Coffee cups.
But my point was more that they were adding a tariff surcharge to everything. It’s like saying “Instead of charging sales tax on some items but not others, we’re going to include half the sales tax rate on everything so it evens out”.
Unless the coffee is Kona coffee, the beans came from other countries. The beans probably were processed in the US, which may account for the “made in USA”, but they were grown elsewhere.
It wasn’t coffee. That was the point of what I was saying.
So… The company charged you (the customer) tariffs on a product that they themselves did not pay tariffs on… And then they are going to keep the tariff refund on the products that they DID pay tariffs on. That they also charged you for.
Win - Win. For them. Lose-Lose. For you.
Sounds about right.
Even items manufactured in the USA may use imported components or material, and thus have become more expensive to make because of Tariffs.
No. The importers had the choice whether to eat the costs or pass them down to the clients. And the clients had the choice whether to buy the product at an inflated price, seek a cheaper alternative, or hold off on a purchase until the prices went back down. I don’t see how you could mandate a refund to the clients, especially because some of the importers really did eat the cost. This comes down to the relationship between the importers and their clients; maybe their clients get pissed about the fact that the importer profited at their expense and go to someone else in the future. Maybe the client finds that the inflated price was acceptable and doesn’t care. And maybe the client didn’t see much of a bump in price if any, because the importer was able to somehow keep their client from paying more in order to keep that relationship solid.
But regardless, it doesn’t make sense to mandate what the importers do with the refund since there was no mandate about how the importers charge their clients.
This will be the gross generalization that will be made to take the heat off the motherfuckers who caused this mess in the first place.
If the tariffs had accomplished their intended effect, someone in the import-dependent supply chain would have decided that the higher prices weren’t worth it, the overall demand for imports would have dropped and the demand for domestic products would have increased, meaning that domestic producers would have the opportunity to raise prices and the increased profits might allow them to build up more capacity to replace the hole left by imports.
In reality we mostly got the opposite effect where the tariffs were so unpredictable that companies randomly got hit with fines, most tried to find some way in the future to recoup the money through raising prices and no one had any idea how long it would last so no one invested in new supply chains that would comply with the tariffs. All of which makes it even harder to figure out who actually “paid” the tariffs. Not to mention even now companies have to manage risk of sone future unknown policy from Trump hitting them again which is going to push them to avoid a high volume and low margin strategy that would give consumers the low prices they want.
It’s actually even dumber than that, since there are now vast swaths of products that are not made in the US, and no amount of tariffs are going to change that in a few years.
Were Trump’s tariffs actually implemented to bring manufacturing back to the United States?
Certainly not. The tariffs were a mechanism to get American consumers to offset the tax breaks given to the rich.
That was one of the stated motivations, and I’m sure it was sincere on the part of many Republican leaders..
Problem is:
Excellent post.
In many cases to biggest cost impact of a tariff is not on the purchaser of an imported good, but on the purchaser of the domestically produced good as the local producers raise their price because the opposition’s imported product price has increased and their customers seem to be prepared to pay the higher ticket.
It’s tariffs as protection. Economics 1.001
If I’m not mistaken, the tariffs hurt manufacturing because it cost more to import many of the raw materials that domestic manufacturers needed to make goods. It’s almost like there was no real strategy to actually improve manufacturing whatsoever.
No, Trump really believes that he can take money from other countries through Tariffs. No amount of explanation will ever convin ce him otherwise.
Sorry, but that wasn’t obvious. You called them a “coffee vendor”, but didn’t indicate that they also sold other products than coffee.
Sad to say I think you are right.
See Post 301 where I specifically mentioned “Coffee Cups” and posted a picture of a box of coffee cups. I’m not really sure how much more obvious I could have made it.
Seriously, there’s no more to it than that.
It’s the same “stable genius” thinking that says going from $600 to $100 is a 600% reduction in price. He doesn’t understand how things work. That’s why from the beginning, the tariffs made no sense.