I know one US business that used to make niche electronic product. Most components they used were from China. Got hit by the tariffs that wiped all the operating profit. Guy also had to sell his home and is now couchsurfing. Business is unlikely going to recover.
Of course he considered making chips and other components in the US, but he was few billions short to start the fab.
Good thing that the US cancelled collection of unemployment stats just as all these sorts of negative business effects were happening. If a job is lost in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Why exactly is China an enemy? They want to increase their standard of living and expand their sphere of influence. That doesn't have to hurt the US directly. What it may undermine is the idea that the US gets to unilaterally steer the developed world.
On the other hand, perhaps that's a burden the US should be excited about tossing off. It's expensive to be the World Police, and it's left them with a lot of strained reputation and burnt-through leverage. It also requires them to do a lot of "lead by example" stuff that they seem completely disinterested in (industrial policy, forming consensus, trying to present as a magnanimous moral model).
Reminds me of a comment I think by Nancy Teeters the first female Federal Reserve board member. She said the other board members thought they could savage the US manufacturing industry to kill wage inflation and break the unions and it would come right back once they stopped. And it didn't.
From the other side of the Atlantic this sounds like straight Thatcherism, in which Chicago-school monetarism was an ideological anti-union weapon, and the Thatcher cabinet was not coy about it. However I think the US went that way first even if Reaganomics came later.
I think a lot of that in the US got spun up with Nixon, Reagan brought a lot of it to the mainstream though. Both of them hated unions with a passion that is for sure.
They use interest rates to protect against inflationary (and deflationary) spirals, which are known to be devastating. The effect on the unemployment rate is a known, and predictable, side effect. But formal unemployment is small compared to labour force dropout anyway, and the latter is not necessarily so sensitive to economic conditions anyway. Besides which, the unemployment rate can't really keep going down forever.
Had it not been for COVID you'd be at more than 16 years without a(n NBER-determined) recession, long enough to suggest a fundamental shift vs. how things worked in the several decades before that.
Have you ever read about people burning piles of German currency because it was better than using it to buy firewood with? Not to say we would get there, but allowing inflation to run is not kinder.
I am imagining Mexican cartels smuggling hardware into the US...
(But seriously I do not know how good US Customs is but in my country every day millions of packages from Asia arrive and they are checking not even a percent).
Counterfeits don't happen when you buy parts from reputable distributors (digikey, mouser, Newark, TTI, arrow, etc) that are not "marketplace" items. These parts often come right from the manufacturer or from a domestic distributor for the manufacturer. You get counterfeits when you buy from brokers.
Often with older electronics designs, the parts the engineers originally picked are no longer made. It's not the end of the world, there are solutions. Sometimes the vendor changes the part number due to a process change or the part design is sold to another company and goes under a new number. You can also sometimes find drop in compatible parts (common for the 7400/5400 series chips), these may be in a different package so you might have to design an interposer or deadbug it. The worst option is finding old stock using a broker. There are legit brokers that will source old stock and "refurbish" them for you (called re-lifeing). But there are also shady brokers that will buy counterfeits (or get tricked into buying them) that may or may not actually work. Sometimes the counterfeits are relabeled parts that are compatible but the new label gets a higher price because they aren't being made any more. Sometimes the counterfeit is actually a totally different design that is shoehorned into its desired purpose (like a new microcontroller masquerading as an old processor or ASIC). Other times it's just some random junk pulled from e-waste that's been relabelled. Other times you'll get a counterfeit that comes from a stolen design. Even when the counterfeit functions, it may not perform to the same spec as the original part (very important for military spec parts) or will have other characteristics that make it incompatible with the rest of the design (like drawing too much or too little current). When it comes to engineering in ISO9001, traceability is a huge thing and brokers just can't provide that.
At my job, we have an "absolutely no brokers" rule. They simply cannot guarantee that what they provide is genuine. If a legitimate distributor doesn't have stock of a discontinued part, they'll never have stock of it. Brokers will tell you what you want to hear while they go out and try to make it happen. I'm not saying all brokers are shady but if you are considering buying from a broker, you should be instead considering how you can replace that part.
a purported niche/low-volume electronics, but the profit is somehow dependent on BOM price? a tariff bump on a small BOM doesn’t take you from profitable to homeless.
if that happened, the business already had seriously bad margins, bad cash flow, over-leverage, or maybe he was just doing it out of love getting paid maybe back for his time or not.
tariffs might’ve hurt, but they don’t collapse a healthy niche hardware company where buyers are presumably also into the niche.
seems weird i dont get it. can you explain further?
gamers nexus did a great (and very long) video on the impact of tariffs on US computer businesses. Some of the manufacturers went into quite a bit of detail breaking down their costs and how tariffs would render some products so unprofitable that they would cease to serve the US market. Not sure if it necessarily applies to a niche/low volume business, but the impacts on a larger business were eye opening:
Do you run a business with good margin, good cash flow, optimally leveraged and for profit? If yes, please tell us more about how tariffs have helped you.
Importantly, the other countries are paying for the tariffs! What happened here is probably just an error, a mistake on UPS' part. There's no way US citizens should be the one paying tariffs, no one understands tariffs better than the US.
I understand your sentiment, but I feel like your position is somewhat simplistic, and the actual situation is more complicated.
First, overall, the US has increased manufacturing output over the last couple decades. 2019 was the highest year ever, covid interupted a bit, but levels are back there again.
However the number of people involved has dropped a lot. US manufacturing prefers automation and prefers to manufacture things which are high-volume, low labor.
A good parallel is agriculture. Foods produced in the US (and the US produces a lot of food) tend towards low-labor. Think fields of wheat or corn, not vegetables. Most fresh produce comes from cheap-labor regions like Mexico (or is grown locally with foreign labor.)
So really your point is not about American manufacturing, but rather American labor.
Secondly, this free market you refer to is the American consumer. They are very price sensitive, and deeply favor cheap over good. This contrasts to a lot of the rest of the developed world which strikes more of a balance in this regard.
Since labor is cheaper elsewhere, it follows that cheap imports are favored (by the consumer) over the locally produced items. Unfortunately the imported good is often of a higher quality now (because foreign manufacturers can afford quality and still be cheap.)
So, the politicians you speak of (regardless of party) are reluctant to medel, partly because of unintended consequences, and mostly because the only real lever they have is to increase the cost of imported goods (ie tarrif them) which in turn gets consumers upset. (Witness the fury of the voter in 2020 because of more expensive goods.)
Thus while it's helpful to blame politicians, politicians are elected by consumers. Consumers who could by local, but choose not to. Consumers who vote against politicians that cause price hikes. (Even when those same politicians incentivise local production with things like CHIPS act.)
You can blame politicians, and indeed corporations all day long, but the consumers are voting with their wallets, and "cheap" is the only metric they care about.
... "cheap" is the main metric consumers care about because whenever anything can be supplied for less, the Federal Reserve calls that "deflationary" and creates enough new money to make sure prices go up to erase those gains. So the cost of buying anything isn't bottom of the barrel keeps going up in real terms. Most people can afford to swim against the current in one product category, and some people [the affluent] can afford to swim against the current in many product categories, but most people cannot afford to swim against the current in most product categories.
Quite funny to see the US import the utterly disastrous "Import Substitution" model that destroyed India's fledgling industrial base that was left-over after the British left.
that's so beyond obviously a sarcastic remark. In that regard I'd consider a vast majority of the humans totally capable of detecting dead pan sarcasm both in spoken and written speech.
We need manufacturing in the US. The service economy can't survive long term; you have to make things. Tariffs are not fun, but they are an important part of making that happen.
But, tariffs on used cameras or vintage electronics does not help bring manufacturing back. Let's just bring back the de minimis exemption for things like this. More industry targeted tariffs, fewer blanket tariffs.
No sure why you are being down-voted. Your argument is coherent and correct.
Targeted tariffs on specific goods leads to the development of local production of that good. Lots and lots of countries have these in place.
Blanket tariffs are, of course, useless. The US doesn't have the climate to grown coffee, so tarifing Brazil serves no purpose other than taxing coffee consumption.
A surgeon uses a scalpel, not an axe. Used well, tariffs are a very powerful tool. Used badly they create more harm, and don't achieve the goal of promoting local production.
Tariffs which are here today, but gone tomorrow, don't created the stable environment which long-term investment in local production requires.
Or targeted investment in relevant industries, similar to what the previous administration was doing before voters were suckered by the New York con man whose entire campaign was bemoaning everything about our country while apparently having some pretty spicy long-term kompromat hanging over him.
And herein lies the rub: It's been like this in many countries for the longest time. In Thailand, say, you receive an order from abroad, the post office sends you a slip and you have to pay the assessed duties to receive the package. It often ends up feeing arbitrary; some stuff comes through, others get assessed at a higher value and you have to show receipts and convince them that no, this isn't that expensive of an item. The officially published rate of X matters little when the assessed value is up to an overworked official (in the most generous of readings of the situation). Nothing's exempt; somehow gifts from family and used items always seem most likely to trigger the tripwire.
Ship something through DHL or a similar service, and they follow the letter of the law so you'll both end up paying the official duty (at least there, it's almost guaranteed to follow the declared value) plus their processing fee, storage fee, and whatever else they include. I've easily paid double the price of a product for all of those fees together.
And worst, it's all unpredictable. At least if there's a 10% sales tax you can calculate that into if you want to buy an item. But once you get hit enough times, you start just not feeling like it's worth the mental load, time, and random financial hit to order stuff.
America had no idea how good they had it, in the before times.
I had this happen with FedEx. They released the package and delivered it without me paying. I submitted a dispute, which they say could take up to 6 months to process. I hate having this hang over my head, as I don’t want anything going to collections, but figured if I paid it I would have a harder time getting my money back.
Mine was for a watch I got serviced. My own watch that I shipped out being returned to me… not a new import. If I end up having to pay what FedEx is saying I owe, it would have been cheaper for me to buy a new watch than to get it serviced, which is very upsetting. The whole process has been a horrible experience from the very start and I regret the entire thing. I should have just risked getting it serviced locally… or not done it at all.
There's something called a "carnet" for that case.[1] When something is leaving the country temporarily but coming back, there's a way to register that.
This comes up a lot if you're doing trade shows or performances.
I just got an invoice from ups to pay a $16 brokerage fee to jpmorgan for collecting a $0.60 tariff on a sticker included in a box with a custom keyboard shipped from Taiwan. Seems like wall street is making out better than the US on this arrangement
Yeah, I noped-out when I saw eBay's writeup on tariffs owed by the buyer (not paid by the seller):
"Shipping carriers or US Customs usually charge $5–$30 in processing fees. Add the item price, import fees, and processing fees to estimate your final cost."
Not something I'm doing for a $5 item... I'll sit back and wait until the Supreme Court finds the tariffs are illegal, and the Fed has to pay every cent back to the businesses, suddenly sending the US spiraling into the biggest budget deficit in history.
Tariffs do not always 100% immediately get passed on to buyer.
If there's a $100 product you'd like to purchase and there's a 100% tariff, it won't be $200.
That product was made abroad, let's for $20. So the tariff should be $20, not $100.
The US-based owner will go to the supplier, say they're getting squeezed by tariffs and first they'll try to see what they can do to recategorize the tariff, or negotiate with their supplier to absorb some of the expense. Let's say that got it down to $15. The owner still doesn't want to increase costs by 15%, so they'll hold off for a while and absorb, and then eventually maybe increase 5-10 and absorb further; perhaps eventually going the full stretch - maybe not.
Squeezing the supplier may work in the short term, especially for goods already ordered, and produced, which can't be sold elsewhere.
But in the short-medium term it creates uncertainty for the supplier. (The on / off / on nature of these tariffs doesn't help.) For some goods this means suppliers will develop new markets, or will adjust prices up for American purchasers.
For example, say I have an orange farm. Say I have been selling to the US for ages. Simple, reliable sale, no need to look for other customers.
This year there's turmoil. We take a hit because US buyers need a discount (or might cancel the order.) OK, I'll take the hit. But I'll also put out feelers for other markets for next years crop. Maybe Saudia Arabia is looking. Maybe Europe is looking. Next year, do I develop those relationships, or do I reserve my crop for my US buyer?
Tariffs are not necessarily the problem. They are an important long-term tool used to support local production. Uncertainty though is a huge problem- it's easier to sell elsewhere.
As an European, I'm kinda pissed we don't retaliate the duties.
I'd rather take a financial hit than act so weak and passive.
I swear between chat control, selling out EU's privacy to US tech companies (you can check how many times Palantir & others met commission members, it's public), the insanity of the ICE ban and this tariffs passivity I'm very unhappy.
Also, it's too convenient to only focus on material goods when the biggest US exports are gazillions in financial and IT services.
Leaving aside the other (valid) items in your list, reciprocal tarifs really aren't helpful.
Firstly, they're unnecessary. Just do what Canadians are doing. Stop buying US goods. Stop going to the US on holiday. Shop keepers get the hint real quick.
Secondly, they just make goods more expensive for you. They gave no impact on American producers.
So it may feel like the EU is doing nothing. But really, there's nothing they need to do. Tarifs are a tax levied by the US govt on US citizens. Sure demand might drop a bit in the short term, but that just drives producers to find other markets. Which in the long run is a good thing.
I've had a UPS business account for over 35 years. In the past year or so they've become just terrible. Any call you make to them will have a hold time of at least half an hour. Many of my calls have gone over an hour. Usually you'll get transferred at least once. Also, earlier this year they outsourced their billing services to a third party, requiring additional consent on their website, and billing calls are now answered by an overseas call center.
I had to call them several times a few months back. What triggered everything was a fraudulent shipment made using my UPS account. I thought that I got that straightened out after two calls lasting about 2.5 hours total.
I got another bill the next month for the same fraudulent shipment where even though my shipping costs had been refunded, UPS was charging me a "missing PLD fee" because the criminals who shipped using my account number did not create the shipment using my online account. So after another 1.5 hours or so, that got resolved too. (They don't seem to offer an option to prevent shipments from being initiated from anywhere other than the online account.)
While waiting on hold (both times), their pre-recorded on-hold content would urge me to user their webiste to resolve my issue, which I had already tried, and discovered that it was impossible.
I had to call them one more time the following month because they began charging me $20 per month for no apparent reason. Without first notifying me, they decided that all direct bill accounts would now be charged this monthly fee. I was able to update my account with a credit card on file to get them to stop doing this.
I would switch to FedEx, but their customer service is even worse. I closed my FedEx account 20 years ago, but I continued to receive spam from them for over 15 years with no way to opt out (because of the existing customer relationship that no longer existed).
I’ve had a similar thing happen to me recently. 500$ tariff on $130 of stuff. The tariff should have been like $20. UPS has been completely non responsive and still won’t show me the customs forms. Total scam.
Our business got charged a 200% tariff on a UPS import from Japan, completely incorrect. The dispute is taking much longer than OP’s.
Either UPS doesn’t know what they’re doing, or they willfully charge higher fees, or maybe they’re just understaffed from the massive layoffs they did to try to save their stock price.
edit: as a biz you (we) should use a legit import broker instead of UPS. But individuals like OP are stuck with no option.
In the country where I live, these kinds of fees are generally referred to "import taxes", because it's the buyer who's having to pay extra money which is going to the tax authority, not the seller.
While they can have an effect of encouraging domestic production, mostly they're a way to extract more money from the population.
I guess we can’t know precisely how this happened without seeing UPS’s original Form 7501.
The amended one sounds strange. Why did they claim that the duty for the actual HTS code is $0, and attribute the entirety of the tariff to the special EU-origin code?
I had this happen to me on an order from Sweden. The order was about $450 + $50 shipping. I used an online tariff calculator and it said it should be 15%. So I was expecting ~$70. A few days before it is supposed to arrive UPS sends me a $242 bill for “tariffs, customs, and brokerage fees”. That basically made it 50% more expensive, but it was either pay it or loose the item. A month later they sent me an invoice that claimed the item cost $850. No idea how that happened. I am too scared to order anything from the EU anymore.
Its funny how little US citizens know about this, meanwhile in the rest of the world we have been paying import duties our entire lives. When an item is posted abroad forms have to be filled detailing the sender, the nature of the goods and the value. Some sellers willl bend the law for you and decalre the value of the goods to be lower than what you actually paid if you ask nicely. The main danger being that if the parcel is lost the sender will lose out on any insurance claim.
The other option is to prepay tarrifs during the purchase of an item. Fedex and DHL usually offer this service which includes epedited customs clearance.
> Its funny how little US citizens know about this
Is it really? It sounds like you're implying it's some kind of woeful ignorance, but I say it's perfectly reasonable:
1. Each US state is already in a open-borders zero-tariff framework with all other states, which covers a very large portion of what people purchase.
2. Until recently, most individual consumers didn't need to think about tariffs on international goods, since most purchases were <$800 and covered by the de minimis rule. (Which AFAICT was in place for ~80 years.)
I used an online tariff calculator and it said it should be 15%.
I got tempted by one of the Brymen/EEVBlog multimeters. There's still stuff on US gov sites (and tariff calcs) suggesting we've a free trade agreement with Australia. The reality is that a 40% tariff is likely to be applied, and the worst case is that someone decides that the copper tariff also applies and in lieu of a declaration of the amount of copper the US gov just assume the whole thing is solid copper. The sad part is that puts a brand new, made in RoC multimeter (BM2275) in spitting distance of a used, working 33401A but not an assembled-in-the-usa-with-global-components Fluke.
Lesson learned: don't trust tariff calcs and assume the worst case. Even if you order something when tariffs have been dropped you're still at risks for broad sweeping tariffs to come into effect by the time your item arrives at a US port.
Moving forward: big companies are far better able to deal with this tin pot dictator chaos, let them handle importation if you can. DigiKey (ugh), Mouser, and Newark all show the tariff as a line item. I'm quite sure at least one of them is fudging COO and all three have some remaining US inventory of some items so there's still some entirely legal tariff avoidance.
Likewise AliExpress choice involves shipping to what I suspect is AliExpress' bonded warehouse and they handle the applicable tariffs. I've recently decided to learn how to solder and there's still plenty of 99 cent crap available from AE if you're willing to (ab)use the new customer discount.
In Germany, you can pre-register with DHL Express¹ with a bank account and optionally an EORI (Economic operators registration and identification) number, and then they immediately ding your bank account instead of providing their "disbursement service" where they 'benevolently' loan the customs fee to you for a 'minor' fee. I've not found similar options elsewhere, though I would assume they exist but might be corporate-only.
¹ annoyingly enough this doesn't even work with DHL, which is a separate thing from DHL Express in Germany.
Sounds like something that could be weaponized. Order a bunch of 'gifts' to be shipped to a target via UPS/FedEx or whichever vendor helpfully pays the tarrifs for you. Then your victim has to fight collections or pay up.
Ah this is just another step towards Turkification[0] of USA. This situation is just how it is in Erdogan's Turkey but you still have way to go if you are able to get your package out of the customs in less than a few weeks and no hustle.
When the trade deals and tariff conditions get sufficiently complex(it gets more complex every day as the president accommodates specific companies and personal favors), the bureaucracy also increases so at some point it becomes too much of a nuisance to bother with individual imports.
It’s still a little hard to believe and terrifying how similar this particular title and the comments below are to what I would’ve read in Turkish forums circa 2010s.
I also imported a roughly $400 item from Romania. Was expecting a 30% tariff at most. Nope. $756. Sender says there is nothing they can do. UPS says that's the money I owe. They will send to collections if you go long enough without paying it. Reddit had no answers, and many are struggling with the same situation.
If (when) SCOTUS determines that Trump's tariffs were illegally collected and importers are refunded, will end consumers who paid tariffs also be refunded?
I had to pay a tariff charge of about $20 on an order of about $100 that I had placed about a year or so prior to this whole tariff bullshit. The idea that the president can decide to tariff whatever the fuck he wants is something that needs to go, since it's essentially levying taxes without representation. If somehow the current admin can't refund the money they stole from people then every single person involved should be thrown in jail and their property confiscated until that money is recovered.
I bought a semi-custom instrument from Germany back in the spring of 2024, about $1800 (a Sandberg electric bass). But there was a year-long back log. The timing was perfect -- they told me it was ready to ship just when the tariffs went into effect, which cost me an extra $250 or so.
Imagine how non Americans feel about Trump. He is fucking with the worlds economy nearly as much as he is messing up the US economy, yet we get even less representation.
Because I've ran into the same issue. I don't think this is actually the tariff. I'm almost 100% positive this is the shipping companies (UPS, and FedEx, but UPS seems to be the biggest culprit) are slamming receivers with massive bills because they are miscategorizing many items coming from Europe.
I would be surprised if the money was being held in escrow and could be refunded. Actually the Trump admin is using this as an argument to the SC as to why making the tariffs unconstitutional is a bad idea.
Tariffs are great. They protect the struggling domestic IT industry and gives it time to ramp up its production of vintage computer parts.
The tariffs encourage domestic American hobbies like watching TV and eating potatoes.
You'll have to remove the potatoes as well as those can come from Canada.
Think you want an Amstrad CPC? Try burger instead.
Specifically thin sliced potatoes fried in industrial lubricants.
WHOA! I prefer my po-tay-toes sliced and fried in duck fat.
Since ducks are migratory shouldn’t duck products be tariffed?
I have a bigger issue: a bunch of undocumented CANADIAN geese in MY BACKYARD! I want ICE to send them BACK to Snow Mexico!
With chemical compounds spread on them for flavor. In a package made of PFAS.
The best time to manufacture vintage computer parts is 28 years ago, but the second-best time is today! :p
I know one US business that used to make niche electronic product. Most components they used were from China. Got hit by the tariffs that wiped all the operating profit. Guy also had to sell his home and is now couchsurfing. Business is unlikely going to recover.
Of course he considered making chips and other components in the US, but he was few billions short to start the fab.
Good thing that the US cancelled collection of unemployment stats just as all these sorts of negative business effects were happening. If a job is lost in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
I stopped buying vintage cameras from Japan on eBay.
Well, there's always the next administration…
I'm sure JD Vance administration will be more vintage-camera-friendly.
Nah, I'm sure he's more focused on vintage furniture.
Likes the creak of some old wood
Only the kind that are small enough to hide in public toilets.
China is US biggest enemy. Why would you allow any packages from China? What if there is a bomb inside?
This is question of survival!
Why exactly is China an enemy? They want to increase their standard of living and expand their sphere of influence. That doesn't have to hurt the US directly. What it may undermine is the idea that the US gets to unilaterally steer the developed world.
On the other hand, perhaps that's a burden the US should be excited about tossing off. It's expensive to be the World Police, and it's left them with a lot of strained reputation and burnt-through leverage. It also requires them to do a lot of "lead by example" stuff that they seem completely disinterested in (industrial policy, forming consensus, trying to present as a magnanimous moral model).
Reminds me of a comment I think by Nancy Teeters the first female Federal Reserve board member. She said the other board members thought they could savage the US manufacturing industry to kill wage inflation and break the unions and it would come right back once they stopped. And it didn't.
From the other side of the Atlantic this sounds like straight Thatcherism, in which Chicago-school monetarism was an ideological anti-union weapon, and the Thatcher cabinet was not coy about it. However I think the US went that way first even if Reaganomics came later.
I think a lot of that in the US got spun up with Nixon, Reagan brought a lot of it to the mainstream though. Both of them hated unions with a passion that is for sure.
Sociopaths. It breaks me to see the Fed use interest rates to cause unemployment as the lever against inflation. It all seems so cruel.
They use interest rates to protect against inflationary (and deflationary) spirals, which are known to be devastating. The effect on the unemployment rate is a known, and predictable, side effect. But formal unemployment is small compared to labour force dropout anyway, and the latter is not necessarily so sensitive to economic conditions anyway. Besides which, the unemployment rate can't really keep going down forever.
Zoom out; recent levels are actually quite impressive in the USA. Yes, they've climbed since 2023, but they're only just reaching the pre-GFC minimum (https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...).
Zoom out further: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE/
Had it not been for COVID you'd be at more than 16 years without a(n NBER-determined) recession, long enough to suggest a fundamental shift vs. how things worked in the several decades before that.
Have you ever read about people burning piles of German currency because it was better than using it to buy firewood with? Not to say we would get there, but allowing inflation to run is not kinder.
I think these days folks typically use Zimbabwe or Argentina as examples.
I am imagining Mexican cartels smuggling hardware into the US...
(But seriously I do not know how good US Customs is but in my country every day millions of packages from Asia arrive and they are checking not even a percent).
This kind of happens. There are all sorts of cases of counterfit ICs. Some even making it into military hardware
Counterfeits don't happen when you buy parts from reputable distributors (digikey, mouser, Newark, TTI, arrow, etc) that are not "marketplace" items. These parts often come right from the manufacturer or from a domestic distributor for the manufacturer. You get counterfeits when you buy from brokers.
Often with older electronics designs, the parts the engineers originally picked are no longer made. It's not the end of the world, there are solutions. Sometimes the vendor changes the part number due to a process change or the part design is sold to another company and goes under a new number. You can also sometimes find drop in compatible parts (common for the 7400/5400 series chips), these may be in a different package so you might have to design an interposer or deadbug it. The worst option is finding old stock using a broker. There are legit brokers that will source old stock and "refurbish" them for you (called re-lifeing). But there are also shady brokers that will buy counterfeits (or get tricked into buying them) that may or may not actually work. Sometimes the counterfeits are relabeled parts that are compatible but the new label gets a higher price because they aren't being made any more. Sometimes the counterfeit is actually a totally different design that is shoehorned into its desired purpose (like a new microcontroller masquerading as an old processor or ASIC). Other times it's just some random junk pulled from e-waste that's been relabelled. Other times you'll get a counterfeit that comes from a stolen design. Even when the counterfeit functions, it may not perform to the same spec as the original part (very important for military spec parts) or will have other characteristics that make it incompatible with the rest of the design (like drawing too much or too little current). When it comes to engineering in ISO9001, traceability is a huge thing and brokers just can't provide that.
At my job, we have an "absolutely no brokers" rule. They simply cannot guarantee that what they provide is genuine. If a legitimate distributor doesn't have stock of a discontinued part, they'll never have stock of it. Brokers will tell you what you want to hear while they go out and try to make it happen. I'm not saying all brokers are shady but if you are considering buying from a broker, you should be instead considering how you can replace that part.
Well they're less perishable than avocados.
a purported niche/low-volume electronics, but the profit is somehow dependent on BOM price? a tariff bump on a small BOM doesn’t take you from profitable to homeless.
if that happened, the business already had seriously bad margins, bad cash flow, over-leverage, or maybe he was just doing it out of love getting paid maybe back for his time or not.
tariffs might’ve hurt, but they don’t collapse a healthy niche hardware company where buyers are presumably also into the niche.
seems weird i dont get it. can you explain further?
gamers nexus did a great (and very long) video on the impact of tariffs on US computer businesses. Some of the manufacturers went into quite a bit of detail breaking down their costs and how tariffs would render some products so unprofitable that they would cease to serve the US market. Not sure if it necessarily applies to a niche/low volume business, but the impacts on a larger business were eye opening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1W_mSOS1Qts
tariffs have chopped and changed so much since this video that the specific tariff amounts mentioned are likely not accurate.
Hardware companies often operate on a relatively thin margin, especially as compared to say, software companies.
Let's say a companies margin was 40%. The cost of their constituent parts doubles due to tariffs, they are no longer making money as a result.
I hope this helps explain it for you.
Do you run a business with good margin, good cash flow, optimally leveraged and for profit? If yes, please tell us more about how tariffs have helped you.
We need to get industry to step up production of the AST 6 pack plus, or Plus hardcard.
maybe even s-100 bus cards.
Importantly, the other countries are paying for the tariffs! What happened here is probably just an error, a mistake on UPS' part. There's no way US citizens should be the one paying tariffs, no one understands tariffs better than the US.
If the seller from the country doesn't pay the tariff then it gets passed to the consumer. Someone has to pay the tarrif to import a tariffed good.
It’s a joke about the administration’s line that the tariffs would be paid by other countries, not by American consumers.
Freedom2 was joking
Too bad all the competent politicians were dead set against preventing the "free market" from hollowing out American manufacturing.
I understand your sentiment, but I feel like your position is somewhat simplistic, and the actual situation is more complicated.
First, overall, the US has increased manufacturing output over the last couple decades. 2019 was the highest year ever, covid interupted a bit, but levels are back there again.
However the number of people involved has dropped a lot. US manufacturing prefers automation and prefers to manufacture things which are high-volume, low labor.
A good parallel is agriculture. Foods produced in the US (and the US produces a lot of food) tend towards low-labor. Think fields of wheat or corn, not vegetables. Most fresh produce comes from cheap-labor regions like Mexico (or is grown locally with foreign labor.)
So really your point is not about American manufacturing, but rather American labor.
Secondly, this free market you refer to is the American consumer. They are very price sensitive, and deeply favor cheap over good. This contrasts to a lot of the rest of the developed world which strikes more of a balance in this regard.
Since labor is cheaper elsewhere, it follows that cheap imports are favored (by the consumer) over the locally produced items. Unfortunately the imported good is often of a higher quality now (because foreign manufacturers can afford quality and still be cheap.)
So, the politicians you speak of (regardless of party) are reluctant to medel, partly because of unintended consequences, and mostly because the only real lever they have is to increase the cost of imported goods (ie tarrif them) which in turn gets consumers upset. (Witness the fury of the voter in 2020 because of more expensive goods.)
Thus while it's helpful to blame politicians, politicians are elected by consumers. Consumers who could by local, but choose not to. Consumers who vote against politicians that cause price hikes. (Even when those same politicians incentivise local production with things like CHIPS act.)
You can blame politicians, and indeed corporations all day long, but the consumers are voting with their wallets, and "cheap" is the only metric they care about.
... "cheap" is the main metric consumers care about because whenever anything can be supplied for less, the Federal Reserve calls that "deflationary" and creates enough new money to make sure prices go up to erase those gains. So the cost of buying anything isn't bottom of the barrel keeps going up in real terms. Most people can afford to swim against the current in one product category, and some people [the affluent] can afford to swim against the current in many product categories, but most people cannot afford to swim against the current in most product categories.
[delayed]
Quite funny to see the US import the utterly disastrous "Import Substitution" model that destroyed India's fledgling industrial base that was left-over after the British left.
True, but does not help in this case with vintage parts.
Please engage sarcasm-awareness mode.
Neither humans nor LLMs are currently equipped with separate sarcasm-awareness modes so telling someone to engage theirs can only be…ohh
that's so beyond obviously a sarcastic remark. In that regard I'd consider a vast majority of the humans totally capable of detecting dead pan sarcasm both in spoken and written speech.
Isn’t there a well known internet adage that speaks to this?
Do you remember what it is?
Cunningham's law
What? No it's not, it's ...
Hang on a sec... you sly devil, you!
Not falling for that one. Hmmmpphhh.
Cunningham himself even claims it was a misquote, and that he never suggested such a thing.
“Shouting incorrect directions in Ironforge” predates Cunningham by several years in any case.
Noted.
I believe the OP was attempting humour.
Yes. Pitfall of not reading the entire comment before responding.
We need manufacturing in the US. The service economy can't survive long term; you have to make things. Tariffs are not fun, but they are an important part of making that happen.
But, tariffs on used cameras or vintage electronics does not help bring manufacturing back. Let's just bring back the de minimis exemption for things like this. More industry targeted tariffs, fewer blanket tariffs.
No sure why you are being down-voted. Your argument is coherent and correct.
Targeted tariffs on specific goods leads to the development of local production of that good. Lots and lots of countries have these in place.
Blanket tariffs are, of course, useless. The US doesn't have the climate to grown coffee, so tarifing Brazil serves no purpose other than taxing coffee consumption.
A surgeon uses a scalpel, not an axe. Used well, tariffs are a very powerful tool. Used badly they create more harm, and don't achieve the goal of promoting local production.
Tariffs which are here today, but gone tomorrow, don't created the stable environment which long-term investment in local production requires.
> The US doesn't have the climate to grown coffee
Well, Hawaii does, but your point is good, thank you.
I knew that would come up :). Yes, Hawaii produces about 1% of the coffee consumed in the US. I'm guessing a chunk of that is consumed in Hawaii...
But I'm glad you got the point. :).
Or targeted investment in relevant industries, similar to what the previous administration was doing before voters were suckered by the New York con man whose entire campaign was bemoaning everything about our country while apparently having some pretty spicy long-term kompromat hanging over him.
And herein lies the rub: It's been like this in many countries for the longest time. In Thailand, say, you receive an order from abroad, the post office sends you a slip and you have to pay the assessed duties to receive the package. It often ends up feeing arbitrary; some stuff comes through, others get assessed at a higher value and you have to show receipts and convince them that no, this isn't that expensive of an item. The officially published rate of X matters little when the assessed value is up to an overworked official (in the most generous of readings of the situation). Nothing's exempt; somehow gifts from family and used items always seem most likely to trigger the tripwire.
Ship something through DHL or a similar service, and they follow the letter of the law so you'll both end up paying the official duty (at least there, it's almost guaranteed to follow the declared value) plus their processing fee, storage fee, and whatever else they include. I've easily paid double the price of a product for all of those fees together.
And worst, it's all unpredictable. At least if there's a 10% sales tax you can calculate that into if you want to buy an item. But once you get hit enough times, you start just not feeling like it's worth the mental load, time, and random financial hit to order stuff.
America had no idea how good they had it, in the before times.
I had this happen with FedEx. They released the package and delivered it without me paying. I submitted a dispute, which they say could take up to 6 months to process. I hate having this hang over my head, as I don’t want anything going to collections, but figured if I paid it I would have a harder time getting my money back.
Mine was for a watch I got serviced. My own watch that I shipped out being returned to me… not a new import. If I end up having to pay what FedEx is saying I owe, it would have been cheaper for me to buy a new watch than to get it serviced, which is very upsetting. The whole process has been a horrible experience from the very start and I regret the entire thing. I should have just risked getting it serviced locally… or not done it at all.
There's something called a "carnet" for that case.[1] When something is leaving the country temporarily but coming back, there's a way to register that. This comes up a lot if you're doing trade shows or performances.
[1] https://www.cbp.gov/trade/programs-administration/entry-summ...
> I should have just risked getting it serviced locally…
Sounds like tariffs working as intended?
It more likely would have been the second option, “or not done it at all.”
I just got an invoice from ups to pay a $16 brokerage fee to jpmorgan for collecting a $0.60 tariff on a sticker included in a box with a custom keyboard shipped from Taiwan. Seems like wall street is making out better than the US on this arrangement
Please blog about this!
Yeah, I noped-out when I saw eBay's writeup on tariffs owed by the buyer (not paid by the seller):
"Shipping carriers or US Customs usually charge $5–$30 in processing fees. Add the item price, import fees, and processing fees to estimate your final cost."
https://pages.ebay.com/tariffs/
Not something I'm doing for a $5 item... I'll sit back and wait until the Supreme Court finds the tariffs are illegal, and the Fed has to pay every cent back to the businesses, suddenly sending the US spiraling into the biggest budget deficit in history.
eBay has a checkbox for "Location: US Only" that I have never had to check before. I check it now.
Go, USA?
How would this ever work?
The vast bulk of tariffs are surely paid by the buyer, not the seller.
It's more nuanced than that.
Tariffs do not always 100% immediately get passed on to buyer.
If there's a $100 product you'd like to purchase and there's a 100% tariff, it won't be $200.
That product was made abroad, let's for $20. So the tariff should be $20, not $100.
The US-based owner will go to the supplier, say they're getting squeezed by tariffs and first they'll try to see what they can do to recategorize the tariff, or negotiate with their supplier to absorb some of the expense. Let's say that got it down to $15. The owner still doesn't want to increase costs by 15%, so they'll hold off for a while and absorb, and then eventually maybe increase 5-10 and absorb further; perhaps eventually going the full stretch - maybe not.
Squeezing the supplier may work in the short term, especially for goods already ordered, and produced, which can't be sold elsewhere.
But in the short-medium term it creates uncertainty for the supplier. (The on / off / on nature of these tariffs doesn't help.) For some goods this means suppliers will develop new markets, or will adjust prices up for American purchasers.
For example, say I have an orange farm. Say I have been selling to the US for ages. Simple, reliable sale, no need to look for other customers.
This year there's turmoil. We take a hit because US buyers need a discount (or might cancel the order.) OK, I'll take the hit. But I'll also put out feelers for other markets for next years crop. Maybe Saudia Arabia is looking. Maybe Europe is looking. Next year, do I develop those relationships, or do I reserve my crop for my US buyer?
Tariffs are not necessarily the problem. They are an important long-term tool used to support local production. Uncertainty though is a huge problem- it's easier to sell elsewhere.
As an European, I'm kinda pissed we don't retaliate the duties.
I'd rather take a financial hit than act so weak and passive.
I swear between chat control, selling out EU's privacy to US tech companies (you can check how many times Palantir & others met commission members, it's public), the insanity of the ICE ban and this tariffs passivity I'm very unhappy.
Also, it's too convenient to only focus on material goods when the biggest US exports are gazillions in financial and IT services.
Leaving aside the other (valid) items in your list, reciprocal tarifs really aren't helpful.
Firstly, they're unnecessary. Just do what Canadians are doing. Stop buying US goods. Stop going to the US on holiday. Shop keepers get the hint real quick.
Secondly, they just make goods more expensive for you. They gave no impact on American producers.
So it may feel like the EU is doing nothing. But really, there's nothing they need to do. Tarifs are a tax levied by the US govt on US citizens. Sure demand might drop a bit in the short term, but that just drives producers to find other markets. Which in the long run is a good thing.
UPS sucks today.
I've had a UPS business account for over 35 years. In the past year or so they've become just terrible. Any call you make to them will have a hold time of at least half an hour. Many of my calls have gone over an hour. Usually you'll get transferred at least once. Also, earlier this year they outsourced their billing services to a third party, requiring additional consent on their website, and billing calls are now answered by an overseas call center.
I had to call them several times a few months back. What triggered everything was a fraudulent shipment made using my UPS account. I thought that I got that straightened out after two calls lasting about 2.5 hours total.
I got another bill the next month for the same fraudulent shipment where even though my shipping costs had been refunded, UPS was charging me a "missing PLD fee" because the criminals who shipped using my account number did not create the shipment using my online account. So after another 1.5 hours or so, that got resolved too. (They don't seem to offer an option to prevent shipments from being initiated from anywhere other than the online account.)
While waiting on hold (both times), their pre-recorded on-hold content would urge me to user their webiste to resolve my issue, which I had already tried, and discovered that it was impossible.
I had to call them one more time the following month because they began charging me $20 per month for no apparent reason. Without first notifying me, they decided that all direct bill accounts would now be charged this monthly fee. I was able to update my account with a credit card on file to get them to stop doing this.
I would switch to FedEx, but their customer service is even worse. I closed my FedEx account 20 years ago, but I continued to receive spam from them for over 15 years with no way to opt out (because of the existing customer relationship that no longer existed).
I’ve had a similar thing happen to me recently. 500$ tariff on $130 of stuff. The tariff should have been like $20. UPS has been completely non responsive and still won’t show me the customs forms. Total scam.
Our business got charged a 200% tariff on a UPS import from Japan, completely incorrect. The dispute is taking much longer than OP’s. Either UPS doesn’t know what they’re doing, or they willfully charge higher fees, or maybe they’re just understaffed from the massive layoffs they did to try to save their stock price.
edit: as a biz you (we) should use a legit import broker instead of UPS. But individuals like OP are stuck with no option.
In the country where I live, these kinds of fees are generally referred to "import taxes", because it's the buyer who's having to pay extra money which is going to the tax authority, not the seller.
While they can have an effect of encouraging domestic production, mostly they're a way to extract more money from the population.
I guess we can’t know precisely how this happened without seeing UPS’s original Form 7501.
The amended one sounds strange. Why did they claim that the duty for the actual HTS code is $0, and attribute the entirety of the tariff to the special EU-origin code?
I had this happen to me on an order from Sweden. The order was about $450 + $50 shipping. I used an online tariff calculator and it said it should be 15%. So I was expecting ~$70. A few days before it is supposed to arrive UPS sends me a $242 bill for “tariffs, customs, and brokerage fees”. That basically made it 50% more expensive, but it was either pay it or loose the item. A month later they sent me an invoice that claimed the item cost $850. No idea how that happened. I am too scared to order anything from the EU anymore.
Its funny how little US citizens know about this, meanwhile in the rest of the world we have been paying import duties our entire lives. When an item is posted abroad forms have to be filled detailing the sender, the nature of the goods and the value. Some sellers willl bend the law for you and decalre the value of the goods to be lower than what you actually paid if you ask nicely. The main danger being that if the parcel is lost the sender will lose out on any insurance claim.
The other option is to prepay tarrifs during the purchase of an item. Fedex and DHL usually offer this service which includes epedited customs clearance.
> Its funny how little US citizens know about this
Is it really? It sounds like you're implying it's some kind of woeful ignorance, but I say it's perfectly reasonable:
1. Each US state is already in a open-borders zero-tariff framework with all other states, which covers a very large portion of what people purchase.
2. Until recently, most individual consumers didn't need to think about tariffs on international goods, since most purchases were <$800 and covered by the de minimis rule. (Which AFAICT was in place for ~80 years.)
I would have just been happy if the declared value was what I paid, instead of almost double.
Lesson learned: don't trust tariff calcs and assume the worst case. Even if you order something when tariffs have been dropped you're still at risks for broad sweeping tariffs to come into effect by the time your item arrives at a US port.
Moving forward: big companies are far better able to deal with this tin pot dictator chaos, let them handle importation if you can. DigiKey (ugh), Mouser, and Newark all show the tariff as a line item. I'm quite sure at least one of them is fudging COO and all three have some remaining US inventory of some items so there's still some entirely legal tariff avoidance.
Likewise AliExpress choice involves shipping to what I suspect is AliExpress' bonded warehouse and they handle the applicable tariffs. I've recently decided to learn how to solder and there's still plenty of 99 cent crap available from AE if you're willing to (ab)use the new customer discount.
> Lutnick Family Angling To Make Astronomical Sums Off Court Nixing Tariffs
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/lutnick-family-angling-...
In Germany, you can pre-register with DHL Express¹ with a bank account and optionally an EORI (Economic operators registration and identification) number, and then they immediately ding your bank account instead of providing their "disbursement service" where they 'benevolently' loan the customs fee to you for a 'minor' fee. I've not found similar options elsewhere, though I would assume they exist but might be corporate-only.
¹ annoyingly enough this doesn't even work with DHL, which is a separate thing from DHL Express in Germany.
Somewhat clickbait. The $684 duty charge was in error, and they got it reduced to the correct amount (an order of magnitude lower)
Sounds like something that could be weaponized. Order a bunch of 'gifts' to be shipped to a target via UPS/FedEx or whichever vendor helpfully pays the tarrifs for you. Then your victim has to fight collections or pay up.
Government insanity aside, the most insane part to me is that card networks allow partial refunds, but UPS wants to... mail a cheque?
Maybe they want to play a similar game to mail-in rebates? Or it could just be an old process that has yet to be modernized
Ah this is just another step towards Turkification[0] of USA. This situation is just how it is in Erdogan's Turkey but you still have way to go if you are able to get your package out of the customs in less than a few weeks and no hustle.
When the trade deals and tariff conditions get sufficiently complex(it gets more complex every day as the president accommodates specific companies and personal favors), the bureaucracy also increases so at some point it becomes too much of a nuisance to bother with individual imports.
[0] https://www.theglobalist.com/the-turkification-of-america-tr...
It’s still a little hard to believe and terrifying how similar this particular title and the comments below are to what I would’ve read in Turkish forums circa 2010s.
For Turkey it only got worse from there.
Never fear! That $2000 check will be coming your way soon.
And all it cost was a mere $4,900 stealthily taken from your pocket—what a steal!
https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-april-1...
I hate UPS with the passion of a thousand dying suns.
I've long since opted to pay more to use DHL whenever I can, but a lot of Chinese suppliers simply won't deal with anyone except UPS. Drives me nuts.
I also imported a roughly $400 item from Romania. Was expecting a 30% tariff at most. Nope. $756. Sender says there is nothing they can do. UPS says that's the money I owe. They will send to collections if you go long enough without paying it. Reddit had no answers, and many are struggling with the same situation.
And now you know why DHL suspended shipments to the US for a bit. I think express (non-postal) shipments are being processed these days?
If (when) SCOTUS determines that Trump's tariffs were illegally collected and importers are refunded, will end consumers who paid tariffs also be refunded?
UPS didn't charge it.
I had to pay a tariff charge of about $20 on an order of about $100 that I had placed about a year or so prior to this whole tariff bullshit. The idea that the president can decide to tariff whatever the fuck he wants is something that needs to go, since it's essentially levying taxes without representation. If somehow the current admin can't refund the money they stole from people then every single person involved should be thrown in jail and their property confiscated until that money is recovered.
I bought a semi-custom instrument from Germany back in the spring of 2024, about $1800 (a Sandberg electric bass). But there was a year-long back log. The timing was perfect -- they told me it was ready to ship just when the tariffs went into effect, which cost me an extra $250 or so.
Imagine how non Americans feel about Trump. He is fucking with the worlds economy nearly as much as he is messing up the US economy, yet we get even less representation.
Retroactive taxes are clearly bs.
If SCOTUS finds the tariffs unconstitutional in Learning Resources v. Trump, they should order refunds.
Because I've ran into the same issue. I don't think this is actually the tariff. I'm almost 100% positive this is the shipping companies (UPS, and FedEx, but UPS seems to be the biggest culprit) are slamming receivers with massive bills because they are miscategorizing many items coming from Europe.
According to the President, tariffs have already brought in $8 TRILLION dollars. [1]
Might be hard to issue refunds.
1. https://reason.com/2025/09/02/the-white-house-says-trumps-ta...
I would be surprised if the money was being held in escrow and could be refunded. Actually the Trump admin is using this as an argument to the SC as to why making the tariffs unconstitutional is a bad idea.
Indeed. The moral of the story is that it’s ideal to do illegal acts which are difficult to undo, as it’ll give the judiciary greater pause.