the registered agent, which is sort of a "contact person", not somebody who works for the company.
https://www.delawarebusinessincorporators.com/blogs/news/can... and https://velawood.com/anonymity-in-delaware/
Lots of states do this. It's not just some Delaware thing. If you're doing "solidly interstate" business there's other reasons to file in Delaware.
Other states are worse or better these days.
The US is
It could be a trademark violation, even in the US, under the argument that DoorDash was “passing itself off” as the infringed-upon company. However, DoorDash would then argue that it was being honest – it was genuinely delivering authentic goods. It could violate trademark no more than a convenience store violates a trademark by correctly claiming it sells Coca-Cola.
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.
The pizza owner from that article is my wife’s cousin!
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.
> 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".
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.
> 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."
The funny thing about truth is that a lot of different, mutually-incompatible philosophical perspectives reach the same conclusions about it. https://existentialcomics.com/comic/258
The change is that standardization of laws and limits to interstate commerce has made everything a national market.
It doesn’t benefit the market to make plumbing contracting a national business, for example.
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.)
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.
Yard Sale Pizza in London does it's own delivery and it's great where it's available. I hated that I had to use their website but delivery is always good and still warm.
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.
Dominos lets people order from Uber Eats but still handles delivery itself. Maybe they fall back to Uber drivers when they are short staffed.
I don’t know of any restaurants that previously had delivery of their own and switched. I’m sure they exist but it’s vanishingly small, for the reasons outlined.
So all DoorDash does is give you the consumer more options. If you don’t like it, you don’t use it and nobody is harmed.
Only a small percent of restaurants delivered in the first place outside of the ones like pizza that still do.
> calling a delivery place was just easier than using an app
This is so much the polar opposite for me.
First of all: restaurant discovery. With a phone interface you have to somehow out of band learn that there is a place who delivers to you, that they are open and obtain their menu. With an app no matter where you are it gives you a list of places which are open and deliver to you.
Second is that you have all the time to browse the menu, do your research, contemplate, hand a phone around among many people, see your order, check your order, change your order, change your mind mid order. With a phone call a fast talking rushed person who often doesn’t speak the language natively talks to you from a noisy kitchen. And they expect you to get on with it fast because you are holding up the line. You better already know what you are ordering and be ready to make decisions about any substitutions as they come up.
Then comes the payment. With apps I’m only trusting my payment details to a large company who has the engineering resources to make the transaction secure. With a phone order you either pay to the delivery driver (does he accept card? Do i have enough cash if not?) or you read in your card details to the phone. Which is just bonkers unsecure on so many levels.
Then comes the tracking: with the app i see when the food is ready, and where the driver is in the delivery with a continously updated ETA. With a phone? You can call them again if the food does not show up I guess. Good luck.
Then comes the handover. With the phone if the food was pre-paid the delivery driver just gives the food to whomever. If it is paid on delivery they give it to whomever pays them. Hope it reaches you. With the apps i’m using the app displays a one time code which the driver ask for to check that you are who ordered.
Every element of the experience is better with an app in my opinion.
> and they could give you updates on when they were out of something
So can they through the app. But instead of telling every single costumer about what they are out of they just click it once on their admin and the items in question are stricken through in the menu. I see that all the time.
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.
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.
Have fun when no one wants to deliver food to you.
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.
VC Fund My Life!
The appropriate musical accompaniment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbH-U2b_EsQ
I was hoping this would be a rickroll.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasubi
Win everything you need from sweepstakes!
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_season_5
Thanks for sharing, i enjoyed reading it, although it is paywalled: http://archive.today/H5FRo
A friend of mine did this, and had the food delivered to himself.
They banned him eventually.