What is the logic behind giving a company money for the tariffs? The costs were invariably passed to the consumer, so how does paying the company make any sense?
The logic was “these companies ate the cost” and when confronted with the fact that prices went up and the costs had been passed on to consumers, the clarification they provided was “nuh uh”.
and when confronted with the fact that prices went up and the costs had been passed on to consumers, the clarification they provided was “nuh uh”.
the argument is, when a price goes up, there will be fewer sales and therefore less revenue/profit
Which makes me want to say things that would get me banned for multiple reasons.
The companies are the ones who paid the tariffs directly and then passed the cost onto their customers.
The companies paid the tarrif, they get the refund.
The fact that tariffs allowed some companies to demand more money, is related but not causal, some companies will have had to eat shit because the market wouldn't bare the increase.
I'd love for the lawsuit to succeed and it set the precedent that when governments issue refunds they can force companies to pass it on to the customer, but I think it's unlikely.
It's also complicated by the way pricing works.
If the tarrif is for $15 but the uncertainty allowed a company to increase prices by $20, how much should the customer be refunded?
And what if the tarrif was $15 but the market only allowed a $10 increase and the company ate shit on the other $5?
Now what if none of these numbers are set in stone and all of the numbers are guesswork? Should the government audit all companies that changed their prices?
They should not be allowed to price based on "uncertainty" - if the tariff increases by 15, the buyer should pay that much and no more. So, anyone who bought at the increased 20 dollar price should receive 5 back.
Of course they'll never do this.
All pricing under capitalism is based on uncertainty.
What the market will bare isn't a known thing.
Side-note: this is why YIMBYs are dumb as fuck when they apply econ101 to rents.
There’s no logic. They don’t know how to fix the things they broke.
Taxpayers paid the tariffs once when prices got hiked, paid the resulting inflation costs, now we are paying those companies back with taxpayer money, which will continue to drive up inflation again.
We’re paying 4 times.
The logic is real "dumb" or simple. The company that paid the tariff gets the refund.
Tariffs are paid at the port of entry and before you are allowed to physically get the goods out of the port. So the payer is not always the manufacturer. Sometimes it's an importer or middleman. Sometimes a retailer. It could be you if you shipped in a package from overseas.
Because the company handled all the nonsense of importing on behalf of the end customer (also most intermediaries).
The youtube channel HowNot2 talked about this a bit since they somehow became a(n actually really good) climbing gear store. Because tariffs were changing so frequently (often multiple times a day), basically nobody could plan for them. So companies had to balance their in-country stock with anything they were going to buy in the next few months... or even days. And try to figure out what price they might be paying.
Some companies basically just charged the tariff rate on any given day... which is bullshit since they would have bulk purchased whatever they could while they were "low". Others would eat the cost because they didn't want to lose customers by increasing the price of a preordered item. And so forth.
And... people who got their aliexpress on can tell horror stories of getting a bill once things made it through customs.
So... it actually makes perfect sense for the companies that dealt with this bullshit to get reimbursed by the christofacists. I would hope they would "pass it on" to the customers as an act of good faith (even if it is just a free game or something) but... this is a case where the problem isn't the corporations: it is the government.
this is a case where the problem isn't the corporations: it is the government.
It can be both.
So... it actually makes perfect sense for the companies that dealt with this bullshit to get reimbursed by the christofacists.
If the company ate the cost, sure.
If the company raised the price on consumers to cover the tariffs, the consumers already made the company whole. If the company gets the reimbursement money on top of that, they're double dipping.
Nintendo: you know what? Fuck you. Our prices just went up for you. Games are $120 now. Fuck you, you'll still buy our pokemon slop we spent 0 effort making. Mario? Yep, $120, but now when he jumps he says "fucka youuuu!" You'll still buy it, because Mario.
I've been ootl on Pokemon since y/x, and even was barely paying attention before someone else bought it for me. But the shit I saw when sword shield(? First switch title) was wild. They really were just phoning it in, and people still bought everything else they dropped! The only reason I got a switch was for prime 4, and likely won't be getting a switch 2. Sucks watching my nostalgia be abused in real time.
You can still enjoy the games you are nostalgic for with emulators.
I love how nintendo are switching our youths back towards old school tactics. Emulators and piracy are having their renaissance.
I got tired of the new games being shit and/or not done when. I think last game I bought new was No Man's Sky (yes I know, its decent now, I still play it sometimes), after that disappointment I just gave up. I haven't been paying attention on whats coming, whats the newest big game.. I just play emulators. I play the games that I wanted to play when I was a kid, but couldn't. My gaming journey started with Amiga 500, then I got a NES, after that a Game Gear, then a Play Station 1. So I've been gaming a lot of SNES stuff lately, I downloaded a bunch of Atari titles. Sega games are next on the list.
Theres so much to play, I will die before I run out of stuff. I think I'll never buy a new game ever again.
Friendly reminder that the Boston Tea Party was about tariffs. We know what works.
We won't see a cent of the money stolen from us by Donald Trump and his gang of pedophiles.
My company lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in tarrifs. We passed those on to the customer since we couldn't take a 50% hike on costs.
We have no way to refund money we don't have.
How did your company lose hundreds of thousands if they passed them onto the customer? If you made the customer pay, your company has the money and can pass on the money you get from the government to your consumers
You don't sell the same amount of product when you have to increase the price. You may need to shrink your business to not get the remaining margin getting eaten up by operational costs.
We've sold maybe a 10th of what we sold pre-tariffs. W have probably lost closer to million in sales due to the tariffs. Customer's aren't buying parts for preventative maintenance, they only purchase when it's an emergency and they are losing tens of thousands of dollars an hour in production. US manufacturing is in trouble.
Like everything else Trump does this too was a grift by him to funnel money to the rich. He should be a part of this law suit.
He's criminally protected from any official acts while in office, remember?
(A Supreme Court decision made during Biden's term, it should be noted - he was also criminally protected from any consequences of his official acts as president, and they specifically gave the example of a president using Seal Team Six to assassinate their political rivals. Biden didn't even try using that power against Trump in any way. Assassination was probably off the table lmao but he could've done extrajudicial surveillance or such. He didn't, because they're all owned by the same oligarchs and Zionazis.)
And a civil lawsuit would be paid by... the taxpayers.
You don't get to win when the other side makes the rules. You have to stop playing the game, or get as close as you can.
He's not protected from things moving towards him at terminal velocity. That's the other solution.
I get what you're saying, but it's gonna bug me if I don't point out that the only direction you can achieve terminal velocity in is down. It's the maximum speed something can achieve by just falling
We should do a blanket class action lawsuit against all corporations throughout history, demanding all the wages they owe, refunds for the prices they gouged, and the artificially created inflation.
Or they could settle by paying for worldwide universal healthcare and UBI.
Fuck settling. Every time we’ve settled with the capitalists they just claw everything back 10 years later. We need to permanently make them extinct.
Heh. Yeah right. They passed that tariff cost on to you but no way will they pass the refund on.
And the players should win this case. It’s pretty obviously true that Nintendo would be recovering tariff money twice.
Let’s see more of this.
Nintendo:

Almost perfect. You forgot to replace "community chest" with "shareholder portfolios"
Customers should get the refunds as this is business already transacted. Nintendo should get a "loss of potential sales" award due to it being priced out for many consumers, due to the tariffs. How that number would be determined is best left to people smarter than me.
I think it's presumptuous to assume that the increase in prices that just happened to be identical to the tarrifs had anything to do with the tarrifs.
Its even messier. Nintendo is a customer of the companies that produce the discrete parts, and paid tarriffs on them. Then they sell to a retailed at wholesale who sells to the consumer. The retailer may or may not also have paid a tarrif on the finished product. So what waa the final retail proce composed of? How much of it was Nintendo's? How much of it was.... Say.... Walmart? Who is on the hook for it for the consumer?
What a fucking mess.
Nintendo stands to recover the same tariff payments twice—once from consumers through higher prices and again from the federal government through tariff refunds
Uh...those are the same funds? They didn't just pocket the tariff fees, they had to pay them in order to get a refund.
They had to pay the tariffs, yes. But they took that money from the customers. So they ended up even.
Now they are getting a refund. Which leaves them at a win for the amount of said tariffs.
Now Nintendo is +1 tariff and customers -1 tariff.
How exactly was Nintendo unjustly enriching themselves. Sure it’s morally wrong. But legally? Nintendo is free to raise their prices, tariffs or no tariffs, it’s not price gouging since Nintendo products aren’t essential goods. And people are free to buy their products or not buy. That the government wants to give them a bag of money is a different matter from the price hike, if they want to sue someone sue the government.
Here is the thing. If they win, it's great for them. However, all the other companies are currently updating their legal documents to reflect that they will get any forms of reimbursement and not be passing them on to the consumer. Not only that, but they are not planning on reducing the price of any of the products. So, even if the tariffs dissappear, they still win.
The only way to win the game is to not play it.
So remind me how much the Switch 2 retailed for while the tariffs were in place and how much it retails for now?
I mean, Nintendo probably does benefit, but I can't see how there's a case here.
The government does have an obligation not to impose illegal tariffs on importers.
Nintendo doesn't have a legal obligation not to raise prices. They, as with pretty much any vendor, can charge whatever they want. You can't win a court case unless they did something illegal.
What limits them from doing that is that they'll lose sales, especially if competitors don't.
Companies could have gambled on the tariffs being overturned in court (as they were) and eating the losses with the hopes of recovering them later. That's a risk, but some companies did do that. They benefited from gaining sales from their competitors. Nintendo didn't take that route; they probably lost sales, but they also avoided the issue of taking losses on a per-sale basis.
EDIT: Well...okay, if you could show that Nintendo tried to get the tariffs imposed and then overturned as some sort of intentional mechanism to cause many vendors to increase prices without incurring actual costs to themselves
which I am confident that they didn't do, but using it as a hypothetical
you could maybe make some kind of antitrust case on price-fixing. But it doesn't sound like that's what the lawsuit is claiming, and in any event, what would be illegal there wouldn't be collecting the refunds.
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
