What happened to surface mail shipping overseas?

   Last year, I mailed a number of comics across the ocean for a decent
price.  Sure, it was slow, but the buyer didn't want to pay the $28 or so
for quick delivery.  Cost was more important.

  Today I was looking into shipping some comics to England, and I don't even
see the inexpensive surface mail.

  It now appears that folks are being forced to use the much more expensive
airmail options to ship internationally.

  Are there really no longer any options for shipping using an actual ship?

  The cost is often 40 to 50% less, compared to air transport.  Without the
cost savings, I guess I won't be able to consider selling internationally
any more.  Nobody wants to pay $1.50 per comic for shipping.

  OhioGuy wrote:


Those heavily subsidized / money losing methods of mailing were
eliminated at the last postage increase.

   Were they really subsidized?  After all, shipping on a boat SHOULD be a
lot cheaper.  The boat is shipping hundreds of times more volume per amount
of fuel spent.  Yes, it is slow, but is also much more efficient.  If it
isn't more costly to fly, then why don't all of those cheap Chinese imports
get flown over here?  They come by boat, because it is much cheaper.

  I'm thinking that the U.S. postal service didn't get rid of those sea
routes because they were losing money, or because they were subsidized.  I
believe they got rid of the inexpensive route as a way to force people to
use their more expensive and profitable routes.  After all, if it's the only
option offered, then they make a whole lot of money - environment be damned,
evidently.

  Makes it impossible for people like me to use the more environmentally
friendly, inexpensive method.  We may have free trade agreements, but now
they are more for the huge corporations, and not for the common man.



  A couple of years ago, I shipped a batch of comics out using surface mail
to Australia.  Today I was considering the possibility of selling the batch
of comics I get each month (24) to someone in Europe.  I decided that before
seriously going after the idea, I should look up how much shipping would
cost.  I figured that I would be able to find some sort of surface mail
route that would be about half the airmail cost, as I had in the past.  I
was wrong.

  What I found was a choice between paying $29.60 for "first class
international" (no specified delivery time, and no tracking) and $30.40 for
"Priority Mail International", which has a 6 to 10 day delivery time, and
had tracking.  This is for a 4 pound package of 24 comic books.  That means
that shipping from here to England - 3,923 miles - would be $1.25 per comic.

  To put this in perspective, I could mail the same box using Media Mail
from Miami, Florida to Anchorage, Alaska for only 3 dollars and 35 cents.
That includes delivery confirmation.  And yes, that route takes them 3,981
miles total, and either through 2 countries, or else in a ship across the
ocean.  So the distances are almost exactly the same.

  Now I realize that shipping to Alaska is subsidized.  It is part of our
empire, of course, and the government wants to facilitate communication and
exchange of goods between the various states.  I expected oceangoing mail to
a foreign country to cost on the order of 4 or 5 times as much - about $15.

  What I can't believe is that it is instead a 10X order of magnitude.  Ten
times as much to mail it the same distance!  All because I guess now we are
forced to use airmail, whether we want to or not?

  I do not support airmail.  Sure, it is fast, but it is also a very
polluting and inefficient way to get things from place to place.  You have
to expend fuel negating the force of gravity the whole way.  A ship
overcomes gravity naturally, just because it weighs less than the water it
displaces.  Ships also use Diesel fuel, which has 40% more energy per
gallon, and thereby pollutes less per mile travelled.  Of course, the
environmental impact is only the lesser part of my frustration.

  The biggest part is that I can't imagine finding anyone willing to pay the
roughly $1.25 per comic for shipping.  Shipping within the U.S. is only 13c
each.  Limiting me to airmail effectively forces me to pass along this much,
much higher cost of shipping to any potential international buyer.  I
usually get about 75c to a dollar each for my used comics.  Adding shipping
in the U.S. costs a buyer another 13% or so.  Adding shipping
internationally now costs a buyer an extra 125%!  In practice, I think it
means that nobody internationally is going to spend even a second
considering buying my monthly batch of comics.  It really stinks, because it
limits my resale market.

  Are there no longer any options to use an actual ship for shipping these
days?

 
The Chinese manufacturers don't ship each toy individually.  I'm sure
if
you could fill up a cargo container with comics, you could find some
way
to ship them to Europe on a real boat.


I imagine they got rid of them because hardly anybody ships that way
anymore.
I'd never use U.S. mail for anything I really cared about.  If FedEx
were allowed
to handle first class mail, I'd probably use them even if it cost
more.


Everything is for huge corporations.  When you hire a bunch of
lobbyists
to persuade the government to do stuff, you'll get things done your
way.

 

Any plane delivering mail would have jet engines.  Jet fuel is a less
refined version of diesel.  Jet fuel can be used in most diesel engines.

A ship is certainly more efficient than a plane, but not simply because
they use diesel fuel.  A lot of ships actually use fuel oil and a fairly
thick fuel oil at that.

This is kinda like when I asked UPS about ground shipping to Hawaii and
they basically laughed at me.  I assumed they could use a ship to do
ground shipments, but no, they only offer air shipping to Hawaii.