Wouldn’t “custom duties paid” be on each individual component?
Unless they're registered as an importer? I could see that as a service they might provide to certain sellers, just like warehousing and other logistics.
But generally, they will receive their merchandise from a corporate entity who paid the tariff already.
It doesn’t apply to parts imported and assembled in the US before going to the Amazon fulfillment warehouses, but it does work for their direct to warehouse imports.
It is "playing politics" the same way listing the effect of taxes on the final cost of something is "playing politics".
This is just useful information for the consumer. It's absolutely absurd to think informing a customer of a cost increase is political.
My point was simply that since nothing like that has happened, prices spiking is almost certainly due solely to the tariffs.
1. https://www.techspot.com/guides/494-hard-drive-pricewatch-th...
It's as if you told a guy working in a ski station that “the temperature cannot be above 0°C as there's snow everywhere and everyone knows that snow melts above zero”.
It's not how it works, and the economy doesn't work in the simplified fashion you seem to believe it does either. You cannot reason from first principles using “basic supply and demand” arguments like that any more than you can make statements about the weather using the second law of thermodynamics.
Price change all the time for variety of reasons, seasons being one of them (that's why CPI figures are said to be “seasonally adjusted”, BTW).
I appreciate the mix of unwarranted condescension with the assertion that the theory that sudden tariffs cause sudden price increases doesn’t have predictive value, when basically every sober analyst predicted what we are seeing now.
It’s not exactly a secret that prices fluctuate seasonally but what we’re seeing now is spread across the entire economy, suddenly, and in sectors which do not normally experience that seasonal volatility.
Including in sectors that aren't affected by tariffs at all, that's the thing.
> the assertion that the theory that sudden tariffs cause sudden price increases doesn’t have predictive value, when basically every sober analyst predicted what we are seeing now.
You are misunderstanding. Tariffs will cause price increase with certainty. But so will lowering the USD value on FX markets, and so will adding massive uncertainty to businesses (including, but not limited to, the prospect of higher inflation in the near future), etc.
Tariffs will cause price hikes, but attempting to measure tariffs effect by observing price variations simply cannot work.
Real life prices are influenced by much more than just supply and demand.
That's theoretical economics, meanwhile in the real world, retail stores change the prices of goods depending on the weather or holidays.
Similarly, weather could explain the decline of winter gear sales in the northern hemisphere or specific commodities being hit by a storm but that wouldn’t affect the whole economy and we’d all have seen coverage of some epic monsoon or drought if it was that impactful.
Prices vary based on many more factors than what you think it does, that's it.
> all randomly did this in the same direction at the same time
Who says it's random? Most of the variation is very likely linked to the US government actions, but the first order effect of actual tariffs is far from the only way the Trump administration is messing up the economy. In fact, the mess started long before the tariffs actually went enforced and it didn't stop when they where suspended.
Again, the question is simply what non-tariff factor would explain non-trivial prices over a month? If there isn’t one, it doesn’t seem unfair to attribute the increase to a huge policy change.
Having the most economically clueless US president in a century and watching his erratic behavior in real time.
Tariffs are only a small piece of the puzzle.
I mean, passing along tax information is a political act (in the same way not showing items on the shelf with sales tax, and then including it on your bill is an anti-sales-tax political statement—the point is to blame the government for an annoying surprise), but it is (I think, at least) widely seen as sort of… normal acceptable behavior in the US.
priceIncrease := (newPrice - oldPrice) / oldPrice var trump_tariff bool
if priceIncrease > 1.0 { trump_tariff = true }
const trump_tariff = priceIncrease > 1.0
const
I wonder if they will just allow their suppliers to add in an additional “my tariff costs” number, which the supplier can compute however they want and be responsible for. (This would be on top of the main tariff price, the one paid directly by Amazon, which of course they’ll have receipts for).
Company B imports lumber and pays a tariff, manufacturers it into furniture rails in the US.
Company C buys furniture rails from Company B and screws from Company A and assembles them into an end table.
Company D buys the end tables wholesale from Company C and distributes them on Amazon.
How does Amazon display the tariffs paid by Company A and B and correctly show the price difference in the final product?
Isn't this the horn everyone keeps trumpeting? It doesn't seem complicated.
Well, realistically they'll do that _anyway_. If you decrease price competition, prices go up. That is the order of things.