Ok, so your package’s in Leicester and you must bring it to Nanjing.
Though, Felixstowe, through Rotterdam, and through Hong Kong too.
But along the way how do you know who to pay, how does it know where to go?
But enough of that Dr. Seuss nonsense.
This is a very serious episode because its about this, the Universal Postal Union, which
has just a fantastic looking website, so hello to the four people who saw this was about
postal agencies and still decided to click.
Much like the ISO from HAI 4, the UPU is an intergovernmental organization, but unlike
the ISO, the UPU is an agency of the UN.
The UPU is made up of the CA, the POC, the IB, and the congress but you really didn’t
need to know that I just felt we didn’t have enough acronyms in our life.
The agency’s whole purpose is to make sure that mail works everywhere.
Its purpose is to make sure that you can send a letter from Belize to Belgium, from Nicaragua
to Nepal, or between any of the other 18,336 combinations of their member countries.
No matter where a letter originates, it has to work in a way that any postal service worldwide
can understand where its going and every postal service in the world has to get paid for the
work they do.
But that all works today thanks to to the Universal Postal Union.
Before the agency was established if you wanted to get a letter from New York to Honduras,
for example, you’d have to affix an American stamp, a Mexican stamp, a Guatemalan stamp,
and a Honduran stamp.
You’d have to put the stamps of every country the letter would pass through and figure out
every country that the letter would need to pass through.
Nowadays, your letter will get to Honduras from any country with the stamp of any country
worldwide and I’ll imminently be explaining how that works with the help of my favorite
spreadsheet in the world, but first we need to do a quick sidebar.
You’re going to be hearing a lot about another acronym—SDR’s or Special Drawing rights.
SDR’s are essentially a special currency used by the lizard peop…
I mean the governments of the world.
The system is managed by the International Monetary Fund and its value is equal to a
specific combination of US Dollars, Euros, Chinese Yuan, Japanese Yen, and British Pounds.
But back to the mail, and the greatest spreadsheet in the world.
This is the spreadsheet the rules the world, or at least the postal world.
The entire Universal Postal Union exists to create and coordinate what is on this spreadsheet.
This is the Bible, the Quran, the seminal document of postal systems worldwide.
This is what explains why shipping costs what it costs.
In section two of the spreadsheet, we have every single international mail route in the
world by land or sea.
Thanks to this spreadsheet we know things like there’s a boat leaving monthly from
Gdynia, Poland to Sydney, Australia and it takes 40 days to get there and that to find
out the price you have to reference the CP 81 table.
So then you go to the CP 81 table and you head down to cell AX 3,888 to find out that
sending a package on this route will cost 9.803 SDR’s per kg which converts to $13.84.
If you’re not as excited about this spreadsheet as me you need to change your opinion because
there are 508,781 cells including every single combination of destinations in the world and
their price.
This is the document that determines how much it costs to send a letter or package.
But wait, there’s more.
Once a package gets from one country to another, for example when this Polish package gets
to Sydney, it needs to actually get delivered and there’s a charge for that too.
So, if you reference the statistics and accounting guide you learn that Poland falls into country
group 2 and then you go to section 1.1 to learn that the terminal charge, the fee for
delivery in the final country, is 0.249 SDR’s per item plus 1.954 SDR’s per kilogram which,
added to the transit charge for the boat equals 12.006 SDR’s which equals just less than
$17 US dollars.
Of that, $13.84 goes to the operator of the boat to Sydney and then $3.16 goes to the
Australian postal service to cover the final delivery.
The Universal Postal Union then processes thousands of invoices from all around the
world to figure out who is owed money and who owes money.
But thats not even the most exciting part.
If you go the website of the Polish postal service and use their price calculator you
get that it’ll cost you 61 Polish Zloty to send a 1 kilogram package from Poland to
Australia which converts to, you guessed it, just shy of $17 US dollars.
So, using this greatest spreadsheet in the world you can learn exactly what costs what
and why.
So now you should give it a test and as the benevolent, selfless YouTuber I am I’ve
set up a way for you to do just that.
Half as Interesting t-shirts are now available from DFTBA.
DFTBA makes really good, really comfortable shirts.
They’re honestly the most comfortable ones in my drawer and the design also looks great.
You can get one of these for only $20, that’s even less than an apache attack helicopter,
and the profits will go to helping us make more great videos.
Or, if you don’t like spending money, I’ve set up a page on my website, halfasinteresting.com/suggest
where you can suggest a topic and if I use it, you’ll be getting one free, high quality,
premium, bespoke, organic, umm…
I can’t think of any more buzzwords but you’ll get a free t-shirt.
Now go away.