On 09/30/2018 09:13 AM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
On Sun, 30 Sep 2018 02:11:54 +0100, rbowman wrote:

On 09/29/2018 03:41 PM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:

Cost to the customer should dictate ones further away will be less
likely to be bought, so I guess they were different carpets.

Presumably. They were all 12' rolls so I never saw the working side.
Furniture was the same deal. There still are furniture factories in the
south eastern US while most of the furniture I loaded on the west coast
was from Asia.

Other products weren't so easy to rationalize. I don't know about the UK
but the Sunday papers (when people still read the Sunday papers) have a
lot of colorful advertising brochures and other crap that most people
strip out and use to wrap garbage. I picked up a lot of those in Boulder
CO to take to Baltimore MD, which is about 1600 miles. Nobody on the
east coast can print useless stuff?

The whole scheme depends on cheap transportation / cheap fuel. Keep
those container ships and trucks rolling!

If your government put as much fuel tax on it as ours did, that wouldn't
be happening. A US gallon of gas here is $6.16 US. How does that
compare to what you pay?

It's been running around $2.97 all summer although I think it's up to
$2.99 now.

https://www.gasbuddy.com/USA

This state has a 27 cents / gallon gasoline tax so it's on the higher
end of the range. Distribution costs play a little part in the price
spread but it's the state and local taxes that make up the bulk of the
difference.

California is the flyer. The tax is 30 cents but because of state laws
they get special, super deluxe, designer blends. Washington has a 45
cent tax which explains their cost. Hawaii is obviously a distribution
problem.