How can Chinese companies ship products to the US cheaper than it costs to ship the same items across town?

Question

How can Chinese companies ship products to the US cheaper than it costs to ship the same items across town?

In: Economics

Answer 1

It’s incredibly cheap to ship cargo containers across oceans. Suspiciously cheap. Pack them as full as you want and they’ll ship them across the Pacific for under $8K, sometimes way under. Considering ho much stuff you can fit in a 40′ container and how heavy they can be, that’s a steal. If you pack a shipping container with 100,000 small items, that works out to about a dime or less per item to get it from a Chinese port to an American port.