Guess why…
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The last I read, de minimis still applied. I didn’t know until now that was done with.
As an avid collector of vinyl records: FUCK! I’ve got no problem sending $50 to a European artist who’s selling a limited run of records out of their living room. Hell, if it’s an artist I really like, I’ll spend $70. I’m not about to spend $70 and the artist get half of it.
Spending ludicrous amounts of cash of 12-inch pieces of plastic is totally fine with me, but I want my money going to the artist who’s making the music I love, not a government I voted against.
It ended 8/29
No more Lego pick a brick! Way more money for temu bullshit, if they even still ship here! Etc
This is where American consumerism will really start to feel the squeeze. The prices of all that stuff had gone up because of tariffs related to manufacturing costs but now direct tariffs on shipments will either block it or cost consumers.
The only good thing about this is hopefully slowing down the disposal clothing fad from Temu.
If this had to happen, I really wish there was a reasonable DM, even $50, and then a requirement to not split shipments to stop business import abuse.
The problem is big businesses like Temu can bulk ship and still only pay a certain %.
But it will ruin small businesses who do only small shipments and will now see a flat fee that may be half or more the value of the good.
Bulk shipping requires storage and logistics infrastructure. Either way Temu and the likes will also be hit by increased costs, though I can’t say if the impact is comparable.
There are many good things about this, American consumerism is out of control
We discuss climate change and how “companies are the worst offenders” but what drives those companies? American consumerism
Importing fast fashion, cheap plastic bullshit, other nonsense in plastic packaging, etc (much of it produced in countries that still utilize very dirty fossil fuel chains) ultimately funds and drives significant demand to keep it going and expand.
Also puts huge demand on fuel for international shipping of dumb bullshit.
Next thing to do would be to further reduce fuel demands by limiting air travel and consumer fuel usage but Trump isn’t going to invest in public transport, obviously. This is only a byproduct of his idiocy. After that would be to address concrete and other building material demand/suburban sprawl. Although the time to do this was 20 years ago
Not only that, but no more pick-a-brick in Canada too! Why does my nephew have to suffer because Trump is a dink?
(We’ve tried maybe suggesting he not leave tiny Lego walkie talkies and lightsabers around for the dog to process - like a lab test but not a Labrador - but that’s proven unworkable)
The last I read, de minimis still applied. I didn’t know until now that was done with.
You can blame companies like Temu for putting a spotlight on de minimis. Their entire business model was built around exploiting de minimis to never pay any taxes. Rather than importing a single shipping container valued above the de minimis amount, they list it as like 10000 individual items, each under the de minimis limit.
It was overwhelming port authorities who didn’t have the manpower to handle that much paperwork for what should have been listed as a single shipment. The tariffs originally didn’t touch de minimis, but then the feds noticed that companies were essentially evading tariffs by only shipping low value items.
Large corpos might set up fulfilment centers in USA and do bulk import. Small companies will just stop export to USA. Setting up manufacturing in USA is unlikely with all the volatility.
Yeah, that volatility came up in discussions at work. Since it’s unpredictable, attempts to plan around it after just futile.
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
Congrats on helping average Americans to finally reduce.
Lol, their quality of life as they spend more on literally everything.
That’s part of why we’ve been so resistant to reducing our “needs”. That and corporate greed.
But they’re a tech company, they don’t transport anything?
If they sell anything they’ll be subject to tariff bureaucracy.
Interesting a Switzerland based company using New Zealands national bird, the Kiwi, as their logo. Plagiarism?
