Amazon says displaying tariffs 'not going to happen' after White House blowback | Hacker News Reader

Amazon says displaying tariffs 'not going to happen' after White House blowback

cnbc.com

62 pointsdocdeek12 comments

This was never going to be feasible to display for several obvious reasons:

1. A tariff is part of the landed cost of a product - meaning it's a component of a businesses' Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). It is not an optional additional service, such as shipping, and is not something that can readily be broken out of product costings (which is used to determine markup and price).

2. Many, many businesses purchase goods for resale from other businesses which imported the goods. Sometimes a business may be two or three times removed from the actual importation of products. None of those businesses would have the capability to prove which component of their price is due to tariffs. This policy would only favor businesses which are importing direct and then reselling direct to consumer, ie. the very overseas Chinese businesses the tariffs are specifically targeting.

Amazon already has a Chinese problem in that it's being slowly converted into a higher-priced Temu - filled with junk and knock-offs everyone complains about. I do not see it being advantageous for Amazon to create such a policy that grossly favors overseas businesses over Amazon's domestic partners and 3rd party sellers.

There is a line for sales tax why not a line for the largest tax ever imposed? I thought he loved tariffs, why not be proud of what you did?

I guess the Leadership Princple of "Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit" doesn't apply when dealing with our current POTUS.

The "Commit" part means doing as you're told after disagreeing.

Cowards, people needs to stand up to that clown, otherwise the US will end up as a backwater country.

I think quietly becoming a country of backwater citizens, on the down low, is a prerequisite for a large enough percentage of voters to think giving a clown power, and then more power, and then more power, that will be very difficult to get back, regardless of increasing chaos, is the sober solution to all their frustrations.

Respect for competency, expertise, education, objectivity, honesty, cross-partisanship and compromise, empathy, diversity of thought, and a host of other important foundations for a healthy country, have already left the building.

Yeah, every store should do this with line items on the receipt.

No comments thus far mention the Streisand Effect.[1]

Bezos may have realized the net effect of the move had a decent likelihood of proving to be self-immolation.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

For anyone with a basic understanding of a tariff as a measurable levied tax on a product vs inflation as a general measurement of price increases, this has to be one of the most wild and best example I’ve seen in many decades of Doublespeak as defined in Orwells 1984.

“Why didn’t Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?” the White House press secretary asked.

The statement is delivered with authority but is utterly nonsensical.

Biden’s federal spending undoubtedly contributed to inflation. So will tariffs, just in a different way. So why suddenly start caring about prices and what influences them? It’s interesting how people develop this kind of analytical blindness, when they are presented with a fact which challenges their political preference.

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43831027

Display of the cost of goods sold for an item (back calculated from the tariff) would be incredibly good information for competitors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com