Yeah your situation sounds a lot more frustrating than mine my friend. And you’re right, it’s more complicated than how I laid it out. But its the long form version of what the core concept I put forward was; the wealthiest of us utilizing the tariff situation to squeeze more money out of small business and working class interests.
There’s no doubt that some super wealthy companies paid the tariff, raised prices, sold directly to consumers, and get the tariff back as pure profit.
But there’s also a lot of layers and nuance that people are missing outside of those dozen or so companies.
Most retailers (especially small ones) don’t import anything, and a lot of those tariffs were on raw materials (like steel or aluminum), or small parts that get imported by the container or ship load, and then broken up and sold through a dozen layers of wholesalers / resellers to eventually get to a machine shop or a manufacturer, that then gets added to other material to become a component or product, and sold to wholesalers, etc and passed through the same layers again, and possibly even exported as a complete product.
All of this is what makes the prospect of refunding all of the illegal tariffs directly to consumers a real mess.
Yeah your situation sounds a lot more frustrating than mine my friend. And you’re right, it’s more complicated than how I laid it out. But its the long form version of what the core concept I put forward was; the wealthiest of us utilizing the tariff situation to squeeze more money out of small business and working class interests.
There’s no doubt that some super wealthy companies paid the tariff, raised prices, sold directly to consumers, and get the tariff back as pure profit.
But there’s also a lot of layers and nuance that people are missing outside of those dozen or so companies.
Most retailers (especially small ones) don’t import anything, and a lot of those tariffs were on raw materials (like steel or aluminum), or small parts that get imported by the container or ship load, and then broken up and sold through a dozen layers of wholesalers / resellers to eventually get to a machine shop or a manufacturer, that then gets added to other material to become a component or product, and sold to wholesalers, etc and passed through the same layers again, and possibly even exported as a complete product.
All of this is what makes the prospect of refunding all of the illegal tariffs directly to consumers a real mess.