>
> Canada Post is often reviled, government-run enterprise with a strong
> union, sometimes mammothly inefficient. I'd blame mismanagement
> by appointed political hacks, but others would blame those lazy civil
> servants and/or the union.
>
> Sometimes, though, they do rather well. There's a special book rate.
> It was $7 a kilo Eastern Canada to China a couple of years back.
> Under $3 a pound in US terms. Took about 6 weeks, though.
I live in Argentina and I've been buying stuff over the mail since around 1996 or thereabouts. In my experience, the often reviled US Postal Service can't be beaten when it comes to price/performance.
I have used FedEx (the Rolls Royce of couriers, if you can afford them), UPS (OK but expensive), DHL, TNT (avoid these two like the plague, they're beyond incompetent, plus they charge you hefty amounts just to hand over the shipping guide when something gets stuck at the local customs).
Best of the best? USPS *EMS* (Express Mail Service). This works as a.... *shock* cooperative *shock* between official postal services around the world.
Yes, a cooperative.
http://www.ems.coop/site/Main.php " EMS is an international postal Express Mail Service offered by postal-administration members of the Universal Postal Union (UPU). The UPU, a specialized agency of the United Nations, promotes the harmonization of postal services worldwide.
The EMS Cooperative was created in 1998 within the framework of the UPU. Its main objective is to enhance and develop the postal express service worldwide. "
Basically, what EMS provides is a courier-like service, with standarized end-to-end tracking and package routing speeds (it takes 5 business days from USA to Argentina for instance, the same applies from UK to .AR). Each postal service handles half of the route.
For instance, if you ship EMS from the USA (USPS) to South America, the US postal services handles the billing and tracking until it gets into a plane to the destination country. When it arrives at the destination country, the local postal service takes over and does the "second leg" of the tracking and routing.
So if you log into the USPS tracking web page, you see the data up until the package aboards a given flight #. Then you have to switch tracking page to the destination country's postal service, (with the same tracking code), and you see the route from flight arrival until it reaches your home.
EMS works very well and usually costs 40-50% less than the cheapest United Parcel Service rate.
Since I favor postal services and the cooperative approach, EMS gets my vote, and that's what I use when I have to pay for shipping. When it's a corporation shipping freebies to me, of course I make them pay dearly for FedEX. ;-)
Just my $0.02 FC Buenos Aires, Argentina