Hopefully that was a woosh.
I’m not a lawyer and could be wrong, but I don’t think contempt orders can be pardoned.
Guilty…
Apparently not easy until a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spends a bunch of money upgrading their system. They should have stayed the tariffs. There is way to unwind the impact of 166B in tariffs inserted at the beginning of the supply chain. Everything downstream is affected: loans taken, goods returned or delayed, credit card transactions, service fees. What a joke.
I’m well aware China doesn’t pay the tariffs.
CostCo says any tariff refunds they receive will be passed on to their members.
https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2026/03/13/costco-tariff-refunds-members.html
Re last Smapti post, that is behind a paywall for me.
Googling, I see that this out today, but cannot vouch for the web site being reliable:
Costco Says Any Tariff Refunds Will Go Back to Customers Through Lower Prices
I also see this, posted yesterday on another possibly sketchy web site, but it also seems plausible:
Costco sued by customer seeking refunds for tariff payments
I doubt it is practical for someplace like Costco to refund the tariffs in a fair way. It partly depends on how their databases are set up. It must be possible to link individual purchasers with all the products they bought. Can they then link all those to import content, and tariff, of each item? Maybe, to an extent. But there would be edge cases, such as when the credit card used to make the purchase is expired, or the customer was not a member, or the customer is deceased, or, well, a lot of other situations that might not be easy for an outsider to imagine.
I doubt it. The tariffs were changing day-by-day. The same product in different containers could have had different tariff rates. Different stores would receive from different containers. The same item on a shelf could have had different tariffs.
You could average it or some other aggregation, but it doesn’t seem worth it. Just divide the tariff refund across customers by total purchases made and let them click through to get a refund.
‘Refunding’ by lower prices is a good way to get a class action suit.
The tariff refund portal is open now. US has to pay back all those big, beautiful tariffs to the corporations that paid them and of course, passed them along to consumers. Fox News did report on it (only one article that I can tell), but the comments are good.
“I thought the other countries were paying these”
“Prices went up and we paid for it, but the corporations get the refund?”
With “Trump did that!” sub-comments
“where is my tariff rebate check”
“Trump said he was bringing in trillions…where is it?”
And plenty more.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
But, but the Supreme court always rules for trump?!?
Obviously not.
Too bad the SC can’t stop all the other shit he is doing. Trump is bulldozing the US and the world all while lining his pockets. Glad they got a win on this one thing.
But, but even with the tariffs being paid back, we are not going to see a dime of it. It’s going to the corporations that paid the tariffs, raised their prices, and will now profit from the refunds.
Another cool thing about the paybacks is putting the lie to the myth that tariffs are paid by the countries being tariffed, not by Americans. I wonder how Trumpists will struggle to explain this particular accounting mystery, where it’s obviously been American companies and downstream consumers paying the higher rates!
I got into a pissing contest on Reddit about this.
Our little company paid a bunch of tariffs, and naturally passed the price increase to our customer. But - I’m sure THEY passed all of their tariff charges to their customers, and so on all the way down the line. So - if we apply for a refund, should we expect to hand that over to our customer? Because, unless they do the same thing, I’ll be damned if we are going to give them any money (they are a pain in the ass).
We paid the tariffs out of our marketing budget. Any refunds will go back in there.
The Trump supporters I know are fully aware of who pays tariffs. When I ask them if Trump was lying about China paying them or if he is simply ignorant they tend to keep their opinions to themselves. It’s like their minds shut down and they refuse to engage in reality.
Are the importers under any legal obligation to refund their refund to the customers it was passed on to?
Quite a few of my vendors had a tariff surcharge on their bills but every single one of them within a month or two removed that line item and increased the cost of the items (or other surcharges) to cover it. While I knew that was partly because it’s easier to tell customers that ‘prices went up’ than to get into a political argument with them, at the time I also assumed it was so that when the tariffs were removed, that extra money would just be extra profit for them. Same thing happens when gas spikes and they add a fuel surcharge, it’s rare for the fuel surcharge to get lowered or removed when fuel prices come back down.
I hadn’t considered them getting what they paid refunded back to them as another reason for burying that surcharge.
In a just world, which this clearly is not, bullshit “bookkeeping” like that would be a criminal offense.
One of my coffee vendors added a 10% "Tariff Surcharge, across the board. Even on the assumption that it averages out to properly reflect the tariffs they’ve incurred, it bothered me, and I called them about it, that they were charging this tariff surcharge on items that said right on the box “MADE IN THE USA”.
The last surcharge I actually saw go away was when the price of eggs spiked a local chain added it as a separate line item to everything with eggs (mostly just breakfast burritos). Egg prices went down, surcharge went away, my breakfast was a dollar cheaper.
In our case, what’s in the box, is made in the USA, but the box itself comes from China. Most packaging does.