Edit: it is also can be treated as a consumer right to know, by analogy with food labeling), what are the major components of the price they are paying, and thus allowing for informed choice.
When your value-add is fronting the cash for a container of something, doing paper pushing and sending the resultant product to an Amazon warehouse people will ask tough questions like "who are all these parties you're pushing papers to? What is their purpose and should they even exist in 2025" all of which is just a proxy for "if we fixed the system you wouldn't exist" and you can't really fault them for that.
The tariff charge may also naturally include say the directly related charges like for example the increased insurance premium for the increased, due to the tariff, insured value of the goods while they are being transported/stored. Add to that increased financing required to cover all those costs, etc., and that can snowball to feel significant even for the ones with higher markup.
Let's say 1 pay x for a product. Gross markup is say 100%. Do I sell it for 2x. Let's say there's a tariff cost of y. That means the cost price is x + y. I mark that up to 2x + 2y. It's easy to up the price by 2y and disclose the tariff as "z%".
But this of course presumes all your expenses remain flat. And they likely don't. As your expenses go up (2nd order effects) that 100% markup starts to not be enough. So the markup goes up a bit.
Plus since things are going up anyway, and since there's uncertainty (which has a cost) we need to bump the price up even more (because hey, free market.)
And when the tariffs go away, we can remove the primary cost, but all the secondary hikes remain. Because that's all just extra profit, and, like, free market right?
This round of inflation is going to make covid look mild. (And as I point out to my Republican friends, just remember, you voted for this.)
The way out of this is to devalue the dollar. That would erode the real value of the outstanding debt (which is delimited in dollars.) Alas the US has worked very hard to make the dollar the world currency, so devaluing it is complex.
The US consumer (voter) is of course the big loser. At least this generation is. Folk born around 2030 may be the big winners.
Tariffs are in the news and the percentages are known. If I'm selling a wallet made in China, in the US for $80, and list a tariff line item of $2 - people will calculate and easily know that I imported said wallet from China for <$1 and start to question why I'm charging so much.
If they're clever enough to do that math, they're clever enough to infer the result from the quality and fact that it's made in China. The ways of obscuring that would be to have paid more for a higher quality item made in China (make a convincingly costly product), or make it difficult to evaluate the quality in the first place.
But I know you're talking hypotheticals and all. It is maybe worth wondering whether in aggregate it'll become more transparent that the U.S economy is based on adding a negligible amount of value to anything from top to bottom.
They backed down immediately after Trump (or someone at the Whitehouse) called Bezos.
That said I wish they would.
“Amazon has partnered with a Chinese propaganda arm.”
If anything, what can be more American than making clear when and how much the government is taxing the people? It is like at the core of this nation’s founding.
Of course the importer will pass the costs along, but that isn't the real point.
The real point is that it is _expected_ that the costs will be passed along to the end consumer. The whole _goal_ of a tariff is to make people not want to buy the product anymore because it isn't worth the money.
There is an uproar about these tariffs, and I get that, people hate trump and everyone who supports him, totally get that too, and when he does a thing, people are going to lose their minds about it.
The point of the tariff isn't to tax citizens, it is meant to discourage spending, so the thing isn't imported, so the country of origin loses money and whatever they were selling now has even _less value_ because there is an oversupply.
China needs somewhere to dump their slave-labor made garbage much more than US consumers need to buy it.