I am going to push back a little on this one, and ask for context and numbers?
As some of my older relatives commented when Wolt became popular here, before people started going to supermarkets, it was common for shops to have a delivery / errand boy (this would have been 1950s, and more prevalent before the WW2). It is one thing that strikes out reading biographies; teenage Harpo Marx dropped out from school and did odd jobs as an errand boy; they are ubiquitous part of the background in Anne Frank’s diaries; and so on.
Maybe it was proportionally more expensive (relative to cost of purchase), but on the other hand, from the descriptions it looks like the deliveries were done by teenage/young men who were paid peanuts.
When I think about home delivery, my reference point is the dao xiao mian 刀削面 knife I bought in 2020 from AliExpress for $3.57 including shipping and delivery to my door. In the 1990s, the simplest way to get an exotic product like that was to fly to China.
I’m not just thinking about the ease of sending something from one house to another within my city. I’m thinking about the ease of sending something from an arbitrary residence on Earth to an arbitrary residence on Earth.
Shipping small packages from China to the US via the USPS has been subsidized—the price of mailing a Beanie Baby from Beijing to New York has been lower than the price charged to mail that same Beanie Baby from Los Angeles to New York. One of the few things the Trump administration did right was renegotiate the international postal system treaties so that China doesn’t get “developing nation” subsidies any more.
I am going to push back a little on this one, and ask for context and numbers?
As some of my older relatives commented when Wolt became popular here, before people started going to supermarkets, it was common for shops to have a delivery / errand boy (this would have been 1950s, and more prevalent before the WW2). It is one thing that strikes out reading biographies; teenage Harpo Marx dropped out from school and did odd jobs as an errand boy; they are ubiquitous part of the background in Anne Frank’s diaries; and so on.
Maybe it was proportionally more expensive (relative to cost of purchase), but on the other hand, from the descriptions it looks like the deliveries were done by teenage/young men who were paid peanuts.
When I think about home delivery, my reference point is the dao xiao mian 刀削面 knife I bought in 2020 from AliExpress for $3.57 including shipping and delivery to my door. In the 1990s, the simplest way to get an exotic product like that was to fly to China.
I’m not just thinking about the ease of sending something from one house to another within my city. I’m thinking about the ease of sending something from an arbitrary residence on Earth to an arbitrary residence on Earth.
Shipping small packages from China to the US via the USPS has been subsidized—the price of mailing a Beanie Baby from Beijing to New York has been lower than the price charged to mail that same Beanie Baby from Los Angeles to New York. One of the few things the Trump administration did right was renegotiate the international postal system treaties so that China doesn’t get “developing nation” subsidies any more.
https://reason.com/2019/11/11/american-taxpayers-are-subsidizing-ultra-cheap-shipping-from-china/