Will postage prices eventually kill off the retro market?

[tbtorro]

Ok, this has been an issue for a while but this really blew a few fuses for me. Today I went to the post office to check the price to send a 5kg package inside the EU, and the 'cheapest' method costs a whopping €38 ! :wooha:

I mean this is Hungary and the cost is more than in Denmark (and I thought Danish package prices were crazy)!

I remember buying a Macintosh back in 2007, and paid $56 for shipping from USA, and that was nearly 20Kg. So I really see a bad tendency here. I've also read somewhere that ordinary mail revenues are steadily declining for most postal services in the world, and they can only make up for that with revenues from online shopping deliveries.

So what do you think, could some kind of price politics be behind the crazy prices or is it simply the cost of oil?

 

[ShambleS1980]

its pretty strange really.
with the post office they are crazy.. if i have a box full of items that i need to post some where. i can send it as 1 box full for
"£ LMAO ARE YOU SERIOUS"
or i can take them out and split them in to 2 boxes and send them like that for
"£ well thats not bad at all"

then you come to the couriers "the ones i use the most to be honest" the guys that collect from my house and take els where..

usually when im sending inside the uk i use myhermies or city link. and they colect from the house and are cheaper than the post office.

but if im sending a 5kg parcel "using parcelmonkey for quotes" out side of the uk to say belgium..
parcel farce will come and collect it from my house for £15 which really isnt that bad considering..
But if i took the same thing to the post office who would send it via parcel farce the cost would be
"£OMG are you crazy?"

just the other day i was sending a small packet to the eu so used the post office. cheapest possible method to deliver this pocket sized parcel was £10.. and thats the absolute cheapest way they could send it..

i dont know about other countrys but i think here the post office has prety much lost its main bulk of customers "online sellers" to private couriers. so they have to charge more to cover over heads..

if you think that 100 parcels at £3 each a day in one van would pay the drivers wages and the the fule cost for a week. then thats easy to sustain and still have money for wear and tear and a profit.

but 10 parcels at £3 a day just isnt going to cut it. so they have to jack up the price to £30 per parcell to offset the difrence..
of course this is a stupid thing to do because now your losing even more customers to couriers so get even less parcels.

To me it looks like the post office is trying to bail out of parcel delivery completley and will try to down size so all they end up processing are letters and selling stamps. "not that any 1 writes letters any more"

but to answer your question..
no i belive that the amount of 3rd party couriers in competition with eachother will drive down the prices of postage so the retro market will be fine.
what may be an issue is all these new regulations about what is safe and what is not and what you have to declair is in your parcel and so on when you send stuff.
I hate having to look at a list of stuff then thinking "well does that have any thing that could be classified as that"

its getting to the point where if your sending anything more than an empty box you have to fill out 4 forms and a disclaimer. and then they wont cover you if any damage happens to the item..

 

[DBloke]

Relevant to my interests, as I will be sending all these PCE/TG Everdrives via good olde Royal Mail

Truth be said, I dont trust other ones with packages as so far RM has yet to let me down

 

[tbtorro]

..snip..
no i belive that the amount of 3rd party couriers in competition with eachother will drive down the prices of postage so the retro market will be fine.

Well, I believe UK is a special market, because most EU countries don't have a choice of several parcel companies. In both Denmark and Hungary for example we have pretty much a choice of GLS and the national postal service. And both are pretty expensive..

But I could be wrong.. Other EU members please check in!

 

[slk486]

The problems with rising prices of international shipping isn't isolated to retro stuff. You can't be competitive outside of Denmark with an online store for example. It's really stooopid.

 

[80sFREAK]

Weight - this is the keyword. In Japan parcels under 2kg can go untracked economy airmail. Whatever is over 2kg(2010gramms for example) goes trackable only and rate is almost doubled.

 

[tbtorro]

Weight - this is the keyword. In Japan parcels under 2kg can go untracked economy airmail. Whatever is over 2kg(2010gramms for example) goes trackable only and rate is almost doubled.

Obviously.. But why do prices rise so drastically? If it did cost about €12 to send a 5Kg package 8 years ago then what makes it cost €38 today? (fuel cost was already suggested - but what else?)

 

[fitzsteve]

Look at the price of fuel 5 years ago vs today and this will go some way to explain it

And it's not only the cost of fuel that has risen above inflation, insurance for example on the fleet will have risen making transport costs much higher.

It's not only weight that they charge by now either, it's the volume of the weight vs/size (volumetric weight) that's important now.

This is why for oversea's bulky items I try to pack as small as is safe to reduce costs.

 

[SaviorX]

Weight - this is the keyword. In Japan parcels under 2kg can go untracked economy airmail. Whatever is over 2kg(2010gramms for example) goes trackable only and rate is almost doubled.

Obviously.. But why do prices rise so drastically? If it cost about €12 to send a 5Kg package 8 years ago then what makes it cost €38 today?

rising costs of fuel
postal union wages/benefits
ridiculous management wage/benefit/severance packages
waste
profits

 

[tbtorro]

Yes, fuel cost was already suggested at the opening post guys.. What about price politics? (hm, haven't thought of postal union wages/benefits..)

 

[tokyoracer]

Royal Fail will be nailing their own coffin. They know they can ask stupid money becuase not enough people know about Parcel2Go or if the package is too insignificant for courriers. And at the moment, they are making MASSIVE profits since they have no rival for traditional letter posting.

However I can certainly see a good market for a company like UK Mail coming into the public sector and challenging RM for the market.

 

[rkauer]

Don't blame UK postal companies, it is this way all over the world.

Here in Bananaland we only have the state company and particular couriers (TNT, Fedex, UPS), no competing companies. But if you have any enterprise you can negotiate with Brazilan post to use a cheaper on-line SEDEX (express delivery) that closes to ordinary surface mail in prices but with the fast delivering of express...

Now that's odd. So normal people can have a decent priced delivery system because they are not a company?

 

[Xanxi]

The problem is that the shipping cost will generally be added to the price of the item the next time it will be sold.
The more a retro item travels the world, the more it becomes expensive.

 

[-Acid-]

Just last week I sent a small box to another Amibay user, it weighed just over 1kg so took it to the post office. Waited in a small queue and got to the front and asked if it was light enough for 2nd class to keep the cost down. Yes fine she answered so I was thinking ok then a fiver tops, next thing she said was £8 ....

I stood there in silence for a few seconds like a rabbit in headlights I was so stunned. The queue behind me had grew and once I got over the price I picked the package up and straight out told her I wasn't paying that ridiculous price when a courier would do it for half of that and left the shop. Went home and hermes delivered it for £4.20 inc VAT.

Absolute greed is the problem in the world today.

 

[keropi]

same here, Greek Post raised their prices about a week ago... tbh it was never cheap to send anything above 2kg though... worst part is that you don't really have alternatives to ship outside the country, it's either Greek Post or EMS/DHL/etc and they cost 3-4x times (they are expedited 2-5days delivered services though)...

 

[kronuz]

In Norway there is no real competitor to the postal service that every man would use....you could send a man with a parcel to the end on the world for 999999999999 money, using dhl/tnt, but that's not gonna happen.

I was in Ioannina last week and found international stamps to be pretty "normal" in costs, but daiimn: the gas prices are just as crazy as in Norway....but we get paid 3x more ?...crazy..

 

[ptp170]

Was having this conversation a few months back. I don't understand how I can order 10 Ethernet joiner connectors AND have then delivered from China to my doorstep for £1.61. I mean it eventually goes through Royal Mail anyway so they must be delivering it for pennies or maybe even at a loss. I'm sure it'll be cheaper to bulk ship stuff out to China in a container and then have it mailed back to the UK before long :blased:

 

[keropi]

@kronuz:

really? you were here? hope you liked it , the city was pretty much empty due to vacation time + great religious holiday...

Gas prices are terrible, more than half is actually tax that goes directly to the state to "pay for the loans" but as you can imaging it goes straight to a black hole...

 

[AmiNeo]

Weight - this is the keyword. In Japan parcels under 2kg can go untracked economy airmail. Whatever is over 2kg(2010gramms for example) goes trackable only and rate is almost doubled.

Obviously.. But why do prices rise so drastically? If it cost about €12 to send a 5Kg package 8 years ago then what makes it cost €38 today?

rising costs of fuel
postal union wages/benefits
ridiculous management wage/benefit/severance packages
waste
profits

General inflation...

 

[moijk]

It might not kill the retro marked, but at least give a damper on selling low value items. Postage from Norway makes it hard to sell stuff. I apparently can't count on shipping from denmark the times I'm over there