The problem is worse here in Canada. My friend does a significant amount of business with Chinese companies, and he says this is due to a UN treaty which classifies China as a developing country.
Example, I had a friend who was recently looking to start an wholesale business in Canada. Let's pretend for sake of the example that he was selling widgets.
He found he could import 300 widgets from China and have them landed in Toronto for a shipping fee of roughly $17. To ship that same set of widgets from Toronto to a store two cities away was going to cost him $349.
In fact for $17, he could send 1 widget within the same city he was in directly to a customer.
It gets even worse if he wants to send that package of widgets to the states for something like Amazon FBA. Once again, it would cost $17 to ship directly from China but would run him $1400 from Toronto to New York.
