I loved temu, aliexpress, and shein. I probably averaged 1 item per day arriving to my house, for years and years. Mostly little electronics parts and specialized tools for my workshop. Buying from Amazon or locally would have cost me 10x as much. Obviously it's over now. Anyone getting a package in May will be hit with a $75-$150 or more bill per package, even a 75 cent envelope will be charged +$75. I feel bad for the unaware people still ordering. I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet. I guess they are hoping for a reversal in the next 2 weeks.
> I loved temu, aliexpress, and shein. I probably averaged 1 item per day arriving to my house, for years and years.
> I feel bad for the unaware people still ordering.
I personally feel bad for the environment and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production. Good if the beneficiaries are gone from your part of the world.
I've been short on work, which means I've been poor. I use my off time to work on side projects that I simply could not afford to complete if I paid what US companies charge for tools, components, and custom PCBs. My ability to innovate is seriously impacted by these tarrifs and there is no alternative that I can afford.
I recently created something that people in my industry actually want to buy, but I only ordered enough parts for 5 units. I had priced them so that when I sold them, I'd be able to put larger orders in to begin getting quantity discounts. Only problem is, what was going to be a $2k order will now cost roughly $5k, and guess what? I didn't charge $1k apiece. Now I'm out of stock and stuck in limbo waiting to earn cash from my regular job and see how these tarrifs shake out.
To clarify, I'm not defending the tariffs or the way this whole thing is implemented. I'm sure it puts a lot of people in trouble.
I'm only criticizing the race to the bottom that the platforms and kind of consumption mentioned are part of. Sure at the individual level we can find advantages to it, but I'm arguing that we're collectively worst off.
> I'm only criticizing the race to the bottom that the platforms and kind of consumption mentioned are part of.
You're going to (collectively) need to increase the incomes at the low-end if you want people earning minimum-wage to still be clothed and able to furnish their homes. A significant portion of people who by from Shein have no other options within their budgets, and their existence tends to be ignored in conversations such as this one. The unspoken social contract has been "You get low wages, but get access to cheap consumer goods", but now the cheap consumer goods are being taken away.
There's a dissonance between wanting American-made/substantive/good quality/expensive consumer goods and maintaining the minimum wage at unlivable levels to avoid knock-on inflation. You can't have the economics of Switzerland coexisting with McJobs.
There is no dissonance here, workers being put in competition with much cheaper ones on the other side of the planet is absolutely going to drive their wages down. They got 30 years of that... and many of us in Europe did too.
Wages may have to go higher at the lower end, but consumption also needs to change. Most of the price of "food" is packaging, transport and marketing, not farmers' wages. Here in France people buy on average 50 items of clothing a year, 50! The amount of items has increased by 50% in the last 15 years.
Yeah pretty funny to see mostly the same people calling for a $20+/hr "minimum wage" on one hand, and bemoaning the tarrifs on the other hand. They will tell you that if you can't pay your employees that much, then you don't have a viable business. But they will turn around and whine about how their cheap Chinese crap purchases are now going to cost what a "viable" domestic producer would have to charge.
It's easy to look at the internet at large see people with these contradictory takes. But 1) these groups may consist of entirely different people who are vocal about different topics, or 2) the wide brush obscures critical context.
I support a $20 minimum wage AND
I think tariffs can be justified, especially when we use free trade to ignore the external costs to the environment and the arbitrage of exploitative labor AND
I have a problem with implementing tariffs in such a shotgun, ill-considered, shoddy way lacking clear strategy or intent
Most people bemoaning the tariffs are doing so because they understand that production will not actually come back to the US. It's not that these people hate Americans and don't want domestic manufacturing (or to pay for it), it's that they can see the reality that this isn't what's actually going to happen. Instead, the price of goods will just rise.
A lot of these people too have been saying "buy local!" or "support black businesses!" for a while now. They're not the same people bemoaning the lost of hyper consumerist plastic junk.
I'm pretty far to the left, and I'm actually fine with tariffs on China in principle for exactly the reason that you mention. Tangentially, I don't think that "free trade" can ever be meaningfully free when goods flow freely but workers can't move to where the high-paying jobs are - it's a recipe to create market inefficiencies that companies can profit from.
However, the fact of the matter is that our economy as it exists right now relies on cheap goods from China. This can and should be changed, but a meaningful plan to do so would last years of careful incremental changes if the goal is to benefit Americans as a whole. This is emphatically not what this admin is doing.
I'm a lefty lib and, like lots of us, I've wanted restricted trade with China since we granted them MFN status in the '90s. I think that was a bad idea in the first place.
Neoliberalism is not popular and never was. Donors like it. Workers don't. The only reason either party could stick to it and still win elections, is because both stuck to it. Neither "defected".
Tariffing Canada and Mexico? The EU? Yeah, not so much. And it makes working against Chinese trade far less effective and more-costly.
Claiming these aren't a tax on Americans? That's just a lie. Chaotically switching your message and actual policies day to day? That's not how you foster investment in factories that'll take years to be net-profitable. Working against the CHIPS act? What the literal fuck, that's exactly the kind of thing you [edit: the "you" here is the administration and their boosters, not necessarily "you", the poster] claim to want! That was a really good idea!
So, I agree with a tiny amount of the overall policy, while finding its implementation incompetent, and the other parts to work so strongly against the effects of the part-I-like that I find desirable, that I doubt my motivations for wanting to reduce trade with developing authoritarian states and the administration's are even the same.
If you want to restrict imports from China, it is somewhat necessary to restrict trade from Western countries as well, in order to prevent evasion by trans-shipping (until and unless they restrict Chinese imports as well).
Canada has been laundering Chinese aluminum and steel, Malaysia has been laundering Chinese ‘honey’, etc.
There were way cheaper and more-effective ways to achieve that. And that's not why the administration says they're doing this, anyway. It's because we have trade deficits, period. Or it's because of fentanyl, since that was the justification for the invocation of emergency powers that're letting the executive impose tariffs at all.
>If you want to restrict imports from China, it is somewhat necessary to restrict trade from Western countries as wel
A good strategy would be not to impose tariffs all goods, just the more important ones, and you would do it WITH your allies. Threaten the same tariffs on allies as China if they do not get on board. You could even use the leverage to get China to increase domestic consumption so they aren't exporting so hard.
Trump's policies aren't going to achieve what he thinks they will.
This is a bit orthogonal to the broader conversation, but you've hooked me with your predicament: Can you allow for preorders or "Expressed interest" at a new price point? (or at a hand-wavy price point to assess interest re: overhead/bulk/etc.) If tariffs come down, you can refund/credit, but for customers who wanted this, something-at-some-price may be better than nothing-at-any-price.
1 item per day is certainly not efficient, but nowadays temu and aliexpress batch things over a small period so that shouldn't really happen...
> and all the people on the losing side of cheap low quality junk production
Remember that taking away bad jobs does not save anyone, quite the contrary. People go from having shit jobs to no jobs, or even worse jobs with lower-profile companies.
Helping them requires creating vast numbers of better paying jobs with better working condition in their country, which require redirecting vast amounts of money to those countries. E.g., by buying even more stuff from those regions, but from manufacturers paying better wages (and selling goods more expensively), so they end up having to massively expand and hire more.
Around the time that manufacturing started moving to China en masse in the 1990s I started to hear about trichloroethylene contamination at manufacturing sites in the U.S. Look up "trichloroethylene united states" in Google and you'll probably get results about how our marines were exposed at Camp Jejune and are now eligible for V.A. benefits. A search for "trichloroethylene china" might turn up a picture of a truck full of barrels from a company that wants to send you those barrels.
That stuff is all over Silicon Valley. Santa Clara County actually has one of the most if not the most EPA superfund sites. It's the leftover legacy of chip manufacturing. When you rent in the Bay Area, the landlord does not have to disclose TCE contamination to you. TCE can cause birth defects and low birth weight in weeks if breathed in by pregnant women. If you're renting in the Bay Area, Google the address and make sure the property is not over a TCE contamination area.
> Helping them requires creating vast numbers of better paying jobs with better working condition in their country, which require redirecting vast amounts of money to those countries
This was the logic under Deng, and the reason China is now a peer state. Unfortunately when doing business with communists, enriching them doesn't help the individuals move out of poverty because that would require wages to rise and that happens for political reasons not merit in a single party system
If we enrich the CCP we just end up with an adversary capable of taking us on. That's why tariffs.
"If we enrich the CCP we just end up with an adversary capable of taking us on. That's why tariffs."
This argument is absolutely accurate and somewhere between two and six decades late depending on who you feel like blaming for offshoring. Present day all we're doing is poking inflation with a stick, threatening the bond market (and eventually the dollar reserve), and encouraging economic partners to look elsewhere for stability. 3 guesses how all that ends.
The thing that really annoys me is tariffs could have been used SO much more intelligently. For example a 24 month increasing schedule. That gives business the kind of incentive to affect manufacturing and something they can plan against.
But now we have a dumpster fire and tariffs will have an even worse reputation.
It might have been better reputation-wise than the current game of chicken, but tariffs will always sour economic partnerships, which in turn leads to bolstering alternative economic partnerships...
That tariffs are in use is not proof that it is untrue. Even with the current dumpster fire we still trade with the US, but that obviously does not mean there has been no harm.
For countries, tariffs is not something that is just shrugged off as it impacts their economy, there will always be political countermeasures to strongly discourage that tariffs are applied that harms them. Retaliatory tariffs, impact on other negotiations and relationships, etc.
For companies, tariffs harm profits and fair competition on both supply chain and consumer side, depending on where the tariffs are located. The company would strategize for maximum profit margins, circumventing tariffs, remove countries from their supply chain, and focusing on more profitable markets.
It wouldn't be a boycott the same way it is now of course. It would be a slower process. But tariffs is a way to force the market and always have wide negative effects. One just hopes that certain long-term side-effects (like high import cost causing focus on driving down local supply cost) is worth the impact (local cost of living increase, drop in investments, drop in friendly reputation).
>Unfortunately when doing business with communists, enriching them doesn't help the individuals move out of poverty because that would require wages to rise and that happens for political reasons not merit in a single party system
But poverty has dropped and income has risen under the CCP? You can argue that the CCP doesn't actually care about "individuals moving out of poverty", and all they care about is staying in power, but this is the sort of accusation that could be levied against governments in the west as well.
Apparently the CCP does suppress wages in various ways to keep export goods manufactured cheaply/competitively. It's probably more of an economic strategy than an expression of collectivism but I can't be sure.
I fully agree on the environmental part. Shipping all this stuff individually is incredibly wasteful. Even the combined packages from AliExpress someone else mentioned this is the case, since there's a ton of unnecessary packaging wasting space and resources.
On the 'losing side' part I agree a lot less. In the recent past, most of these items would be sold by mega corps, marked up multiple times with most of the profits flowing into shareholder's pockets. Meanwhile, the average consumer is over paying for the exact same 'low quality junk' with branding like Logitech, Dell or Amazon Basics on it. Now we can get the same (or often better) quality straight from the source, often for a fraction of the price. To me, that's a big win.
You remind me of Chamath Palihapitiya. He's this billionaire who likes to call things "cheap low quality junk" too, but for him it's anything is under like $5000, or not made in Milan or the French riviera. He's hamming it up for the audience but the point is the same. Every strata of wealth has the luxury of not buying the "cheap low quality junk" of the strata below it. To you, they are temu possessions, but to another person they are just their possessions. Everyone would love to be wealthy enough to never check a pricetag. And even then, plenty of products last just as long no matter what you spend on them. Many things are literally identical and just marked up 10x by the middleman who imported it to your local store.
> But, someone buying stuff made by their employer is not what harms them.
It is exactly what harms them.
With that logic one can defend keeping children in tantalum mines in the supply chain of an iPhone. That's not an acceptable status quo...
Removing the market for immoral exploitation of beings and the environment is a necessary step. The size of the market for things made fairly needs to grow.
There are kids in Congo that are claiming to be older than they are so they can get work in mines to feed themselves and their families. If they don’t work they and their families starve, but if they do work they are encouraging immoral child labor. I don’t understand why many people think the answer is easy and straightforward in that case, this sounds like the trolley problem to me.
The people involved in international aid in particular know fine well that it's not an easy problem to solve... Exploitation and corruption is at every level here. For a children in Congo it may be a better option if the only alternative is to starve, but let's not pretend that everyone from the mine owner to the smartphone buyer is not profiting from that situation.
As a consumer one of the few immediate means of action we have is to at least refuse these products when we can... Then yeah, vote, donate, get involved for these kids to live decently.
Let’s say we boycott the Congo because they allow child labor (or turn a blind eye to it), and they see our “fix” (disallow it, let them starve) as barbaric because they have nowhere near enough resources to just make the starving problem go away (or to consider that as a possible solution). Did we make progress on anything by cutting the Congo off economically? We already know that if the country became richer the problem would probably go away naturally, but making it poorer instead, why?
I kind of understand why China invests in Africa the way it does vs how the west seems to just throw charity and morality at it. Development would solve the problem naturally (a richer society will stop sending their kids to the mines, or having their schools organize them to make fireworks, a sad state of affairs that happened less than two decades ago in China but now is unthinkable).
The nicotine bottle size constraint is a safety concern. Spilling a 200ml bottle of nicotine easily has the potential to cause lethality or morbidity through skin absorption, particularly in children. A 10ml bottle can still cause injury, but it is way more likely to be survivable.
In this case, the safety concerns outweigh the environmental concerns.
> I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet.
Well, why would you waste the opportunity to enrage Americans against their government, for free? "Your $5 package has arrived on time, now you only have to pay the $75 extra that the candidate you voted for has decided to take from you". It's the best ads campaign ever, and it's entirely free.
They don't pay the tariffs. The person receiving the package does. Many carriers will slap you with the tariff charge, a brokerage fee, and then send you to collections if you don't pay it.
The vendors don't care because they're making the sale and the tariffs are the other person's responsibility. Caveat emptor.
The person you are replying to isn't claiming that the seller pays the tariffs, they are saying that it's not in the seller's interest to notify buyers of the tariff charge because it's essentially free anti-tariff messaging once buyers are hit with the sudden fees.
but in the process all their customers will have been burned buying something from Temu and many will be wary of buying in the future even if the tariff situation improves etc?
That's certainly how it worked out in Europe, where the processing fee was much less (€5-10 usually).
Since 2021 foreign merchants can send the goods tax paid, they collect the VAT and send it to to EU country, so there's no fees at customs. It works perfectly fine, but many people don't realize it or don't trust this.
Yep, this is my experience here in Greece. I'd randomly get maybe 5% of packages having a 3 € "customs fee" on top, but everything else was much cheaper. Now I have to pay VAT and import duties on everything, nothing gets extra fees but everything costs 50% more.
I guess the intent was to let local shops compete with AE, and they succeeded, because the prices are much more in line with the local market, I just miss all the cheap stuff :P
This is the Australian system as well. A lot cheaper for the government to collect with the tradeoff that small no name Chinese sellers can pretty much ignore it without penalty.
But the person receiving the package doesn't receive the package until they've paid the tariff.
You don't have to pay it -- if you don't, the package gets returned to sender or destroyed.
The post office delivers you a slip with information to go to your local post office to pay it and pick up the package. With UPS and FedEx you get a notice to pay online, and they deliver it once you do, as far as I know.
I've never heard of something being delivered without the tariff already having been paid, and then it going to collections. Has anyone ever experienced that personally? I don't see how that would be legal, or why a delivery service would expose themselves to risk of nonpayment.
It depends on the carrier. As multiple other commenters have explained, you can absolutely be hit with a tariff fee after receiving the package.
They do not care if you didn't want to pay the tariff. They don't want to deal with warehousing it, offloading it, or returning it to sender. They want to get it into your hands and deal with the logistics later.
That is not normal. Even a recent article explains:
> US customers who placed orders on shopping websites like the popular Chinese fast-fashion platform Shein have been particularly impacted, even if they made their purchases long before the tariffs were announced. They are now forced to either pay hefty fees—in some cases, more than the value of the items inside — or have their packages sent back.
> They show Love’s order was put on hold for several hours, during which she received the notice asking her to pay the import duties. DHL also noted the package would be returned in five days if she declined to do so.
I can find a few anecdotes online about FedEx delivering first and then charging later. I can also find people saying they called FedEx and refused to pay, and FedEx waived the amount. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see how FedEx can hold you responsible for payment when you didn't engage in business with them -- you didn't purchase anything from them and you didn't sign any contract with them. If they paid the tariff before delivering to you, then that's on them.
So if I wanted to mess with someone I can just send them tons of cheap crap from Temu and they'll be forced to pay tariffs for items they never asked for?
> send you to collections if you don't pay it
That doesn't make sense. So can I cause troubles to someone by ordering an unwanted $1 temu item to their house, and thereby summon a collection agency to them (if they don't pay the $75 fee)?
You ordered the package, so you have to pay the fees. If you gift the package to someone, that is nice of you but they do not become involved in your purchase by that.
wow i see a variation of SWAT'ing someone. Just flood your unliked neighbour with aliexpress packages. It costs you 0.5$ ant 75$ for him. real life DoS attack.
And because they aren't morons, Pizza places will generally deny an order of 20 pizzas, pay on delivery, to an address they don't have an existing relationship with.
Cops haven't seemed to figure out that way of reducing abuse. Maybe if we pay them what we pay pizza delivery workers they will figure out how not to swat people.
Pizza places figured out not to do that because it's more profitable not to do that. Cops don't care because they still get to play with their toys and they generally have qualified immunity for civil violations that occur during the swatting.
You can not deliver a pizza based on a 2% chance of fraud. If there's a chance of bomb, shooting etc the same threshold doesn't apply. So the police have completely different criteria.
I assume we'll see backups on both sides. Containers backed up in Chinese ports and a huge backlog of unclaimed packages and delayed tariff bills waiting for USPS/UPS/FedEx to process them.
I doubt credit card purchases will be an option once we start seeing a lot of chargebacks. They are an absolute pita to deal with for the vendor and processor. I expect your payment options will be limited to those that don’t allow chargebacks.
You get a letter from your delivery company (in the UK, usually the Post Office or Royal Mail) with a link to pay import taxes. Once you pay, the delivery is scheduled.
Depending on country rules, it is sometimes possible for the sender to pay and then include the charges in their delivery fees.
You pay the sticker price, which does not include tariffs. The package ships. It arrives at the US border, and the carrier (DHL or whoever) bills you for the import tax before it leaves the port.
Maybe this will change, but up until now when importing things, tariffs were not part of the price paid to the seller.
Let's say I have a nemesis, I could in theory spend 100$ in packages from China, and ship it to them. And they'll have to pay 245$ in tariffs ? (245% today).
The bill received is a "you must pay this if you want the package. If you do not, we will destroy the package". It's not a contractual obligation where you get sent to collections or take a credit hit if you don't pay.
In the situation you described, the end result is that your nemesis does nothing, pays nothing, and you are out $100.
> Brexit literally just resulted in the UK having lower tariffs
That is, of course, entirely false. In that the UK does not, in fact, have lower tariffs, and even if that would be the case, there are many downsides that don’t have anything to do with tariffs.
> and a probable free trade deal with the largest economy on the planet
The FTA with the US has been "happening soon" for about a decade now. I’ll believe it when I see it. And with a protectionist American government, it would put the UK at a significant disadvantage.
> unlike our friends on the European continent
LOL. Nobody on the continent wants its country in the same position as the UK is. Brexit killed any political movement to leave the EU for a generation.
They were not applied. Tomorrow, they can be 30% or 5.36%. If your only goal was depending on a fluke and a brain fart of a senile old man 10 years after Brexit was voted, then I don’t need to tell you how poorly thought out it was. If that is your measure of success, then Russia and Belarus welcome you.
1. The EU has that reprieve. Given the EU can bite back, it's possible that reprieve becomes permanent.
2. Last time Trump slapped tariffs on UK + EU, Biden prioritised reversing tariffs on the EU first because they're a bigger trading partner than the UK.
As the above poster pointed out, that's to say nothing of the many downsides of not being in the EU.
Why do you think it's an exaggeration? I mean it has measurably put them in a worse financial spot than before. I'd call the US tariffs a disaster and I'm not sure which one wiped out more from which nation's economy
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.
As far as I know, the way it works is shipping companies can do the % package value (ad valorem duty) or the flat rate per package (specific duty) but have to do the same method for all packages and can only change their method once a month.[1]
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]
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.
Am I, in fact, going to be hit with a $100 tariff on a $2 item ($2+$100=$102) or a $2.40 tariff ($2*1.2=$4.40) ?
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.
In the EO language there is no "whichever is greater", the shipping company picks (note this all specifically for de minimis, <$800 value, packages).
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
Back when the tariff was first announced I remember seeing a whitehouse.gov announcement saying it was 30% with a $25 minimum per package. I can't find that but the [newest Fact sheet](https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...) dated 4/2/25 just has the vaguely worded "either / or".
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.
Its going to be great. I can't wait to see how MAGA explains this one away. Eventually the pain will be enough that hopefully the bubble breaks with some of them.
If what Trump says is any sign to how MAGA explains it, then the answer is: if you don't want to pay those large fees, buy local. Sure the cost will go up, and significantly so in the "short term" (however long that is ...), but in the long term we will have more local manufacturing.
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.
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.
And its going to be fine. Amish mostly make everything they need, have no debt, no trade deficits, have lots of kids and are thriving. I'm not saying this to be snarky, all Americans can be as happy as billionaines: https://www.businessinsider.com/if-you-want-to-be-happier-sh...
"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-...
What would happen if everyone lived like the Amish though? I’m assuming they are still profiting from modern science they wouldn’t be able to come up with, right? Or are they refusing MRI scans and Chemotherapy too?
I think the point wasn't that that specific example scales to the whole nation but more that if that specific example works as well as it does at the scale that it does than surely some middle ground between "import basically every consumer good" and "the amish" would scale to the entire nation with acceptable tradeoffs.
My theory is that all our modern junk doesn't necessarily cause depression, but it allows us to take on more chronic depression and other mental problems (distraction, dopamine hits, etc.) Like the way added safety features to cars just caused drivers to drive worse to compensate.
US "liberal" media is being extremely cagey about what and how it reports on this admin. They know they're in its crosshairs and are doing this clumsy balancing act of trying to retain their relatively left-leaning or centrist viewers while trying not to draw any more ire. It won't work, of course, and if we continue on this trajectory you can expect that they'll change over to apologia and ass-kissing or be dismantled.
> At this point it's basically capitlism against authoritarianism
Ha. You say that as though those things are incompatible. Some capital is putting up token resistance to the rise of authoritarianism, but it can't be a strong counterforce because that would risk retribution. Instead more and more capitalists bend the knee in hopes of favorable treatment. That's why I say the likes of CNN and NBC will switch to bootlicking before long.
There's a very large political base, particularly of young people, that is more than ready for leftist politics.
It just doesn't get any funding from the millionaires who fund the DNC or the billionaires who fund the GOP. And money is how political organizations run. We have too much wealth inequality to effectively enfranchise most of the population; Capitalism ate democracy, film at 11.
There's so much chaos being flooded out all at once that things that massively impact normal people don't have time to gain traction in the news. And the moment things do make the news, there's an even larger flood of people everywhere saying, "Fake news. Didn't happen." followed by "So what? How does this affect you personally?" and then ending with "This is actually a great thing and you're suspicious if you're against this."
Sites like Amazon and probably aliexpress/temu require a documented shipment before you can write a review. Shippers sometimes send extremely inexpensive stuff like seeds to random US/overseas addresses and launder the shipping receipt into a fake review for something more expensive.
This sounds fake. Why send seeds, of all things? Why not some equally cheap item like electrical wire insulation off-cuts, a piece of scrap bubble wrap or just a note (or just nothing)? Seeds are likely to set off alarm bells for biosecurity at many borders for no benefit.
I've seen countless interviews of Trump supporters who believe that China is the one paying for it. Which I can completely understand because if it is a cost on them it would be typically be called a tax.
That said the overwhelmingly majority are shocked but believe it's all just a negotiating tactic:
Some Chinese exporters are definitely splitting the cost of these tariffs with their American importer counterparts. While this isn't as significant as "China pays all the tariffs", it's also not "Americans pay all the tariffs".
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.
I've come across some other comments on Chinese forums. Some importers buy products for 10 RMB from China and then sell them in the U.S. for 10 USD. Later, they use tariffs as an excuse to raise prices to 15-20 USD. They couldn't care less whether you impose 100% or even 200% tariffs – they'd still profit unless the tariffs reach 1000%.
Also, check out this link[0] some people actually don't have many alternatives either.
Why is that the case? If an item (from every manufacturer) costs $5, and there's a new tax on it, making it cost $10, why would this be split between buyer and seller? The seller needs to make a certain margin on it, and it's not like the competition can sell any cheaper, or they already would have been.
If demand is elastic, then the seller has to lower prices (and their margin), otherwise people don’t buy their stuff (because they can do without). In this situation, the seller eats the tariffs, That’s the case for nice-to-have things like luxury goods and entertainment. If the seller cannot do that, e.g. because their margins become negative, they will just stop doing business (in the US or entirely).
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.
> Wow I’m genuinely surprised that’s not getting more press
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.
Truth be told, the status quo, with 5-dollar packages clogging the USPS, was a DoS on-going thing in real life/physical form, there had been many posts in here detailing that. Yes, it will most probably negatively affect a lot of people who were relying on that DoS thing to carry on, and, yes, most probably the proposed charges are too high, but it was obvious that something needed to change.
I don't agree with Tariffs, but the discounts some countries get on postage is BS. It should not be cheaper to have a parcel delivered from overseas than interstate in your own country.
How long will it take him to change his mind again? He has already exempted a bunch of stuff from tariffs, coincidentally the same stuff that is likely to be imported because the US doesn't make much of its own of.
That’s all true, but you are leaving out an important piece of information that, at least for AliExpress, the VAT is already included in the price and there’s no additional customs processing fee.
Yeah, you have to try real hard to get a customs processing fee on a package from AliExpress. Customs literally can't keep up with the fire-hose of packages coming in from China, so the current deal is that they, AliExpress, charge and pay VAT and the packages just come through unscathed.
Order something from the US into Europe? Expect to pay customs most of the time. From Great Britain post-Brexit? Ditto. China? Rarely.
Any business outside the EU can register for the EU One Stop Shop scheme and charge the VAT directly and avoid fees. Many small time US sellers probably just don’t want to bother, but big platforms like AliExpress centralize it https://skat.dk/en-us/businesses/vat/vat-on-international-tr...
"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!
It’s all about the VAT collection. I order frequently from Amazon Japan. They add the 25% VAT directly at the moment of purchase and deliver by DHL to Denmark without any extra handling fees. So it’s not about china, but about the company doing the paperwork required for the VAT collection instead of you doing.
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.
> But the processing fee for customs is usually 20-40 USD. Which can exceed the cost of the package in the first place.
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.
One positive that could still come out of the tariffs is the US consuming less junk.
I just spent a few months in Germany, and the trash can for our APARTMENT BUILDING is roughly half of the size of the one at my single family home in the US. And here I see lots of my neighbors overflowing their 96 gallon wheeled tote very week. The world would be much better off with out all of this waste.
Germany is definitely top-tier on reducing waste. Before I left the UK it had got to the point where actual landfill-bound unrecyclable trash was a tiny portion of the waste output.
The sad thing is, UK and Germany are tiny compared to all the other countries that don't give a shit.
I live in Germany. One reason the toters can be smaller is because there places to dispose of your recyclable goods (free) on almost every corner. The toters are just for compost and regular trash.
Aliexpress my impression is you can get "useful" stuff that are odd but usable. But I've had the impression that temu and shein was all "direct to garbage" devices, was this not the case?
They sell the same stuff in my experience. I would describe Temu as selling the top 10% of AliExpress that's the most popular, with faster and more reliable shipping since they use huge centralized fulfillment warehouses, similar to Amazon warehouses.
Aliexpress also changed a lot there. I'm not sure if it goes for all vendors, but my last purchases have been very fast. Some even shipped from Europe, but even if from China the wait time of several weeks did not happen anymore.
I've only used Temu a few times, but in my limited experience it is just Aliexpress but with a slick gamified interface on top. Alibaba sellers supplies the same stuff to Aliexpress, Temu, a ton of the Instagram ads and even a lot of the cheap Amazon stuff.
You can't lump shein and temu in the same bucket. My wife is an avid shein user and from what I can tell the quality so far is really good for what you pay.
Shein is in reality just an aliexpress/baba wrapper, but they put huge amounts of effort into accurate sizing charts for their clothing, and their customer reviews system actively incentivises buyers to upload pictures of themselves wearing the purchased clothing. So as a potential buyer you can actually see the piece of clothing being worn by someone with a similar body shape than your own.
My impression of temu is they are trying to be as misleading as possible with their listings, and the value for money is absolutely terrible because of that: you think you are getting a 6' xmas tree for $20, but when it arrives it's 6".
Shein biggest thing is actually AI/ML. As far I remember, what they really invested is on the service per see. Shein gather data from consumers on internet, on what's the latest trends/art, and just create clothes. And they do this like, always.
There's no "Summer" or "Winter" season clothes. They just update them continually.
> Shein biggest thing is actually AI/ML. As far I remember, what they really invested is on the service per see. Shein gather data from consumers on internet, on what's the latest trends/art, and just create clothes.
Few years ago there was a trend in online ads showing t-shirts and hoodies with "realistic" print ons of animals, optical illusions, mazes, etc. Realistic only on photos or rather renderings. Felt like some form of brainrot. It was all Chinese clone shops or outright scams. Luckily the trend is dead now.
They all are. That doesn't mean they don't tell their vendors what to produce at what price. That's the business model of Chinese fast fashion after all.
I'm sorry for your convenience loss, but I'm happy for the environment.
Not only because of the unrestricted consumerism, but also because of the environmental costs of logistics. I too have ordered fusible resistors from aliexpress that I could not find locally.
But things I barely need, only for a small dopamine kick ? I do my best to not have a small baggie shipped from the other side of the planet for that.
And not even mentioning the effects of insatiability on myself.
The resistors to your local store have to go through logistics as well. And doing the last mile yourself is a lot more inefficient than a post service doing it.
Transport is also quite small fraction of most products' environmental costs.
Who would have thought that Trump would bring in a policy that would benefit the environment? Also, who would have guessed that right wing governments would start buying Tesla's? Quite a plot twist ..
I bought a bunch of off-brand Lego kits usually with Chinese themes (pagodas, nine-tailed foxes) from Temu. What I thought was hilarious about Temu was that the size of things was usually different from you had in mind. Most of the time Temu items were smaller than I imagined but once in a while you'd get something much bigger.
> Buying from Amazon or locally would have cost me 10x as much.
Most things I have bought on Ali express have no US source. I also have mostly bought small electronics and components and generally pay the Amazon premium for speed and only go to Ali express when I can’t find what I need, so third is quite a bummer to hear as I’d simply have no source for that item. Although, it did seem too good to be true, the minimal shipping costs that is.
There is a minimum fee for packages, yes. At this point I've lost track of all the changes but at one point I remember seeing $100 or $150 per package under some conditions.
Carriers will also charge a fee for brokering it. USPS has a $9 fee, other carriers are higher.
We went from being free to order things internationally to having out of control fees and taxes on top of everything.
There's a lot of sneering at Temu and Shein, but the hobbyist and electronics worlds are about to get hit extremely hard by the lack of access to tools and parts from Aliexpress. It's really sad.
That there is a minimum fee doesn't necessarily mean the customer pays it on arrival. It could also be charged to the sender in advance, and if they don't pay, the package is simply not delivered at all.
If you could cheaply send stuff to random people to make them pay huge fees when they get something they didn't even order, that would be quite bad...
Yet that’s exactly how it works. Each package will have $100 tacked on and in June that goes up to $200. They are basically making small packages impossible, so individuals / hobby buyers will be cut out completely, and a lot of small businesses will lose their supply lines. Big businesses will just raise prices to compensate… or bite the bullet long enough to put everyone else out of business. I suspect this is Walmarts plan.
> If you could cheaply send stuff to random people to make them pay huge fees when they get something they didn't even order, that would be quite bad...
You can just refuse to accept the item, and it'll be returned to the sender or destroyed.
After the inavsion of Ukraine and sanctions were put on Russia every western company laundered their goods through Kazakhstan and into Russia. Im sure we will see a similar situation whith chinese goods finding their way into the country via vietnam.
realistically speaking, it is likely not possible to deliver envelop from China at 75c cost, its likely someone else is paying for your 75c envelops (like taxpayers through subsidies).
I enjoy the cheap shipping (from Aliexpress China warehouses to Germany), but I really wish this would be improved. It just seems nonsensical. There should be a closer relation to actual cost, but paying 4-5€ for a national shipment, versus essentially nothing for Chinese shipments, is mad.
It gets even weirder when you consider the prices of shipping even within the EU. Within Germany? €3,50 if the seller has a good deal with DHL, within the Netherlands? €4,50 with PostNL. As a normal consumer shipping something the price goes up, and when you want to ship from the Netherlands to Germany or vice versa? €9,50 at least. Vinted seems to be the exception because of their deal with Mondial Relay, so I can order something from Italy for just €5 (but they currently exclude Germany for that feature for some reason).
…meanwhile a couple of I²C light sensors, some brass book screws, a router bit or two? Free shipping because of the (whatever) deal or Ali Choice shipping, and just as fast too.
Of course with Shein and Temu this isn't about cheap electronics, parts, and tools any more, but wholesale environmental destruction by fast-fashion. It wouldn't get much worse if the Chinese fashion manufacturers just shipped their wares directly to the Atacama desert.
Enjoy this while it lasts Nachbar, no tariffs there for us just yet.
I remember paying 25 euro to ship a bottle of wine to somebody in Belgium while living 30 minutes away from the border (just for weight and destination, wine itself had no extra taxes).
And then stuff from China appears at my doorstep almost for free?
I would love to buy more from European sellers, but unless you're a serious company with deals shipping is just too expensive.
Our invisible borders are quite real when it comes to shipping. It's only the really big ones like Amazon which seem to be able to negotiate lower prices across the block, and that's just depressing.
It's the same for us in the US honestly, the shipping companies are ridiculous with this. Someone in my company sent me a hoodie, in a soft package, cost on it said $14.50.
Ridiculous! And they don't even discount you for bringing the package to their dropbox or to a store, it's the same price for home pickup. There's just no way to economically ship things as an individual.
Yeah, this gets even worse within EU, I luckily am probably less affected by that than you (thanks to country size differences), but when it hits me, it surely is bad.
Fast fashion is what consumers want. It's just that China has a state of the art supply chain that can do it and they blew everyone else out of the water.
I don't think the price of those small shipments from China is necessarily crazy.
Looking at flights for people: you can get a return flight to China from the UK for less than £350, which means less than £175 one way.
Let's say that's about 100kg (person plus luggage) then this means that flying 100g from China to the UK costs less than 17.5p or 20c in euros.
I expect that cargo will be cheaper than passenger plane, so shipping small stuff from China to Europe can indeed be very cheap. It's about volume and efficiency.
Air freight rates vary wildly by demand/bulk discounts/route/etc but $2-8/kg is typical, with a median around $4/kg. Commercial flights are often cheaper, and especially when you consider the weight of seats/water/food/crew/etc.
The plane itself isn’t the only cost of shipping. Even sending a letter is more expensive, and there’s no plane involved. You have to pick it up, bring it to the airport, and deliver it to the door from the destination airport.
Here in Australia I can order a $10 (AUD) item from aliexpress and get free shipping from China. But as a consumer or small busines, if I want to send anything bigger than a letter within Australia it's likely to cost me way more than $10 just for the postage.
It doesn't make sense and it must distort retail trade in China's favour. I'm honestly not surprised the US withdrew from that treaty, I think it needs reworking.
If you’re a consumer, I’m not sure why you’re not singing praises of this arrangement. If someone in China can sell me exactly the same stuff for 1/4 the price you’re charging, shipping included, then why do you even exist?
>If you’re a consumer, I’m not sure why you’re not singing praises of this arrangement. If someone in China can sell me exactly the same stuff for 1/4 the price you’re charging, shipping included,
Because those low shipping prices are being subsidized by taxes and the rates other shippers pay which make their way back to him because he shares an economy with them.
Just because the specific source of the subsidy is complex and can't be accounted for by the consumer doesn't mean it's not paid.
> If you’re a consumer, I’m not sure why you’re not singing praises of this arrangement.
You misunderstand my point a little - As a consumer, I want access to that pricing! Why does it cost me tens of dollars to post something across my own country? But it costs someone in China almost nothing to post much further, including the part in this country?
And the answer is that treaties mean that we're all paying for it in other ways. In fact my expensive parcel may be directly subsidising the cheap parcels from overseas. I'm not a fan of this idea.
> If someone in China can sell me exactly the same stuff for 1/4 the price you’re charging, shipping included, then why do you even exist?
My partner briefly tried to sell handmade items within Australia. The postage cost more or less killed the idea as it added 50% or more to the price of a small-ish item. Yes, a mass-produced item from China would likely cost about 10% as much and be shippable for nearly free, but the audience is different. AFAICT it's largely other people who make stuff, and some who just value handmade and want to support local. They don't want the thing from China and are a little less price sensitive, but still within limits.
For items that are directly equivalent, I would prefer to buy from an Australian company, not least because of the consumer protections. Market distortions that favour overseas sales over domestic seem like a bad plan all round.
If I order a $2 item from aliexpress with free shipping, like some baseball caps I just found, nobody is paying the $10 postage fee it would cost just on shipping to send one within Australia, in China or anywhere else. Let alone the $25 it would cost to send the item the other way, back to China.
The treaty distorts the cost of delivery massively in favour of countries with low internal post costs, and ends up creating absurd situations like this.
> I'm surprised the websites don't even acknowledge this yet
Some people are reporting seeing tiktoks - not "ads", but regular videos, inasmuch as there's a difference - where Chinese vendors are saying "see, this is the factory that makes US brands such as lululemon, why not cut out the middleman and buy direct?"
> I guess they are hoping for a reversal in the next 2 weeks
There's been several reversals already. If trade policy is done by whim, why not wait for a reversal as soon as it starts to bite?
The whole category of "US business dependent on Chinese imports for inputs" is probably toast in the meantime. This includes a lot of kickstarters.
My dad was in manufacturing and later importing so growing up I got to learn a lot about the process. He had worked for Heinz when I was young and would always buy the ketchup from some store brands that was about 60% of the cost. He was like, yea we bottle this on the same line as the name brand product.
The same hold true for imports. And yea there is a lot of cheap Chinese junk, but if you know what you're looking for you can find the same Chinese products that get name branded and marked up 200-2000% here in the US.
The problem with all of these is it's just going to cause and economic downturn where people purchase less, but more US products aren't going to sell. They simply aren't built here, and even if they are they'd still be many times more expensive. Even with the tariffs it would still be cheaper from China.
I think that websites like Temu or AliExpress are particularly popular in poorer countries because we're used to scammy tactics, and we know how to navigate them. We know what to buy in order to get what we want, and for this purpose, AliExpress is awesome, because there are so many products you can't find locally. Meanwhile customers from rich countries expect better customer service as the default, and are willing to pay higher price for it.
It does not work. You have to declare the real source of the merchandise. Or it has to go through "substantial transformation" so that is called "Made in France".
Country of origin is taxed and not country of shippment.
And nobody ever lied on those Chinese envelopes with the value declaration. ;)
Also, I can tell you that the country of origin field has one of the lowest entry qualities of all fields. People just don't bother, and customs don't have the capacity. Also, depending on your warehousing, there is a good chance you simply don't know. If something in your item bucket came from either China, Vietnam, Malaysia or the Philippines, what are you gonna write?
I've seen a few headlines in our local news here in Australia about how nobody knows what amount of Chinese ingredients will result in the final product being hit with Chinese tariffs, even though the products are assembled here.
Thank you for saving me money! I have been saving up for a little birthday gift for myself, which I was planning to get from Temu and the extra charge would make it way over my budget. Thanks again!
Why would you offer some low quality shit from Temu for a birthday? 99 items out of 100 self destruct within weeks of use.
It is only useful to people compulsively buying clothing regardless of the quality and who will never wear twice the same thing. Disposable stuff/waste.
One would only do that to their worst enemy.
OK I am exagerrating a bit and had a handful lf decent stuff from aliexpress/wish/temu. But you can typically only order for yourself as the quality testing is non existent. It is totally unsuitable for gifts. Mechanical pieces are often out of tolerance, clothing way uglier inperson than in photo, electronic stuff can last only days or years but you have no way to know for sure, finitions in general are very bad in general.
Reading this thread is mind-boggling. People complaining that cheap garbage from Temu is falling apart. People proudly proclaiming that they order Chinese crap almost daily. An argument about whether one crap peddler is better than another one.
Am I taking crazy pills? Am I the only one who buys things a few times per year? This rampant consumerism is depressing.
It isn’t all or nothing, products from Temu/Shein/AliExpress are not all “crap”; (and the idea that Chinese products are crap is also seriously outdated). Yes, there’s a lot of shovelware on those websites, but if you know how to navigate them you can get the same products that you’d get from Amazon for a third of the price. I’ve bought bags, tools, hobby equipment etc from aliexpress that has lasted me years and saved literally 50% on average.
So many people are clueless to this. So many products we buy in the US are the made in the same Chinese factory line and 200-400%+ marked up as a name brand.
You have to do your research for sure.
Honestly I'm old enough to remember when Japanese products were still considered crap after WWII. Then their stuff massively improved and trounced US products. Japanese cars lasting 100's of thousands of miles while US junk at the time barely lasted that. This reminds me of that at a much bigger scale.
I keep hearing stuff like this and I kind of fully expect someone to tell me you have to pay Monster cable prices to get something that's not junk.
Really my day to day experience isn't this at all. I have good amounts of "chinese junk" tools that I use on a weekly/monthly basis that I paid probably 25% of a name brand tool and they are holding up just fine. I'm not using them daily so don't need to spend my life savings on them. I do a bit of research first so not getting the worst crap that some people run into.
Batteries are the big thing I've had excellent luck with. I can get Dewalt knockoff batteries at less than half the cost and twice the power and they last the same amount of time as my name brand.
Buy item X from Amazon, which is effectively a Temu product+ a 50% markup.
Or buy direct from Temu/AliExpress and save money?
It's not a hard choice.
I like watches. While I still pay retail for most of my watches, the bands are like 2$ on AliExpress and 15$ on Amazon. Phone cases are much much cheaper.
Certain phones aren't released domestically at all, so now I'm looking at a 100$ fee to import them. If I want to work on a project requiring a PCB that's now impossibly expensive.
Our neighbours have Prime vans as well as unmarked white delivery vans dropping stuff off almost daily, mostly small items. I have sometimes wondered where it all goes, until I see their overflowing garbage and recycling bins.
I don’t buy things online too often (about once a month, I would say), but regularly I buy on AliExpress things that I cannot find elsewhere at a decent price or at all (mostly electronics and specialised hobbyist stuff). On the other hand, yes, Temi is cheap garbage, and so is much of AliExpress. And Amazon as well, to be honest. Real life leaves room for a lot of nuance.
No, I had the exact same thoughts. I personally find it crazy to think that you'd buy something (that isn't an explicit perishable or consumable) and intentionally buy something shoddy or discard it after only a few weeks.
With regards to clothing, I'm kind of glad the market for cheap shit from sweatshops is getting a beating, as I'm tired of seeing fewer and fewer legitimately durable clothing items. We need more union shops like Carhartt's (which only makes a few things anymore) building nice durable clothing. God knows a good pure cotton duck jacket or pants are both better for the environment (no petroleum products for synthetic materials and longer life) and frankly a better investment when they last years or at least months under the hardest abuse.
I've also been saving up for a self birthday gift from AliExpress, parts to build a custom watch. Looks like I missed my chance on that one too. Though if this trade war continues escalating I have a feeling a watch will be the least of my worries.
