Wait why would $0.75 have a $75 charge? Is there a minimum tariff that’s not as widely reported reported on? That would be a 10000% tariff. Or is this just exaggeration
> Washington will also increase the per postal item fee on goods entering after May 2 and before June 1 to $100 from the planned $75. Parcels entering after June 1 will pay a fee of $200 per item instead of $150 announced previously, according to the Wednesday order.
ref. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-10/trump-aga...
disclaimer: I personally don't agree with that, so no need to argue against me. Just answering OP's question, because I feel that it is important to understand the other side.
"Is it possible to step off the hedonic treadmill? The best approach involves silencing our desires, restraining the insatiable appetite of our dopamine neurons. This is what the Amish have done. They have learned to live without modern consumerism. They don't use cars, reject the Internet, avoid the mall, and prefer a quite permanence to heady growth. The end result is a happiness boom. The Amish turn out to be as satisfied with their lives as members of the Forbes 400. Furthermore, their rates of depression are more than ten fold lower than the rest of the American population. The Amish are content because they have learned to ignore their dopaminergic pleas for more." https://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/03/16/happiness-wealth-...
One wonders if this is simply due to under-diagnosis.
Telling the Amish they're depressed sounds like a wonderful business oppportunity! Think of all the follow up products and services!
I suspect for many imported items there is no local manufacturing and there won't be one. Oh well we'll see soon how the voters react to that.
I have a bunch of white oak from a tree I cut down and had milled into lumber.
I wanted to make a bunch of benches for friends/family, etc. I have the lumber so all I needed was the bench ends/legs.
I looked at the domestic options and it was going to cost. I couldn't find anyone that would sell a set of legs for under $300 a piece or wanted me to "contact them for pricing." and that's all BEFORE shipping.
Keep in mind that your local bigbox store sells an almost exact replica of the made in China bench legs with crap lumber for $99. It'd be cheaper for me to buy those, junk the lumber and use my own.
I then checked alibaba and walked through the process of getting RFQ. The competent sellers who knew what I wanted and what to do were easy to work with and quick to check the various shipping costs - the per unit price would be pretty low($20ish even with my low volume order) but shipping would be $50-$70 a per set of legs due to the weight of the cast iron. BUT, now, even with tariffs, that leg would go from $~90 to $180ish AND I'd still be well below what the domestic cost is.
If I go forward at all, I'll still probably go with the Alibaba folks. I don't see how USA manufacturers will suddenly start producing these sort of bulky intermediary consumer products anytime soon.
https://www.uspis.gov/news/scam-article/brushing-scam
They send all sorts of things but there was a big wave of seeds that got a lot of news coverage because of biosecurity fears.
https://www.ft.com/content/876bc3ec-aadb-11e8-8253-48106866c...
That said the overwhelmingly majority are shocked but believe it's all just a negotiating tactic:
Though, I haven't seen any analysis on how common this is, so the effect might be negligible in terms of how much "the Chinese" are paying for these tariffs.
Prices go down when demand goes down, right? Why's that, don't sellers need to make a certain margin?
The other end of the spectrum is stuff people cannot do without, in which case the seller has no incentive to lower their margins because their customers don’t have a choice. Then, tariffs are entirely paid by the buyer.
In reality, everything is in between and accurately estimating how much everyone will be paying is very difficult. What we can predict with certainty is that prices can only go up, and that some businesses will fold because they cannot absorb the loss.
The tariffs are not paid for by the foreign producer and domestic consumer alone unless PED=0 or PES is extremely large.
Also, check out this link[0] some people actually don't have many alternatives either.
It's hard reporting on the current administration, it's the classic Russian flood style messaging, where you just flood as much (mis)information as you can, and people just can't follow.
My speculation is the ad valorem duty requires more manpower to implement and so that's why there's the specific duty option. Especially because they originally temporarily halted the de minimis changes due to USPS not being able to handle it.
Executive order 14266 is the most recent rates with 120% ad valorem or $100 / $200 specific (gated by date as noted above). [2]
[1] EO 14256: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/furt...
[2] EO 14266: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/modi...
So I can buy my carton of 120 iphones if I pay a $100 package fee, instead of $200,000 at the 120% rate?
Alternately: My Chinese excavator only costs $100 in tariffs?
Can someone give me pseudocode here?
There are plenty of things where Temu charges $2.00 and I would be fine paying a 120% tariff on that to bring it to $4.40, because Amazon is charging $8.99 and retailers are selling a seventy pack for $30.
But I would not be fine paying a $100 tariff to bring it to $102.
I am looking for language like "Whichever is greater" in the announcement and I'm not seeing it. Do importers choose which to go with? Do customs? It looks like before, shipments below $800 were exempt of all tariffs under the "De Minimis exemption", and that exemption is going away, but I'm still not clear on how the rest of this works.
I just did some digging and cannot find an answer. Everything just says "X% or $Y flat fee".
Maybe it's up to the discretion of the administration. How much did you donate to Trump's campaign?
Then there's [avalara.com](https://www.avalara.com/blog/en/north-america/2025/02/how-to...) saying on 4/10 that it's 120% OR $100, but not clear if filer gets to choose.
The latest I can find is from today (4/15/25) from [metro.global](https://metro.global/news/new-tariffs-and-the-end-of-de-mini...) that says 120% AND $100 per package (rising to $200 June 1st).
Your question is so simply put it seems like there should be an easy answer but it seems like there's a lot of interpretations on what's going to happen. It's possible that all of these sources were true on the day they were posted but the rules are continuously changing.
In EO 14256:
> Transportation carriers delivering shipments to the United States from the PRC or Hong Kong sent through the international postal network must collect and remit duties to CBP under the approach outlined in either subsection (c)(i) or subsection (c)(ii) of this section. Transportation carriers must apply the same duty collection methodology to all shipments; however, transportation carriers may change their collection methodology once a month or on such other periodic timeframe as CBP determines appropriate, upon providing 24-hour notice to CBP.
(c)(i) is Ad Valorem Duty and (c)(ii) is Specific Duty
But the processing fee for customs is usually 20-40 USD. Which can exceed the cost of the package in the first place.
So when possible I always shop within the EU, or maybe the US.
Order something from the US into Europe? Expect to pay customs most of the time. From Great Britain post-Brexit? Ditto. China? Rarely.
And by you I mean PostNord in the case of Denmark
"Dont want to be stuck in the morass of EU red tape" is more like it. Not that US red tape is any better, mind you, but suffice to say that unless you have massive scale, registration schemes will make you ROI negative unless you are making >100k in sales per month from the country in question.
Some even require registration by region. For example GER vs UK vs FR and rest a while back, all needed separate registration. And the paperwork is usually in the home coun try official language. Ha joke is on you when you start getting tax authority messages. They arent saying bonjour!
Source: i did this for my company.
I get stuff delivered from the UK to the EU very regularly and all competent sellers handle VAT and duties just fine without additional processing fees. Smaller companies don’t always bother, though, but most of the time I don’t have to pay customs because everything is declared properly.
It depends on who you are buying from. This is the order of magnitude of the fee if you let the shipping company handle it. It is extortionate and they do it because at this point buyers don’t have a choice if they want their stuff.
Companies that are used to dealing with foreign customers handle taxes themselves and don’t charge processing fees.