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One thing I wonder is: If you're a business used to selling at a certain price point, and the value proposition is established with your customers .... do you
by duxup 2y ago
One thing I wonder is:
If you're a business used to selling at a certain price point, and the value proposition is established with your customers .... do you bother risking shattering that expectation if the future is unknown?
Do you risk customers saying "Oh crap my hobby that I did with Adafruit is now untenable ... well I'm out." vs "Well they're low on stock, I'll check back when this is all over."
I don't know if it is all or nothing but it seems like there's a lot of risk either way.
- Workaccount2 2y agoYou charge a separate tariff charge.
- duxup 2y agoI think it is a good choice to be transparent. I 100% agree with that. But I don't know that it really changes the "I'm out" dynamic or risk that they won't just show up again. Also if there's a lot of "I'm out" you just bought a lot of stuff nobody wants to pay anything near the cost of.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoYeah, I don't know why any business with the capacity wouldn't be being explicit about this. If you're going to get hate, might as well try to point the hate in the right direction. It makes absolutely no sense to fall on that particular sword.
- grey-area 2y agoSomething this administration considers a 'hostile and political move'? If you're small enough I guess you might get a way with it, if you're big enough you'll be threatened into compliance. Either way the US customers and the rest of the world lose, everyone is a little poorer because of these tariffs.
- tantalor 2y agoI don't understand how they can say its hostile to list tariffs when plenty of merchants will advertise "made in America" as a selling point. It's the same thing!
- duxup 2y agoThe current administration considers "I don't like it" to be hostile, it's really that simple.
- dylan604 2y agoYeah, it really feels like a strained lack of understanding. If you challenge the orange man, you're immediately deemed hostile.
- jacobyoder 2y agoMore to the point, if high tariffs are GOOD, we should be embracing them and the WH should be working to promote 'pride in tariffs!' messaging. Show how much you love your country and leader by how much in tariffs you pay! It'll be great, because you won't have to pay $3k income tax, just... an extra $5k in cost of living every year. Forever. Even when you stop working.
- mlinhares 2y agoThe people running the government are making bank with shitcoins so some people are winning.
- QuercusMax 2y agoYou'd think these big companies would want to stand up against this nonsense. Microsoft fired their law firm who sucked up to Trump's threats. Why doesn't Wal-Mart or whoever make a loud pronouncement that they'll fund primary campaigns against any congressperson who supports these tariffs? These companies got Citizens United passed so they can spend unlimited amounts of political money, so why don't they use this power when their business is threatened like this?
- jm4 2y agoAnd if you're big enough and you do that, you get bullied into submission by the White House. It's really hard to look at this administration's economic policies and not wonder whether there is deliberate sabotage going on. The best case scenario is these people are woefully uninformed and incompetent. These tariffs will hurt consumers, destroy small businesses, and simultaneously have the potential to enrich the largest players in the market. This never would have happened if our population was better educated and particularly more financially literate.
- _DeadFred_ 2y agoI mean Besset, Trump's Secretary of Treasury, was on Soros' team that broke the Bank of England. According to MAGA he is literally the Soros swamp that got rich basically breaking a friendly country. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/26/business/scott-bessent-wall-street-treasury.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/26/business/scott-bessent-wa...
- anjel 2y agoAmerexit
- Neywiny 2y agoYeah I would've expected that like other companies they'd buy sparingly and see what happens. That said, 42 units seems low for them, so maybe they nominally ship hundreds/thousands of that device and are doing a "magic number" trial run.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Symbiote 2y agoIt's 42 packages with a total weight of 445kg, we don't know how many items are within each package.
- simple10 2y agoI worked with a lot of ecomm and especially crowdfunded companies that shipped to 100+ countries. Outside of the US, most consumers expect to have to pay import fees as a separate line item. But this is new for US consumers. My hope is that US companies will add temporary price increases if they can't eat the tariffs in their existing margins and then reduce when tariffs are reduced. But my guess is that most companies will increase prices, blame the tariffs (rightfully so), but then not fully reduce prices if/when the tariffs decrease. It's similar to what happened with tipping for takeout food during Covid. It's now a permanent tax.
- dtech 2y ago> Outside of the US, most consumers expect to have to pay import fees as a separate line item. Only if you buy from a foreign store directly which is relatively niche. It's much more common for an importer to pay the duties and then put the product in local stores.
- Symbiote 2y agoPart of the reason it's relatively niche is because people did it once, then didn't like the surprise customs bill that arrived. (Or they heard about this from a friend/colleague.)
- carlosjobim 2y agoThat makes no difference for the price.
- Dylan16807 2y agoWell yeah. The point they're responding to was about how different stores display things in the same economic situation.
- mvdtnz 2y agoBuying from a foreign store is not niche at all. I think it's insanely common. I think most people do it multiple times a year. Why would you think it's niche?
- sleepyguy 2y agoWhen freight rates skyrocketed due to fuel prices, freight companies added a fuel surcharge, which reflects the additional cost of moving your product. Retailers need to do the same thing with the Republican Tariffs. It is fair, and the consumer deserves to know.
- duxup 2y agoI agree, although fuel surcharge is totally expected and common in logistics land. Consumers ... going to have to learn something new.
- CSSer 2y agoOn a podcast I listened to yesterday (Marketplace, from American Public Media), they mentioned that many businesses seem to be approaching this with an "We're in this together" type of attitude. They played some audio clips of business owners on their social media channels saying things like, "Don't worry [company name] is going to do absolutely everything to fight this. We'll do everything we can to avoid raising prices on you!" The reality, of course, which they reveal when interviewed, is that they know they're completely powerless. In the best case, all they can do is delay the inevitable and they know it. This approach exists purely to keep themselves from being made into the enemy. As you noted, some business owners admitted to considering if they should just shutter their business too.
- advisedwang 2y agoA company can do that on a few SKUs, but not their entire catalog. Pausing your entire revenue stream for more than a very short period means laying off staff, breaking leases, ending dividends (if you give them), taking a stock price hit (if you are public) etc. It's potentially a fatal move. Better to lose some customers than fold completely.
- duxup 2y agoPart of what I'm referencing is that you don't know how much "lose some customers" even is. And if you buy stock and pay the tariffs, you might have stock that almost nobody wants...