Aaaand… yet another fee on top of everything else. How fun!
Fuel and logistics-related surcharge: FBA, MCF, and BWP in US and CA
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And, Supply Chain Dive had the story this morning with some commentary –
“Some e-commerce experts are skeptical that the surcharge will be a short-term increase. Noah Wickham, VP of sales and marketing at Amazon seller agency My Amazon Guy, said in a LinkedIn post that he expects the company will “keep it regardless” even if fuel prices fall and stabilize.”
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Yet, we are still held hostage via price matching, to all the other companies that do not have this fee…
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And I’m sure USPS will keep their 8% surcharge as well as having a holiday increase until Jan and then a regular rate increase right after that. And apparently electric delivery vehicles at Amazon and USPS have not made a dent in maintaining any operating costs.
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I thought USPS scrapped all of their EVs.
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It is a shame we don’t have leadership with a penchant for not caring about other countries views of us, that had the authority to limit exports of refined oil products, increasing domestic supply and reducing costs for Americans by putting them first, instead of China and the rest of the world…
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The real problem is - has anyone ever seen a surcharge go away before on Amazon - even if the problem that causes it does?
The answer is no - so this is the new FBA fee, until it goes up again.
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Did they ever end the fuel and inflation surcharge from back in '22? I don’t bother doing FBA anymore so I really don’t know if they still have that fee.
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??? Google says quite the opposite.
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They didn’t but they also didn’t raise the FBA fee at all in 2023. So there’s that…
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Okay, good to know. I didn’t follow up on it after DOGE announced they were scrapping them all. I guess for once, Elon didn’t get his way.
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They did however scrap the EV tax credits (not to Elon’s liking) which was traded for missiles and high gas prices
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Yes! And if we can raise prices, the price history will show that we did without explanation of why.
I thought of this, it should be helping some but those are the final leg. Diesel semi’s are transporting between warehouses.
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But that’s not how oil prices work.
Oil is a worldwide commodity, and like many of them, the differences in shipping cost is “so near to zero” as to be insignificant, as all ports are assumed to be reached by tanker from a refinery for pricing purposes.
So, a shortage anywhere drives up everyone’s price, as the oil goes to where the price is highest first, so the USA pays a higher price because China does not “see” enough oil to meet its needs on the market at the moment. We may not pay as much as China would for our oil, but we surely pay more than if there was sufficient supply to meet demands.
And even a “domestic” supplier is going to sell at that world price, as they will not turn down the opportunity to profit. (Hence Carter’s famous “Windfall Profits Tax of 1980”)
No… That is how we CHOOSE to let it work.
We did this kind of thing for national defense all the time throughout history, and we even had a crude oil export ban starting back in the 1970’s to ween us off foreign oil when OPEC wanted to play games when we helped Israel back then too, and it what led to the shale revolution. Removing that ban is what destroyed much of the technological expansion and physical expansion of domestic oil production. It was only rescinded in 2008.
Secondly, refined oil products are not the same as crude prices as many nations with high demand do not have the technological capacity or even demand to break down and utilize all of the derivatives of oil refinement. You have to have an outlet for everything from jet fuel to asphalt, from natural gas to bunker fuel.
It is completely possible to create an “America first” export cap on the refined products we make here in the United States to make American fuel prices stable, but we choose not to so American oil companies, subsidized by American taxpayers, can sell the refined products on the global market for a higher price. We do it for war on things like steel, aluminum, and all sorts of other tech.
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Yep, we could make them stable. Maybe somewhere around $5-6/gal.
Much of our oil comes from Alaska. Getting it to the east coast in a large tanker involves going all the way around South America, as they won’t fit through the Panama Canal. That’s a trip of about two months. Of course, the other option (which is used) is to sell that oil to Asia (half the travel time), use the money to buy oil from the Mid-East, and ship that oil to the east coast of the US.
It’s a lot easier to move money around and trade on the world market than it is to move product in a closed environment.
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Well, then there is the Jones Act, where we CHOOSE not to use the same “global markets” to move said oil from A to B.
We also do not have capacity to refine all of our own oil at all of our own refineries, as there are many different types of oil and some refineries are setup to refine imported crude, then put it back on a boat for someone else on the “global market”.
I think part of that, is who is paying for the security of those transportation lanes. Didn’t see too many Chinese destroyers keeping Somali pirates at bay in the last 40 years.
You can move a lot of oil from Alaska to New Jersey instead of moving a single aircraft carrier strike group from San Diego to Australia.
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