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Presumably they can determine this for items directly imported, but for all other cases (such as a made-in-the-USA product that is built using made-in-China too
by jl6 1y ago
Presumably they can determine this for items directly imported, but for all other cases (such as a made-in-the-USA product that is built using made-in-China tools, or from made-in-China components), surely the cost impact on the final product could be extremely complex to work out, if they even have access to that level of supply chain detail?
- abirch 1y agoA lazy way to do this is to take the current price as the non tariff price and assume any increase in price is based on tariffs.
- littlestymaar 1y agoThat would also be quite a misleading way to do it.
- acdha 1y agoI’m sure it would be off in some cases, but “quite misleading” seems like an exaggeration: the economy was steadily growing and there weren’t any major drivers of inflation other than Trump’s massive tax hike.
- mrits 1y agoI don't think it takes much thinking to realize how misleading this is. I'd really be interested in Prime Day when tariffs are decreasing everything
- acdha 1y agoCan you give an example? Usually short term price fluctuation would be in response to something like a sudden change in market demand or something like a natural disaster lowering production but nothing like that seems to have happened other than the largest tax increase in U.S. history and the demand shock from the federal cuts should be lowering prices, not raising them.
- mrits 1y agoPrice fluctuation doesn't usually depend on market demand or natural disasters. How you got that idea is beyond me.
- littlestymaar 1y agoI've been convinced for a while that teaching economics broadly is a mistake, people who have taken a minimum amount of economics class do in fact understand less how the economy works than people who don't…
- mrits 1y agoPeople that actually have ran a business and priced stuff generally have a better idea of how pricing works
- littlestymaar 1y agoExactly.
- acdha 1y agoAll I’m talking about is basic supply and demand: if prices suddenly go up significantly, that usually means that there is either a big change in demand or the supply has become limited and buyers are having to pay more. A big natural disaster can cause that if it affects agricultural supply, shipping, or factory production (e.g. years ago, flooding in Thailand caused hard drive prices to double[1]). My point was simply that since nothing like that has happened, prices spiking is almost certainly due solely to the tariffs. 1. https://www.techspot.com/guides/494-hard-drive-pricewatch-thai-floods/ https://www.techspot.com/guides/494-hard-drive-pricewatch-th...
- littlestymaar 1y agoThe problem is that you are invoking a crude theory in a simplistic fashion that has with very little predictive power over the real world. It's as if you told a guy working in a ski station that “the temperature cannot be above 0°C as there's snow everywhere and everyone knows that snow melts above zero”. It's not how it works, and the economy doesn't work in the simplified fashion you seem to believe it does either. You cannot reason from first principles using “basic supply and demand” arguments like that any more than you can make statements about the weather using the second law of thermodynamics. Price change all the time for variety of reasons, seasons being one of them (that's why CPI figures are said to be “seasonally adjusted”, BTW).
- graemep 1y agoThere are other sources of price changes - commodities prices, exchange rates, taxes in originating countries, costs of transport....
- acdha 1y agoYes, but how many of those dramatically jumped recently? Two years from now, sure, you’ll have to ask about other things but it’s not like the commodities market had other massive upsets this month.
- graemep 1y agoOil has varied in a range of about 23% in the last few weeks, and the USD to CNY rate. Raw material for many things (like plastics) and obviously used for transport.
- CamperBob2 1y agoOil has primarily gone down. Demand destruction tends to do that.
- graemep 1y agoIt went up then down. Either way, its still makes the assumption that "price change is purely due to tariffs" inaccurate - it just changes the direction of the error.
- acdha 1y agoOil has gone down, though, and the primary driver for the volatility was the tariffs. It’s not like there was a big change in production or something like the pandemic causing millions of people to change their driving habits. Again, the question is simply what non-tariff factor would explain non-trivial prices over a month? If there isn’t one, it doesn’t seem unfair to attribute the increase to a huge policy change.
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- bee_rider 1y agoI don’t think they are going to do some novel calculation or go out on a limb much at all. I mean, passing along tax information is a political act (in the same way not showing items on the shelf with sales tax, and then including it on your bill is an anti-sales-tax political statement—the point is to blame the government for an annoying surprise), but it is (I think, at least) widely seen as sort of… normal acceptable behavior in the US.
- maxvisser 1y agoSome Amazon programmer tomorrow priceIncrease := (newPrice - oldPrice) / oldPrice var trump_tariff bool if priceIncrease > 1.0 { trump_tariff = true }
- unwind 1y agoPlease don't use if:s to assign boolean literals, just do it: const trump_tariff = priceIncrease > 1.0 also saves you from not initializing the variable in the default/other case. :)
- Upvoter33 1y agoThis was just someone showing you what the "Amazon programmer" was doing, and hence a deep cut reference to the likelihood of it being poor quality code :)
- TheSoftwareGuy 1y agoIf you really wanted to look like Amazon codex you would write Java :)
- maxvisser 1y agoI see I missed an opportunity to make it even funnier.
- Someone 1y agoIn the original code, trump_tariff is a sticky value. If that’s intended/not intended, the above introduces/fixes a bug.
- throwaway519 1y agoconst I feel you may underestimate how often they change.
- grokkedit 1y agonot to mention the mix of snake_case & camelCase
- parrit 1y agoThen increase the price!
- bee_rider 1y agoSeems novel and kinda “going out on a limb,” sort of unlikely for a big entity like Amazon, right? I wonder if they will just allow their suppliers to add in an additional “my tariff costs” number, which the supplier can compute however they want and be responsible for. (This would be on top of the main tariff price, the one paid directly by Amazon, which of course they’ll have receipts for).
- hippich 1y agoLast 2 or 3 years we use their AGL service. I am pretty sure a lot of their third party sellers are. So they will have exact information on custom duties paid.
- cj 1y agoI think the GP is asking about “Assembled in the USA” products where individual components are imported from around the world. Wouldn’t “custom duties paid” be on each individual component?
- conductr 1y agoIf the product was made in US but used a dozen raw materials to create it, Amazon doesn’t know where you sourced them from or how much you paid for them or even how much of each your product consumed in a per unit basis.
- SecretDreams 1y agoThe only tariff Amazon needs to display is the one they need to collect. You are right that more tariffs might've been applied along the way - but it's not relevant for what Amazon has to do.
- crazygringo 1y agoDoes Amazon collect any tariffs at all? That would be unusual for a retailer. Unless they're registered as an importer? I could see that as a service they might provide to certain sellers, just like warehousing and other logistics. But generally, they will receive their merchandise from a corporate entity who paid the tariff already.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- SecretDreams 1y agoI'll say regardless of it's Amazon or the last party in-line prior to the final sale, my point is the same. They're just displaying the last tariff that was collected before it enters into the hands of the consumer.
- dagaci 1y agoSurely they will have receipts for the tariffs paid…
- myrmidon 1y agoThis doesn't help; e.g. if you buy sneakers made in the US, those might be affected by leather import tariffs, but Amazon is not gonna know by how much and manufacturers are gonna be cagey with exact numbers.
- stetrain 1y agoCompany A imports steel and pays a tariff, uses the steels to make screws in the US. Company B imports lumber and pays a tariff, manufacturers it into furniture rails in the US. Company C buys furniture rails from Company B and screws from Company A and assembles them into an end table. Company D buys the end tables wholesale from Company C and distributes them on Amazon. How does Amazon display the tariffs paid by Company A and B and correctly show the price difference in the final product?
- bdavisx 1y agoYes, that would be complicated. EXCEPT most of what amazon sells is Company A in China makes product -> Company B imports and sells on amazon. That's easy to calculate.
- stetrain 1y agoYou're right, but the parent comment was asking about the exception to that majority.
- dgfitz 1y agoA and B passed along the tariff costs to C, which passed those costs to D. D now costs more, assuming they pass the delta cost to the consumer. The only delta a customer cares about is the past/current cost of D, which is what amazon would presumably display. Isn't this the horn everyone keeps trumpeting? It doesn't seem complicated.
- scotty79 1y agoThey can put up "up to x" for products which provenience in not known. And if you want to bring it down you need to present 3rd party audit result about how much of your price comes from US.
- reverendsteveii 1y agoLet's POSIWID this for a second. Perfect accuracy isn't the goal here, nor does it meaningfully contribute to the goal. The goal is messaging, it's about drawing a line in consumers' brains between the price increases and Trump. If it were me I'd just take the pre-tariff price, work out a post-tariff price and then assign the blame for the difference between them to Trump. No one is gonna check up on this, and it has the narrative on its side. Even Trump's supporters acknowledge that his tariffs are gonna raise prices, they're just integrating that fact by saying it's for the greater good and it'll bring manufacturing back home and put a chicken in every garage and a car in every pot and all of that. Amazon just wants to hammer him on this because even after Lord Bezos bent the knee, donated tons of money and used his power to manipulate the media in favor of Trump Trump still went ahead with moves that will consolidate his own power but cost his nobles a ton of money.