this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
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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”.
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.
You have now been banned from Lemmy.World
MFW a zionist bans me, then my entire instance without a vote, then unbans the instance, then censors everyone who complains, then mods me, then unmods me, then bans me again, then unbans me, VIP, ban, unban, ban.
This is America. You’re not a person unless you’re a corporation.
Is it expensive to file corporate taxes in the US? It really sounds like if everyone represented themselves as a corporation they would have more rights.
If you're looking for a new rabbit hole to explore...theres an entire crowd of people who firmly believe that the government creates a corporate version of you when you're born, and that your name in CAPS on the birth certificate is evidence of this.
There's also endless content of them confidently presenting these arguments to judges when they've broken laws and being immediately shut down by said judges.
The whole thing is a scam by Big Driver-Side-Front-Window to boost their sales.
Berth certificate, making us all boats and therefore subject to maritime law.
It sounds like a stupid joke because it is but also one of their things.
I want to believe you're joking, I really do...
Me too. Reality is dumber than fiction.
From the Wiki article about Freemen on the Land, a SovCit offshoot.
It didn't take long to go from "corporations are people" to "the only people that matter are corporations"
And everyone who cried out a warning at the first step was ignored.
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 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.
That's great in theory, but in practice these days the US sets tariffs the way rideshare companies do surge pricing.
Also what happens when the companies are forced to eat part of the tarrif, if the tarrif is 15, but that pushes the prices above the maximum profit point (units sold * per unit profit) then how much tarrif back should the customer get?
Fuck that. They should push back against the government.
They did and they got the tarrifs refunded.
The issue is that with markets nothing is tightly coupled.
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.
The company paid for it initially, but the customer actually paid for it.
Well, the logic is the fact that the tariffs were illegal.
The honourable thing to do would be to pay that money back to the customers, but that would make the shareholders sad and grumpy, so it's never going to happen.
Because the companies are the ones that literally paid the tariffs and the gov doesn't have records of how that burden was distributed, and thus couldn't possibly enforce it.
In short, they're completely unprepared for this situation they put themselves in.
There's records of customers buying products at inflated costs due to the tariffs as well. They absolutely can refund people if they get a refund.
If those records do exist, they're with the company, not the govt.
And the company should be legally held responsible go reimbursing its customers.
Again, there's no way to enforce that.
They enforce plenty of draconian shit just fine, I think they can find a way.
i guess it only makes sense in the maga world. if i was in nintendos shoes, i would have done the same. who knows when tariffs change yet again, the tariff compensation is withdrawn or whatever the fuck. the trump administration flip-flops all over the place so fuck em.
The Art of the Deal
Corruption
It makes sense if you're grifting
That is far from the universal standard especially for non-s&p500 companies who compete against the prices set by the s&p500 companies. In competative markets/industries the importing party doesnt always have controll over when their order ships and what the tariff rates will be at time of shipment. It takes 3-6 months for large import orders to be dwlivered with landed price adjustments. The list price isnt going to fluctuate with every penny movement. The price is dictated by the market price and share of market a company holds. So a lot of times the tariff shock isnt going to find its way to the list price in any less than 3-6month time span. To reiterate, this is for products in a competative market. Your iphones, pc parts, game consoles are not competstive markets. The pipe fitting valve (PVF) industry is a v9mpetative industry. Hundreds of mfgers, accross hundreds if not thousands of skus
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.
It can be both.
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.
How do you prove a customer paid for a product and that this product paid a tarriff
Not that difficult, actually. The company pays a tariff on the specific product being imported, which would have been recorded. Customers who then buy those products should receive itemized receipts, either physically from a store or electronically via email when buying online. The receipt should also indicate a payment method that can likely be matched to a bank statement if needed.
Match the itemized receipt to the tariffs paid, there you go.
The harder part is directly linking the tariffs paid to the price the consumer paid. The tariffs were inconsistent and changed a few times, and we don't know if all price increases were caused directly by tariffs or if there were other factors as well. Moreover, some companies ate the cost in some cases, notably Nintendo, who chose not to increase the original pre-tariff price of the Switch 2, but did for Switch 1 and accessories for both systems. Nintendo will likely be refunded for all of those, but not all of that was a cost passed on to the consumer, so it's hard to figure out at that specific a level.
This lawsuit is definitely going nowhere, at any rate, so this is basically all just idle musing.
How do you verify if the receipt is real?
If your company isn't keeping track of receipts for goods sold, the IRS is going to have an absolute field day with you about time they decide to audit the company.
Okay so the U.S. government should have to interact with however many private companies with their own standard for storing data, and then handle contacting the consumer and figuring out how to get the refund?
The whole thing is bad. Having to give refunds directly to consumers is near impossible to implement in any reasonable way.
Edit: the biggest hurdle is by far scammers. The U.S. government has historically been terrible at sussing them out. No way anyone'll find a pile of receipts. Noooooo shot that could be a problem.
Personally, I think the easiest one is the US government refunds the tariffs to the company with the requirement that the company has to give it back because the company already has all that information
However, if We were to continue this hypothetical situation where the US is the initiator.
All they would need to do is make it so it's a hard requirement in order to get the tariff return that the companies provide basic transaction data For that duration, They could even dictate what format they needed it in. (or Alternatively they could assert they have a system in place already to handle it themselves but I think most would just let the gov handle it in bulk processing than need to make a framework for it)
Then for returning the money, there's a few options. They could either use the existing framework that they have to send returns to cards on file because it's almost certain that they have direct access to every major card network. Or they can filter the master list by the card identifiers at the beginning and send them to the banks/card companies and let them deal with it.
For cash transactions, it would be a pain in the ass, but that's going to be the case for both distributions, because there's no link to an actual identity. What they would have to do is they would have to compare the receipt to the transaction data that they have, which you are right, they could scam you on. However, they would have to know where it was purchased, they would have to know the time stamp, they would have to know the amount spent.
Honestly, the most annoying part of that entire deal would be that people who paid in cash, regardless, are going to have to reach out to some system to say, hey, I spent this money, where's my return? But I don't think fraud is going to be a very big risk case here.
Honestly, they could probably even set up an online portal to do everything for you. You just have to supply the information needed, much like how unpaid claims are
Matching payment method/date/cardholder name to bank statements. You can prove that you paid X amount of money to Y company on Z date, and the matching itemized receipt received from that company indicating that you bought A, B, and C products that may have been tariffed.
Harder to prove if you paid with cash or gift card. Doable, but probably more trouble than it's worth to effectively collect pocket change after lawyer fees take their cut from the class action settlement.