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Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

De Minimus rules are the reason why you don’t have declare that fridge magnet and bag of chips you bought from your trip to Beijing. Going to make air travel a mess flying into the US setting de minimus to $0 and travelers have to declare everything.

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Are these laws so inflexible they can’t differentiate between a traveler and a shipping container?

Or a traveler and a company doing $30 billion in de minimus import sales annually.

What if the traveler is a celebrity on a chartered jet bringing home a shipping container's worth of souvenirs? Where do you draw the line?

There are personal exemption limits already at $800 per person returning from abroad.

At that point it costs so much that the rule doesn't make a difference.

Doing the work on a large amount of miscellaneous parcels is going to have pretty much the same problem.

But Temu/etc aren't sending a shipping container. They're sending a tiny package addressed to an individual directly. They look a lot more like family sending a souvenir from their holiday than large scale commercial freight.

Are these laws so inflexible they can’t differentiate between a traveler and a package?

Well, possibly yes, US law is one of the most regulation heavy countries making this sort of stuff impossible.

However the point really is, do there really need to be issues at the border when flights land? I guess you could exempt travellers so that there is the appearance of normality to people IRL, but that wouldn't prevent issues at the border for packages, and most people get a lot more packages than they do fly in/out of the US, so I'd imagine it wouldn't take long for people to really notice the impact directly (let alone several steps removed as companies can no longer import effectively).

I could see a regulatory environment where if a package is personally escorted through commercial flight, it falls under a different set of rules than as a package sent from one place to another.

Or not! But I don't think the problem is that we cannot craft regulation, it's whether we ought to.

Isn't the entire point that people should order their packages from companies subject to US jurisdiction? Or at least from countries that make a good faith effort to enforce compliance with US regulations.

On the other hand, that point is not as legitimate in the US as in Europe due to domestic companies such as Amazon that don't act in good faith. Stores that pretend to be marketplaces and therefore try to avoid responsibility for the stuff they sell for their subcontractors.

This isn’t a well thought law, but a rash executive order. I have a trip to Beijing coming up in April and I’m a bit worried about this and potential retaliation.

It's not the laws it's the skirting around. Chinese sellers are already notorious for waaay under declaring package value so buyers aren't hit with customs charges. So many packages cheap enough to be sent without insurance but expensive enough that customs duty should be collected.

Bit off topic, but if you ever travel into Australia never don't declare that package of chips.

It could easily turn into your most expensive bag ever.

All food items simply _must_ be declared. There's two lines, so join the "something to declare" one. You'll be waved through after a quick inspection, or asked to surrender any offending items. Super easy. The declare line is often quicker as well.

I was witness to someone doing this into New Zealand. It clearly states all food stuff, but someone failed to declare their half of a Subway sandwich. This was a sandwich bought in the departing airport in the US, and then sat at room temp for the entire flight to NZ. Like, why do you still have it on you, and not have trashed it already? Nice little fine for essentially trash because someone wasn’t paying attention.

The USA has this also. I once declared chocolate cake that my girlfriend (now wife) baked for me on a trip to the USA from China. I didn’t even get sent off to secondary, I just told them what I had when I handed in the form and they waved me through.

I agree with your statement except that their entire business model revolves around exploiting a de minimus rule such that it isn’t beneficial to the USA. Their should be a limitation against a shipper exceeding a certain threshhold value of shipments into the USA before they need to start paying tarriffs.

I think you could adjust the rule so that it covered this situation, but didn’t cover shippers who specifically created fast shipping to avoid tarriffs and keep the processing outside the country.

That being said, I benefited from this when I ordered my Prusa 3d printer and I believe it was purposely priced exactly under the threshhold so that I would avoid the tarriff.

It's the importer that pays the tariff.

You could make being subject to the tariff depend on the shipper volume of course.

No, the reason for that has nothing to do with de minimis, and reforming de minimis would not change this particular situation at all.

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