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De minimis: US small parcels loophole closes pushing up Shein, Temu prices
- glimshe 1y agoI wouldn't want to be in the landfill business right now.
- IG_Semmelweiss 1y agoDoesn't that depend on the geographic location you are in ? ET had to be buried somewhere!
- andrewstuart 1y agoThere goes your dirt cheap microcontrollers send from aliexpress for $3.
- rasz 1y agoDIY fixing cars/tractors/lawnmover just became much more expensive. Chinese carburetors were cheaper on Amazon than a first party rebuild/gasket set at your traditional part suppliers.
- sarchertech 1y agoI mean you can still pay the $3-$5 import tax on them.
- rjmorris 1y agoUnless you get hit with the flat fee instead. > Packages sent to the US from mainland China and Hong Kong with a value of up to $800 now face a 120% tax rate or are subject to a flat fee. The fee started at $100 and is due to rise to $200 at the beginning of June.
- sarchertech 1y agoYeah that part was unclear. So maybe the $100 flat fee is the minimum. In that case us importers will pop up to import them in bulk and your uc goes up to $8. Maybe it makes sense to order something from Parallax or TI in that case.
- alabastervlog 1y agoNot direct-order. There’s a minimum fee. Unless you’re ordering bulk, you’ll be paying a lot more than $3-$5 per board in taxes. The cheapest alternative now will be to go through a middleman who adds some markup but can pay “merely” the 145% tariff rate because they’re buying a ton of them at a time. 400% total markup on the direct-priced $3 board beats $100 (and soon $200) per parcel ordering just a couple at a time. Though, these businesses may not be viable at the higher prices, and supply might just dry up. (In fact, the cheapest alternative will probably be “Vietnamese” boards that are lying about where they were manufactured…)
- foobarian 1y agoYes and then wait half a year for CBP to hire a few thousand more people to handle the workload.
- ty6853 1y agoLol assuming CBP doesn't spend that money on migrant hunting squads and torture camps.
- invokestatic 1y agoI ordered an FPGA development board from China last month that unfortunately didn’t make it out of the country before tariffs/end of de minimis set in. So it’s now sitting in a consolidation warehouse overseas while I figure out what to do with it. Paying almost double its value in taxes alone just kills its viability as a hobby, and sourcing it overseas is the only way to get hands on hardware without shelling out $2,000+. There’s a whole cottage industry over there where they harvest semiconductors from junk/e-waste and turn them in to usable products again. I assume that’s where the actual FPGA chip came from.
- aziaziazi 1y ago> junk/e-waste and turn them in to usable products again. Could you expend on this? In my understanding (armchair-youtube-expert), seminconductor "recycling" is basically burning the device and to scrap the metallic parts then using as usual cyanide+boiling chloride (or mercury) to extract gold. Then throw away everything else. The less industrial method involves human dissection of such devices (with pre and post burning) to extract Silver/Cooper
- bombcar 1y agoThere's an entire industry in Asia that takes apart computers and boards and industrial equipment, removes the chips, and resells them. Sometimes they even paint part numbers and such on them by hand. It can be a source of fake chips, but also a source of chips that aren't made anymore.
- reginald78 1y agoChina seemed to take chips from obsolete motherboards and turn them into boards to allow reuse of old Xeons, at least for awhile there. I can't imagine those chipsets were still being made so I assume that is what was happening. A lot of those old processors were still quite useful but since the motherboard supply had dried up they were cheap e-waste. I can't imagine that kind of recycled product being made here, not least of which because Intel would probably find a way to sue a domestic company out of existence if they even tried.
- rwmj 1y agoAlternate headline is "US introduces higher taxes and more bureaucracy".
- Ylpertnodi 1y agoI guess one way to keep the 'special relationship' going, is to create your very own Brexit.
- ogogmad 1y agoThe UK did not impose 10+% tariffs. They left a voluntary union. And they might rejoin soon, now that the 'Special Relationship' requires going against Canada and Denmark - which is evil.
- chihuahua 1y agoMaybe if the UK adopts a general rule that they're in the EU in even years and out in odd years, that would make everyone happy. A reasonable compromise.
- A_D_E_P_T 1y agoI'm in Europe. My wife buys a lot of stuff directly from China via their internal/domestic marketplaces 1688.com and TaoBao.com. (Better prices, better service, just use a translator app and ship to a freight forwarder.) Currently, those domestic/internal marketplaces are being flooded with cheap stuff. Like $5 jackets of very decent quality. Now's the best-ever time to be a Chinese consumer. (Or one with a freight forwarder and o3 handling translation, as long as you're not in the USA.) I don't know how hard the manufacturers themselves are complaining, but to some extent you have to imagine that they anticipated this and are looking to recalibrate production and reroute goods.
- 9dev 1y agoInternational trade is always a bit delayed due to the volume of stocked goods, and those en route on container ships. The effects will become visible soon though.
- folli 1y agoAny recommendations regarding freight forwarders?
- IG_Semmelweiss 1y agoI'm interested in this as well
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoTariffs are based on country of manufacture, not where they were shipped from, so freight forwarding would only make a difference if this is not truthfully declared.
- glimshe 1y agoCould someone in Mexico order a Chinese product, take it out of the box, put it in a Mexican made box and export it as a Mexican product?
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- alabastervlog 1y agoFrom what I’ve read in other articles that stated it more-clearly than this one, US de minimus is suspended for only China and Hong Kong (for now…), right?
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoUS had a de minimis (<$800) tariff exemption for goods originating from all countries, but that has now been removed for China and Hong Kong, so all goods from those countries, regardless of price, will now incur a US import tax (tariff) at whatever rate Trump is currently imposing (125% for China?). Basically cheap cloths from Shein/Temu, cheap electronics on eBay, etc all just doubled in price.
- alabastervlog 1y agoOK, good, I've got some in-flight orders for things from the EU and Japan that'll be impractical or impossible to source if the US gets further cut-off, and every time I read one of these articles that doesn't make it crystal clear that this is (so far) only ending for China and Hong Kong, I get a little nervous that I'm about to get a painful bill.
- sarchertech 1y agoI am not in favor of how the administration has handled this at all. But I am in favor of reducing our dependence on Chinese imports. The externalities for all the cheap stuff we import are too high and the market will never do anything about them.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y agoHow does it hurt the US for consumers to be able to buy cheap goods from China that would cost a lot more if made here? Cheap clothes are not a national security issue. The US should be self-reliant on things like electronics, software, industrial equipment, but for many classes of items there is no benefit in pushing up prices for US consumers.
- markus_zhang 1y agoI think they just use this as another form of taxation. If a $20 pant doubles to $40, it still beats a domestic one (if there is even one) with one hand. If the US really wants to reboot manufacturing, first I agree with what you said, it should focus on national security goods as well as higher value add goods. Second, the US should actually lower the tax for machines that build these items and import them to build up these businesses, and third, then it should move upstream i.e. to build those machines domestically and push the taxation higher. The current policy seems to be the most idiotic.
- sarchertech 1y agoOf course the US should focus on goods related to national security over clothing, but small value imports directly impact US electronics manufacturers like Parallax and TI. I imagine it was easier to do this than to inspect every shipment from china for microcontrollers. Again I don’t agree with the way they are handling it.
- morkalork 1y agoThere's the argument that if clothes were more expensive, manufacturers would be forced to compete on quality instead of volume, fast fashion would die to ye olde good days where people had fewer but better quality clothing and the environment would be be better off. Culturally, I don't think we're going back to that. And if you talk to any boomer or older person who remembers what that was like when they were kids they'd hated it.
- echoangle 1y agoWhat’s the definition of loophole? How is shipping small packages without taxing them a loophole if that’s the exact thing the exemption was introduced for? Is driving an electric car and getting a tax credit a loophole too?
- lesuorac 1y agoThe argument was that grandma would be shipping you nice cookies and it'd be annoying if you had to pay tarriff on receive foodstuff. Temu is not grandma so that's where the loophole comment comes from. It wasn't meant to be used large-scale commercially where you ship 100 small packages instead of 1 large package to avoid the tarrif.
- Gracana 1y agoWhy was it set at $800 if it’s for grandma’s cookies?
- IG_Semmelweiss 1y agoIt was an example. There's no need to be pedantic. $800 is a meaningful exception for personal use. If you want a turkish $400 rug or a $300 indian wedding dress, it was always meant to be for personal, not corporate, use. Can we agree that the law as it was intended was completely abused ? EDIT: for graphic language
- Ekaros 1y agoWould paying extra 24$ on a 400$ rug be unreasonable when importing it? To me well it is a tax, but in the end not that significant one.
- echoangle 1y ago> Can we agree that the law as it was intended was completely raped and abused ? Not really, is there a source for the rationale of the de minimis exemption?
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- aziaziazi 1y ago> After a series of rises to the threshold, it allowed retailers to ship packages worth less than $800 to US customers without having to pay duties or taxes. > The European Union has also proposed plans to scrap duty-free exemptions for parcels worth less than €150 (£127.50; $169.35). Does the threshold apply the package entering the border (a container) or the package for the foreseen destination (the cardboard in your mailbox)?
- dharmab 1y agoIt applies to each parcel, not an entire shipping container. Note that a parcel can contain multiple physical boxes for a single order.
- madaxe_again 1y agoThe EU exemption does not exist in practice - if you ship something worth €20 from the U.K., you can expect to pay ~€50 in import vat, tariffs, customs inspection fees, and courier handling fees. It’s only really worth importing stuff that’s well over the theoretical threshold, as you’re going to be paying the flat rate fees anyway.
- detaro 1y agoThe key point is that the 150€ limit is a tariff-enforcement limit, but VAT limits are set by the countries (and in recent years often much lower), so even if you don't pay tariffs on your parcel it might still go through the system for VAT purposes and incur the various fees around that.And privatized postal systems means that they can choose how large these fees are.
- madaxe_again 1y agoRight, but I’m telling you it’s normal to pay tariffs on small value items in the EU - China seem to get the carve-out, but anywhere else, you’re paying duties. I’m not confusing VAT and tariffs.
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- cmrdporcupine 1y agoJust read an article about how overseas shippers have been flooding warehouses up here in Canada stockpiling cheap goods destinated for the US market, hoping for the tariffs to get dropped soon: https://archive.is/PjEgL https://archive.is/PjEgL Article notes that if the tariffs don't get dropped shortly, the cost of warehousing will exceed the tariff cost, and the goods will get dumped into the Canadian market. (Win? Maybe?) Then we have companies that set up their distributor model to be North American wide, screwing Canadian consumers (adding in tariff overhead for them and taking it as profit) because they still route their goods through the US: https://petapixel.com/2025/04/30/leica-raises-prices-in-canada-to-reach-price-parity-with-tariffs-in-the-us/ https://petapixel.com/2025/04/30/leica-raises-prices-in-cana... Everything is a mess
- drumhead 1y agoHow inflationary (or not) will this be. Will just switch to domestic products or will they just reduce consumption overall.
- alabastervlog 1y agoDomestic production can’t keep up with demand for things like clothes and PCBs. Weddings are about to get interesting. May regress (“regress”, arguably this is totally fine) to the 1980s and earlier where having special complex color-coordinated dresses for all your bridesmaids was something only the upper-middle and higher could afford. Lots of perfect Disney wedding dreams about to get a ton more expensive. [edit] it could keep up, of course, especially with depressed demand from higher prices, but it’ll take quite a while to ramp that up, and there won’t be a lot of takers for that investment while de minimus remains in place for other markets that could take over that manufacturing cheaper than the US—India, Vietnam, Indonesia, DR, et c.
- atrus 1y agoI can't imagine how domestic production can keep up. US manufacturing isn't impossibly far behind China, and now you want to basically double the need, and worse, double the need with low value good like clothes and PCBs? Nobody is going to invest in that.
- hypeatei 1y ago> Will just switch to domestic products On what timeline? Does the current environment even encourage companies making huge investments into the U.S. (and no, the pinky promises that we hear about aren't investments) since it'll just change in four years? There is no central industrial policy being proposed or passed via Congress, just a mad king imposing tariffs on a whim.
- ty6853 1y agoCongress voted on tarriffs last night. It's no longer riding on a whim, the entire elected representatives voted on them and decided to keep them. Reversal failed 49-49. So the mad king theory, I think it was initially defendable, but I'm not so sure now. The people have spoken, through their representatives, and through a president that advertised his tarriff plan during elections. The American people have spoken, they want this pain.
- sspiff 1y agoUp to $800 is not "small parcels" in my book. We used to have the similar (but lower value limit) exemptions in (some) EU countries but those have been abolished several years ago, as well as discounted shipping rates for China as it was finally upgraded away from "developing nation" status.
- friendzis 1y agoCorrection: Import duties are still generally (depends on product category, some are taxed from first Euro) waived on small parcels. What parent refers to is small parcel exemption to VAT, however every larger retailer adjusted to that and are now declaring VAT on their end. Personally, I would say this is a net win
- OutOfHere 1y agoThis is going to be bad for people who get medicines from abroad. Medicines can be unaffordable as it is.
- geenkeuse 1y ago[dead]