[marktwain]

As many have noted, it is cheaper to mail something from China than from a town a hundred miles away.

This is one of the ways the USA directly subsidizes China.

[Calvin Cooledge]

Actually it works like this. Overseas shippers send stuff (all the crap we buy from Amazon) via freighter, or air freight, to US businesses called “reshippers”. The reshippers put it in the US mail. It’s a legitimate business model, but some reshippers try to increase profit by using fake postage.

Works the other way too. US products go by mail to Miami, where reshippers box it up and sea-freight it to Rio, Buenos Aires, etc.