I was not doing a comparison, I was showing how the NPR numbers were dishonest. NPR claims that it costs $6.30 to mail something across the street. They never give a specific number for a shipment from China to compare to.
Prices have gone up since then, but even today the most expensive option with no pre-sorting for 13 oz is only $5.39. It can go as low as $2.36 depending on the level of sorting.
NPR is clearly not doing an apples to apples comparison, and nobody has tried to defend them, they just attacked the numbers I sourced.
Now, you're saying that China does full pre-sorting to the zip code level but doesn't deliver to the closest location. This is roughly equivalent to the 5-digit DNDC option, which currently costs $3.56 - maybe slightly more because I don't know the exact details of how China delivers to the US. And it was lower at the time of the NPR article, which claimed the domestic price would be $6.30.
