De minimis exemption ends
washingtonpost.com
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To put it in perspective, used to pay about $85-$90 for 10 completed boards —- shipped —- now it is $316ish for 10 boards shipped.
That's always been my problem with buying American. I'd be willing to pay 2x as much to support manufacturers in my own country. Maybe 3x. But 10x-15x as much? EABOD, I'll stick with China. While infuriating, the Trump tariffs are nowhere near enough to alter the outcome of that calculation.
Plus these are going on high altitude balloons aka throwaway so a lot of people have a hard time spending that
Meanwhile our Chinese suppliers were honest with us.
The one benefit the American places are supposed to have, they managed to squander through either sheer greed or incompetence.
Their CEO Andrew Seddon was recently on the AmpHour podcast:
https://theamphour.com/699-circuithub-12-years-later-with-an...
My project uses gerbers and they do not accept them. Will see what I can do
I'd be very surprised if any of these companies they list are willing to give project files for manufacture. I assume they do this because smaller companies and hobbyist see it as more convienient, and to CircuitHub it means less mistakes / time dealing with the customer when they generate their own outputs.
I didn’t design the PCB so all I have are gerbers and BOMs (as CSV)
I speculate this is going to slow down the small hardware hobbyist small business space, by maybe 50%.
To expand, in too many words:
Personally I have a penchant for music synthesizers and many of them are from a one-person shop. I imagine these 3x price increases are going to slow people down. Determined and cost agnostic people will power through this. People who just have an idea and are actually motivated by the past inexpensive PCB prototyping universe, will a lot more about cost and prototyping and a lot less about the problem that they're solving. And I just can't imagine it being anything less than a 50% slowdown for those folks.
> “Key questions remain unresolved, particularly regarding how and by whom customs duties will be collected in the future, what additional data will be required, and how the data transmission to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection will be carried out,” DHL, the largest shipping provider in Europe, said in a statement.
https://apnews.com/article/us-tariffs-goods-services-suspens...
> They cite ambiguity about what kind of goods are covered by the new rules, and the lack of time to process their implications.
I now have to pay an extra £1.50 "administration charge" for every gift I send to a friend in the USA, despite gifts under $100 still being exempt.
How will it work for small, one off purchases? Well, I don't see how the tax payers are under any obligation to streamline that for people. The net effect will be to buy from US suppliers/importers, not directly from overseas.
The fact that no one has the slightest clue how to implement this is insanity to the third degree.
There is no good here. I don't when it became popular or acceptable to restrict free trade and ignore reality.
0: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/07/fact-sheet-pr...
1: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/rein...
I thought you were making a joke but that really is the name of the EO. It's so over for America
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/de-minimis-u-s-canada-endin...
It is still a policy from someone threatening economic annexation of Canada. He's dropped the rhetoric, but I doubt he's given up on the concept. "Targeting China" is a very kind, possibly even forgetful, way of phrasing it.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5071665-trump-ec...
Trump hates China. His boss told him to.
Mexico has also been disproportionately impacted by these protectionist policies. And that’s just the immediate neighbours with which the US has pursued trade agreements for decades.
the U.S. launched the trade war against Canada, “their closest partner and ally, their closest friend. At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense.”
Don't worry, those of us not in those camps have long reached the same conclusion.
I think the thing some Americans mess themselves up with is thinking that the world perceives their domestic politics the same way they do. From our level of abstraction, America voted and Americans decided the country is going to be an anti-science, protectionist menace.
Protect yourself. If and when we have enough good governance to be friends again, we'll need your friendship.
The petty child-like name calling from the American president was mostly just an evocation of “I’m embarrassed for you.”
Trump's policies are big on tough talk while actually having the opposite effects of the marketing. High import taxes hurt the pre-imported selection available from domestic retailers, as sellers have to pay the tax ahead of the sale and navigate the uncertainty that the rates might change in the future. Whereas direct-from-China goods already have cash in hand to pay the tariffs, and the only uncertainty is in the few days between purchase and arrival at customs. I expect to be buying many more things direct from Aliexpress, as the tariffs set in, domestic inventory is exhausted, and domestic-seller prices creep upwards.
Furthermore, the high tariffs on China do encourage investments in factories. Specifically, Chinese investment in factories outside of China, for final assembly of products. Investing in the United States would not be prudent, with the environment of political instability. So these policies are effectively strengthening China's relationships with other countries.
Never mind that many of the companies still known for manufacturing quality goods do so in other western countries. If the goal was really to oppose China, then it should have been time to pull together with our allies - not to levy import taxes to keep them (price-) uncompetitive with Chinese products, while alienating them with hostile rhetoric. Ultimately, our adversaries couldn't have dreamed of more favorable policies.
> what's your carbon footprint?! You fly around in jets 3 times a year?!
> let's buy 30c disposable crap from across the world while essentially subsidizing advanced industrialization of societies completely disconnected from our own
The US Deminimis seemed quite generous. No wonder it is removed.
The issue of course is that it's fraudulent. It remains to be seen how closely the US is going to be enforcing it. I have a feeling Chinese shippers will be under the most scrutiny.
I know that you obviously know this, so it's a weird thing to mention in context of (additional) taxing of foreign goods.
Obviously the main problem is that tariffs do not lead to positive future outcomes for the country levying them.
This simply expires the exception for the remaining 25%.
Why not just end De Minimis to China and leave it for the rest of the world that doesn't take advantage of it and reciprocates with their own De Minimis for US Imports?
There is the law of unintended consequences. Other countries will now make American small business products much more expensive to export. Why would they give a De Minimis to these small businesses when the USA doesn't reciprocate?
You're only thinking about China and not the rest of the World. US small businesses buy things (under $800) from countries like Canada and the EU, and were able to do so because of De Minimus. Canadians could buy things from US small businesses without worrying about duties as long as it was under $500.
Now even the smallest item, even a gift from abroad worth $20, will incur a duty of $50-$250 plus administrative fees from the carrier.
> Other countries will now make American small business products much more expensive to export.
They already are/were. From EU it never made sense to buy anything from small US business - with the absurd shipping costs and VAT.
If the sending country doesn't collect customs duties for the US, then the US will place a flat fee of $250 on the item regardless of its value.
>From EU it never made sense to buy anything from small US business, with the absurd shipping costs and VAT.
Perhaps in your case, but some products are specialized or of much higher quality than can be found in the USA.
I understand your point that removing it for all is a blunt instrument and causes different problems and harms. Hopefully some policy adjustments are made with some trade offs.
US is the biggest market for everyone, because they have the sweet sweet dollars and that dollar is the global reserve currency. The government is fighting with that to be honest, and they aren't only hostile towards China, but to the whole world. EU amd Canada are actually at the top with China.
It’s not China but businesses. Mostly Chinese businesses but it’s still a lot of individual companies that utilize it.
Same with illegal immigration: Trump & others could hire only legal locals at their hotels/resorts/farms - but don’t. So we go in circles about how to “solve” it.
Unpopular, but same with drugs: dealers/cartels aren’t forcing anyone to snort cocaine or do heroin. They do horrific things otherwise, but users share blame for the actual drug use.
When the de minimis exemption for China already ended 4 months ago?
And it would, in fact, have been easy for Trump to do exactly what you suggest, if that had been his intention?
This isn't about China.
This is about Trump's stubborn wrongheaded idea that tariffs are Good, Actually, and that means they should apply to everything.
I'm not thrilled with the way China acts in general, but come on; place the blame where it really belongs—and not on one of the victims.
How is China "taking advantage" of anything? They produce decent products at low prices.
It is important to also capture tarrifs from high value parcels, as for small but high value items a parcel can very much be a similar bulk import. (Picture diamonds. A moderate sized parcel full of them is very much a bulk import).
But at the same time trying to collect tarrifs on every parcel was historically deemed non-viable. Way too much work for too little gain. Especially since historically, the addressee of the parcel often ends up paying the tarrif, this requiring customs to communicate this to the parcel carriers broker, who must communicate it and collect from the end customer, who finally gives the money to the broker, who submits it to the government. Meanwhile CBP needs to store this package.
This whole process ends up just annoying your countries own citizens, and generated little revenue, so a de minimis exemption of some form was highly desireable. And to most politicians there seemed like little downside to setting it fairly large. Sure $800 is probably larger than reasonable, but it certainly means the average person would rarely ever need to interact with this process, and that was good enough.
What I object to is that in practice people just side with their politics "team" like in sports and create post-hoc justifications for policy created for unrelated reasons.
I'm in favor of evidence-based trade policy, but this isn't that unfortunately. The closest thing we have to evidence-based policy is the economic consensus, and the current administration is making a big show of disagreeing with the consensus for non-evidence-based reasons.
The current economic direction is not a consensus. The Western democracies are increasingly politically polarized and economically volatile.
Between the many different crises (unaffordable real estate, populational collapse, unsustainable environmental practices and global warming, increasing inequality, hollowing out of small and medium sized cities, and the list goes on), it is very difficult to justify the status quo.
You can estimate the impact objectively, but not whether that impact is good or bad.
A fundamental aspect of science is rigor. And a fundamental aspect of democracy is opposition.
And you don't understand what the economic consensus is so you don't know what you don't know and aren't in a position to assess the level of rigor.
Plus your other comments, e.g. calling drug users zombies and criminals, make it clear that the anti-democratic impulses shown in this thread aren't just a one-off accident.
Bold to hold contempt for free-market capitalism, when it's made your society so staggeringly wealthy, your concern of the day is literally worrying about landfills filling up with surplus wealth. Find some perspective.
Wouldn't I just get better value from an independent review mechanism?
when the differences don't matter or are things you areenot aware of this is more important.
Nothing stops you from evaluating all possible options - but in most cases you have too many other things to do and a simple set of options lets you get on with life.
What a weird thing to say to someone else.
Seems pretty judgey to me.
Because I’m a rational person, I know when I need to examine different options specifically matching what I need and when I just choose a random one.
You are free to visit shops that offer you just one option for a given category of it is too much cognitive load to make decisions like that. Just don’t force that on me and tell me that it is good for me. You might also want to get a number for the one therapist they offer there too, because having trouble making simple decisions is something that should get attention.
Look, I'm all about the race to the bottom but the market needs to be fair
The other side sees the tariffing government making capital available along with other assistance in order to grow the local industry of the thing being tariffed.
What you have done is engaged in a trade war for no readily apparent reason other than the fact that the shit businessman in the White House doesn't understand that a deal doesn't have to have winners and losers in order for it to be a good deal.
This wealthy engineer mindset is too literal. The AI-generated photos and fake reviews aren't bugs. They're features. They let the poor American with $100 of disposable income pretend they found a way to get an Apple Watch for $11. Just for a few days, they get to believe it might be real. When it arrives and it's crap, they knew it would be. But they got to play the fantasy.
TEMU's tagline is "Shop like a billionaire." I want you to really think about that. Marketers test hundreds of combinations to find what resonates. TEMU probably has thousands of marketers. They've tested millions of possible hooks. Millions. And this is what won.
"Shop like a billionaire" is the message that brought new people in the door above all others. Now what about churn? That's not the tagline's job. Don't let your knowledge of what exactly TEMU does and how it functions conceal from you this signal of what many (not all!!) people want.
However I believe they're not scamming people. They're delivering exactly what they're selling, which is the experience of feeling like you could have nice things.
Twenty years ago you could go to a matinee movie for a dollar. Two hours of escapism for a dollar. That product doesn't exist anymore. Theaters decided to serve a different customer base. They went upmarket. But people still want cheap escapism. Now it's $1-3 on TEMU to get that same escape. You browse, you dream, you wait for the package. It's entertainment.
TEMU is making things people want.
Not saying you’re wrong, but I find “Shop like a billionaire” to be a deeply weird slogan.
Yes, the majority by volume is from China, and from large trash sites that rightly aren't sustainable...
... but the second order effects on small businesses and consumers who enjoy buying from them.
That comment was not an attempt to evaluate the policy, bit an attempt to make it sound better due to made up environmental concern.
We are overall already treating too many clearly bad faith arguments as if we all were naive polaynnas. There is no reason to insist on that as mandatory strategy.
For the actual shipping, even if we pretend this rule removes the trip across the ocean, that trip across the ocean would have let out a very small amount of pollution per pound. Worrying about cargo ships is iffy to begin with. But GP was talking about the concern being made up, not the underlying issue they're pretending to be concerned about. Fake motivations in a bad faith argument.
Not sure I can say anything about the claim that some/most/all people expressing concerns over the environmental impact of low quality products are participating in bad faith. I guess you win?
I don't think you understood my post at all. The point was to disentangle low quality products from de minimis and cross-ocean shipping. I am not making the claim you're accusing me of making. watwut was also not making the claim you accused them of making.
To put it a different way: The environmental concern you're expressing is valid but not affected much by this rule change. The actual environmental impacts of this rule change are pretty small, so be critical of anyone using those impacts as a major reason to support it.
And there is a trend of people claiming whatever they wanted anyway is better for the environment, especially when the claims are small and hard to measure. Again in this situation that would be people talking about the effect of this specific rule change, not the general concern over mass produced junk.
I don't think this will give big advantage to US shops, it will mostly be extra expenses for consumers.
Surely you must realize that's a very atypical use case and is dwarfed by people buying cheap clothes and trinkets? Just go to aliexpress or temu right now and see what the items on the front page are. It's not niche components that you can only order from china, it's the same cheap shit you can order off amazon or buy at a local discount retailer.
People think that this just means that their nieces will stop buying junky fast fashion or whatever but that their own clean aescetic lifestyle will be unimpacted. But, no, that avocado toast is bankrolled by your employer and IRA and investment accounts or whatever, none of which are prepared for a 10% GDP contraction (or whatever) because the rubes can't buy their skorts anymore.
Economies are boats. We all sink or swim together.
The environment cost is higher with the middleman "small business" because they need their own logistics (likely Amazon). So instead of a carrier driving from the boat to USPS/OnTrac, it goes into the warehouses at Amazon. Wow! Thanks! World saved! In the eloquent words of our dear leader: SAD!
In any event, volumewise I presume Ali does more environmental damage than hobby electronics being shipped through Amazon.
Americans are rich and will buy wastefully made expensive item if cheaper alternative is not available.
[1] https://copenhageneconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/S...
[2] https://www.postnord.dk/siteassets/pdf/forretningsbetingelse...
If you import goods into this country at below the threshold, you are very likely to pay more than the original price of the good itself. That's the truth. There is de minimis in name only.
This is completely false. I buy tons of cheap things from outside of EU, including China, and they're insanely cheap (often for the price of quality of course). Maybe it's a Denmark problem?
There is a reason shipping stopped.
US consumers have long enjoyed the privilege of actual de minimis, that is straight to their door, no fuss, no additional fees goods below the threshold.
Let me introduce you to VAT.
If they dont, the package will be inspected in the destination country and taxed there. Making the shipment take longer and more expensive for the customer, as shipment companies levy additional fees.
It's easy to be snobbish about "low quality crap" from Shein etc if you have the money and preference to buy better, but for many people cheap stuff from China, whether bought in Walmart or online, is a godsend.
In terms of jobs and American manufacturers, there is zero demand for clothing sweatshop jobs in America, just as you don't see Americans lining up to replace illegals for low wage crop picking jobs.
All this is doing is making things more expensive for consumers. It's a consumer tax paid for by those who can least afford it.
I'm happy if there's an environmental improvement from this (never bought from the stores you mentioned), but a counterpoint may be in how all this impacts those trying to operate repair shops, labs, and teach science. Bunnie Huang had some arguments on tariffs back in 2018: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2018/new-us-tariffs-are-a...
There were some arguments from repair youtuber Louis Rossmann also from a few months ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xR2_eqNL604&pp=ygUWbG91aXMgcm9...