You know Herman, I was looking at the mail pile in the entryway this morning and it struck me as completely absurd. There was a package for our housemate Daniel that arrived in four days all the way from Shenzhen, China, sitting right next to a letter from an office in Tel Aviv that took two weeks to travel sixty miles.
It is the great Israeli logistics paradox, Corn. And honestly, it is one of the most fascinating examples of modern supply chain engineering. By the way, for anyone joining us for the first time, I am Herman Poppleberry, and this is My Weird Prompts. We are coming to you from Jerusalem, where we live with our friend Daniel, who actually sent us the audio clip that sparked today's deep dive.
Yeah, Daniel was asking about this exact thing. He has been an AliExpress power user for over a decade, and he pointed out something really interesting. Israel is actually a world leader in AliExpress consumption per capita. We are obsessed with it here. But the real mystery is how the shipping went from taking two months of waiting and wondering if your package sank in the Indian Ocean, to arriving faster than a local delivery from just down the road.
It is not just a fluke or better luck with the weather, Corn. It is a massive, intentional infrastructure project. Alibaba, which owns AliExpress, basically looked at the map and realized that Israel was this perfect storm of high demand and terrible local retail options. When you combine our high cost of living with the fact that we still do not have a full-scale Amazon Prime warehouse presence here in twenty twenty-six, you get a market that is absolutely hungry for a global alternative.
I want to dig into that high cost of living part because I think it drives the psychology of the consumer here. When Daniel mentioned that local sellers are often just importing the same stuff from China and marking it up three hundred percent, he is not exaggerating. I have seen the same phone charger for ten shekels on AliExpress and sixty shekels in a mall in West Jerusalem.
Exactly. It is the cost of the middleman. But let us get into the actual mechanics of the supply chain, because that is where the magic happens. A few years ago, AliExpress realized they could not rely on the standard international postal system if they wanted to dominate. The old way was called the Universal Postal Union model. Your package would go from a Chinese post office to a massive sorting center, then wait for space on a cargo ship, then arrive at the port in Haifa or Ashdod, and then sit in an Israel Post warehouse for weeks.
And that is where packages used to go to die. I remember the horror stories of people finding their Christmas decorations in July.
Right. So, enter Cainiao. That is the logistics arm of Alibaba. They decided to bypass the traditional postal sluggishness by building what they call a smart logistics network. Instead of just being a platform that connects buyers and sellers, they became the actual movers of the goods. In Israel specifically, they set up a dedicated supply chain that relies on two main pillars: air freight and private last-mile delivery.
Okay, let us break those down. When we talk about air freight, most people assume that is incredibly expensive. How can a three-dollar pair of socks be shipped by plane from China to Israel and still be profitable?
That is the beauty of consolidation, Corn. Cainiao does not ship your socks individually. They have these massive consolidation centers in places like Hangzhou and Shenzhen. Thousands of orders for Israeli customers are gathered in one place. They are sorted by sophisticated artificial intelligence that predicts demand and optimizes the packing. They are not just throwing boxes in a plane; they are building massive pallets of goods all destined for the same small geographic area.
So it is essentially a bus for packages. Instead of everyone taking a private taxi, they all wait at the station and hop on the same flight.
Precisely. And because the volume from Israel is so high, they can charter entire cargo planes. We are talking about Boeing seven hundred forty-seven or seven hundred seventy-seven freighters that fly directly into Ben Gurion Airport several times a week. When you have that kind of volume, the cost per item drops to pennies. But here is the secret sauce that Daniel mentioned in his prompt: the triangular shipping model.
Right, he mentioned Singapore. Why go through a third country?
It sounds counterintuitive, but it is all about international trade agreements and logistics hubs. Sometimes it is cheaper and faster to fly goods from China to a massive hub like Singapore or even Liege in Belgium, which is Alibaba's European hub. These places are designed for high-speed sorting. A package can land, get sorted by a robot, and be back on a plane to Tel Aviv in a matter of hours. It is often faster than waiting for a direct flight that might only happen once a day.
That is incredible. But once it lands at Ben Gurion, it still has to get through customs and then get to our door in Jerusalem. That used to be the biggest bottleneck. What changed there?
This is where AliExpress really outplayed the local competition. They realized that the Israel Post was overwhelmed. So, Cainiao started partnering with private Israeli courier companies. You have probably seen the vans around the city from companies like HFD or Cheetah. These are private logistics firms that do not have the same bureaucratic baggage as the national post office. They even opened their own dedicated distribution center in Tel Aviv recently, right in the middle of the city at the Dizengoff Center.
I have definitely noticed that. Now, instead of getting a slip in the mail telling me to go wait in line at the post office, I get a text message with a code for a locker or a local grocery store pickup point.
And that is the last mile innovation. By using these pickup points, the courier does not have to drive to every single apartment building. They can drop off fifty packages at one kiosk in a neighborhood. It is massively efficient. And because these private companies are being paid based on performance by a giant like Alibaba, they have every incentive to move fast.
It is funny you mention the post office, because Daniel brought up that hilarious story about the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. For our listeners abroad, it got so bad that parliamentarians were ordering so much stuff from AliExpress to their offices that the Knesset had to officially ban it. They were using the parliamentary mailroom as their personal P.O. box because it was more reliable than their home delivery.
It says a lot about the state of local logistics when the people making the laws are trying to bypass the system they oversee. But it also highlights why AliExpress is winning. They saw a broken system and they built a parallel one.
Let us talk about the competition for a second. Daniel mentioned Amazon. Now, Amazon does ship to Israel, and they even offer free shipping on orders over forty-nine dollars for many items. But even now, in early twenty twenty-six, they still do not have a local warehouse here. Why hasn't Amazon been able to replicate this speed and dominance?
It is a different strategy. Amazon focuses on high-value, high-reliability goods. Their shipping is often fast, but it is expensive if you are below that forty-nine dollar threshold. AliExpress, on the other hand, dominates the long-tail market. The cheap, weird, specific stuff you cannot find anywhere else. And because AliExpress is a marketplace of thousands of small factories, they can offer prices that Amazon, which acts more like a traditional retailer, often cannot match. Plus, Cainiao's Global Five-Day Delivery service has set a benchmark that Amazon's international shipping just struggles to hit consistently.
Plus, there is the VAT issue. The value added tax. Daniel mentioned the threshold. Can you explain how that influences the way we shop?
This is a huge factor. For a long time, the limit was seventy-five dollars. But as of late twenty twenty-five, the government actually doubled that threshold to one hundred fifty dollars to help fight the cost of living. So now, if you buy something from abroad for less than one hundred fifty dollars, you do not pay VAT, which is currently eighteen percent. That is a massive discount right off the top. AliExpress sellers are masters at this. They will often split your order into multiple small packages to stay under that limit. So you might order four hundred dollars worth of tools, but they arrive in three separate boxes, each worth one hundred thirty dollars.
It creates this weird situation where it is actually cheaper to buy something from five thousand miles away than it is to buy it from the store downstairs, because the store owner had to pay import duties, VAT, rent, and Israeli salaries.
It is a total disruption of the local economy. And while it is great for us as consumers, it is a nightmare for local small businesses. But that is the reality of a globalized supply chain. When you have a company like Alibaba that can integrate the factory, the international flight, the customs clearance, and the local delivery into one digital platform, the local guy just cannot compete on price or speed.
I want to go back to the Tel Aviv versus Shenzhen comparison. Why is it that a supplier in Tel Aviv, which is literally an hour's drive from us, often takes longer to deliver than a factory in China?
It comes down to the lack of a unified logistics culture in Israel. If you are a small business in Tel Aviv, you are likely using a local delivery service or the Israel Post. You do not have a smart AI sorting your packages. You do not have a dedicated fleet of planes. You are fighting through the same traffic on Route One that everyone else is.
And let us be honest, the traffic between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is a logistics nightmare in itself.
Exactly! Sometimes it feels like it is easier to fly over the ocean than it is to get through the entrance to Jerusalem at eight in the morning. But more importantly, the Chinese logistics centers operate twenty-four seven. They are highly automated. A package there is handled by a human maybe once or twice. Here, a package from Tel Aviv might sit in a local distribution center for three days just waiting for someone to scan it.
It is the difference between a high-speed digital river and a series of stagnant ponds. I am curious about the data side of this. Herman, you love the technical specs. How much data is actually moving to make this happen?
Oh, it is massive. Every single package has a digital twin. From the second you click buy, the system is already reserving space on a flight and notifying the local courier in Israel to expect a package in four days. They use predictive analytics to know that, for example, during a certain week in Jerusalem, there will be a high demand for space heaters because a cold front is coming. They will actually pre-position goods in their hubs closer to us based on those predictions.
So they are basically shipping it before we even know we want it?
In some cases, yes. It is called anticipatory shipping. While AliExpress mostly ships on demand, their logistics arm is constantly moving goods toward the destination hubs to shave off every possible hour.
That is fascinating. It makes me wonder about the second-order effects. If everyone in Israel is buying their clothes, electronics, and household goods from China, what does that do to the Israeli economy in the long run? We are becoming a nation of consumers who are completely decoupled from our local supply chain.
It is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it lowers the cost of living, which is a huge political and social issue here. It makes life more affordable for the average family. On the other hand, it hollows out the local retail sector. But I think the real takeaway is that it is forcing the local market to modernize. We are starting to see Israeli companies trying to mimic this model, creating better e-commerce platforms and faster local delivery.
But they are playing catch-up against a giant that has a decade-long head start and a billion-person home market to subsidize their international expansion.
True. And let us not forget the environmental cost. Flying millions of small packages across the world in individual plastic mailers is not exactly sustainable. That is the hidden price we are paying for our ten-shekel phone chargers arriving in four days.
That is a great point. We focus so much on the convenience, but the carbon footprint of a pair of socks flying from China to Singapore to Belgium to Israel is staggering. It is the ultimate luxury of the modern age, even if the item itself is cheap.
It really is. And I think that is why Daniel's question is so poignant. It feels like magic, but it is actually just an incredibly complex and somewhat fragile machine. We saw this during the Red Sea shipping crisis in twenty twenty-four and twenty twenty-five. When the sea routes got dangerous, AliExpress leaned even harder into the air freight model for the Israeli market because the demand here is so inelastic. We will pay for it one way or another.
It is interesting how they pivoted. They basically decided that if the ships cannot get through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, they will just fly everything over the problem.
Exactly. Israelis are very price-sensitive but also very tech-savvy. We will find the most efficient way to get what we want. And right now, that way leads straight to a warehouse in China.
So, for our listeners who are not in Israel, does this model work elsewhere? Or is Israel a unique case study?
It is happening in other places, but Israel is a bit of a lab for this. Because we are effectively an island in terms of land trade, everything has to come by sea or air. We do not have the luxury of huge trucking networks coming in from neighboring countries. That isolation has actually made us the perfect test case for high-speed, long-distance air logistics.
It is like we are living in the future of global commerce because we have no other choice. If we want stuff, it has to fly.
And it has to fly fast. I mean, think about it. We are talking about a package crossing several time zones and thousands of miles faster than it takes us to get a plumber to show up at the house.
Don't even get me started on the plumbers, Herman. That is a whole different episode of My Weird Prompts.
Fair point. But I think it is worth reflecting on what this means for the global village idea. We are closer to a factory worker in Guangdong than we are to a shopkeeper in the next city over, at least in terms of our commercial interactions.
It is a strange form of intimacy. I know the exact status of my package at a sorting center in China, but I have no idea if the local store has what I need in stock.
And that is the digital divide. The transparency of the AliExpress supply chain is one of its biggest selling points. You see every step. Arrived at hub. Custom clearance started. Out for delivery. That data flow builds trust, even if the seller is thousands of miles away.
So, what is the practical takeaway for people listening? Besides the obvious check the one hundred fifty dollar limit?
I think the takeaway is to realize that the last mile is often the most important part of any system. You can have the fastest planes in the world, but if you do not have a smart way to get the package into the customer's hands in Jerusalem, the whole thing fails. The lesson for any business is that you have to solve the local problem as much as the global one.
And for the consumer, maybe it is a reminder to occasionally look at that package and realize the incredible amount of human ingenuity and carbon that went into getting it to your porch. It is not just a cheap gadget; it is a miracle of modern engineering.
Well said, Corn. It is easy to take it for granted when it becomes routine, but it really is a marvel. And hey, if any of you listening have had your own weird experiences with international shipping or have a topic you want us to dive into, you can always reach out.
Yeah, we love hearing from you. You can find us at our website, myweirdprompts.com. There is a contact form there, and you can also find the RSS feed if you want to subscribe. And of course, we are on Spotify and most other podcast platforms.
And if you have been enjoying these deep dives, please do us a favor and leave a review on your podcast app. It really does help other curious people find the show. We are approaching episode three hundred, and it is all thanks to this community.
Absolutely. We have come a long way since episode one hundred fifty-one when we were complaining about our slow internet. Now we are talking about global supply chains. It is quite the journey.
It really is. Thanks again to Daniel for the prompt and for being such a good sport about us talking about his mail.
I think he is just happy his packages are arriving on time now.
Aren't we all? Alright, I think that covers the mystery of the China-to-Jerusalem express.
For now, at least. Until the next disruption.
Until then. This has been My Weird Prompts.
Thanks for listening, everyone. We will see you in the next one.
Bye for now!
You know, I was just thinking, Herman. If we could apply the AliExpress logistics model to our grocery shopping, we might actually save some money on those expensive Jerusalem tomatoes.
I don't know, Corn. I think a tomato might not survive the triangular shipping route through Singapore as well as a phone case does.
Good point. Some things are still better when they are local.
Exactly. Anyway, let's go see if there's anything else in the mail today.
Probably just another package for Daniel.
Most likely. See you later.
Take care.
