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Has anyone else run up against higher costs due to the US tariffs?
I'm curious to hear stories. Aside from generally higher prices, I've been mostly ok. But yesterday I was going to order a t-shirt to support a game developer, and was surprised to see the total doubled at checkout. I thought it might be shipping at first since it was an international order, but upon closer inspection I saw the tariff charge adding a whopping $30 to my $30 t-shirt order
For machine parts and "raw" materials I've seen the steel/alum prices increase by about 25-30% compared to last year, and that's after they were gradually lowering from their spike in early Covid.
And most of the band merch I would have bought in the last three months has disappeared as they no longer ship to the US.
Same on the merch, Bandcamp must really be hurting right now, to say nothing of the tiny overseas bands who would have otherwise gotten $30-60 from me.
Absolutely.
My primary income is repair / refurbishment of lab electronics for resale on my eBay store / FB marketplace / Craigslist. This means I need to source parts. Sometimes it's from DigiKey, sometimes Mouser or RS, sometimes AliExpress or eBay. All costs associated with buying parts (and nearly ALL of these parts are made outside the US, most often China, unless they're vintage parts from the 1980's Hewlett Packard era) have gone up anywhere from 20% to sometimes double, with I think an average somewhere around the 35% mark in terms of stuff I've personally needed to source.
Materials too. Nickel strip for battery welding, wire crimp kits, metric bolt kits, heatsink pads and compound, solder mask and flux, copper wick, etc...
Back when the first round of Tariffs were looming I stocked up as much as I could afford, but I could only cover the common stuff I knew I would need, there was no way to anticipate what SMD components I'd need in the future for individual repairs and refurbs.
Yes, specifically with my primary hobbies of car stuff.
Ordered a stereo earlier this year, $100 tariff, which I did not pay (I purchased it with the understanding that it was in the US, they did message to say they were out of US stock and would ship it from overseas, then was held by DHL until somebody paid the tariff and I refused to do so, so seller paid to stop the payment dispute as I bought something that said it was in the US). That was back in May.
New steel for blacksmithing doesn't have a tariff line item that I've seen, but prices are easily up 20%+.
Seeing reports of others in the hobby with even greater issues:
$1,000 set of Japanese camshafts for a Japanese car in the US - $900 tariff
Guy that repairs vintage clusters, not even an actual product, just a service he provides - $200 tariff for something shipped to him to repair and send back
Now I have seen reports of UPS having an issue converting Yen to USD and causing incorrect tariff calculations and needing to call their customer service to explain what a foreign currency is as a 90% tariff isn't correct obviously. UPS is also rubbing salt in the wound by adding an "admin fee" to their tariff collection process. Don't know if others are doing so, don't believe DHL is at the moment.
I am not looking forward to buying wheels for my race car.
Just a note, the item you sent out for repair should only have been tariffed if it was a foreign-made product in the first place. US-made goods that are repaired abroad should generally be exempt from tariffs when returning as long as they weren't upgraded or advanced in value in some way. Foreign-made goods that are sent abroad for repair should only be tariffed on the value of the repair charge, not the whole cost of the item itself.
Wasn't me, but someone on the same car forums as I. Japanese made cluster for a vintage Japanese car, sent to the US from Canada for repair.
Not saying it's the correct tariff, or that there should be a tariff at all, just saying that even the shipping services don't know what the hell they're doing, how to charge the tariffs, and you can bet that they won't be refunding anyone for charging them incorrectly.
Just out of interest, what do you race?
I forgot to mention this in the post, but I've also been locked out of at least one kickstarter due to tariffs:
JetKVM has paused shipping to the US
Interestingly, those guys shone a light on why I was having a nightmare of a time getting my hands on certain components outside the US earlier this year.
Availability absolutely dried up for a bunch of things I needed, for a good couple of months, and most manufacturers went radio silent at the same time. JetKVM were at least transparent that they’d shuffled US orders ahead of others in the queue to get as many into the country as they could before the deadline, and that meant additional delays for the rest of us.
In retrospect, it turns out that a whole lot of companies supplying a whole lot of products emptied every warehouse they had into shipping containers and got them into the US by any means necessary before the tariffs kicked in, completely drying up the supply chains for everyone else.
Aww, now I want one.
I haven’t encountered the “tariff” line item on any online purchases, but I am sure that I’m paying for them in the list price. Everything is definitely more expensive than it was before, but I can’t pinpoint any specific items that are more expensive. I notice at checkout when my average cart is more expensive than it used to be.
Tariffs are probably not being folded into the base item price, because that then increases the amount of the tariff itself, which then means you need to increase the price further to cover the higher tariff, and so on. It's more likely being folded into the shipping, or added as a surcharge.
I recently worked with a business to increase prices after the de minimis exemption was lifted. We briefly tried putting tariffs in as a line item, but quickly found it upset customers who either felt they were being robbed, or believed it was some kind of conspiracy and that "the other country should pay for it". So we moved it into the shipping price instead and it's been smoother ever since.
I wouldn't be surprised if other businesses have come to the same conclusion. I would expect shipping costs to be considerably higher when crossing the border now.
How would this work on a site like Amazon where it may be common that they do 'free' shipping and they also said they weren't going to separate out the tariff cost?
I'd personally prefer to shop somewhere that lists the tariff as a line item if they still had comparable end result pricing to other places that are not putting the line item in, but I'm not sure if any such retailers exist.
Amazon requires (or at least used to, my knowledge is from talking to a business owner over a decade ago) products listed on their site to be stored in their warehouses. So presumably they've already imported the thing and paid the tariff for the MSRP, and now that markup gets folded into the list price.
It's why a lot of the time if you look at an item on Amazon and on the manufacturer's site, the Amazon price tends to be the price on the manufacturer's site plus shipping.
I just overhauled my bike, the majority of which focused on Shimano components. I'd say costs were 10-20% higher. Overall cost in parts was around $300 which would have been maybe $250 last year. Some of the packages even came with old prices on them.
There are also a few specialty parts from the UK I was planning to buy in June, but now will be picking up in person in a few weeks.
Ok, weighing back in because I tried to buy a new swimming wetsuit tonight and am so freaking frustrated. Prices have fucking DOUBLED! What could be a fairly reasonable purchase has become a luxury good. Sellers from England and the EU are now no longer selling "sale" goods because the tariffs make them too expensive to make sense.
I bought a decent wetsuit last year on labor day - sales are at the end of summer for swimming wetsuits - for $250, 50% off it's $500 price tag. The same wetsuit this year is $1000, with no option of sales for last years model. WTF. Niche products from other countries are absolutely fucked.
I haven't been meet with anything in particular except one thing: after the de minimus change, the online shop in Britain where I ordered my tea from no longer ships to the US! It's a bummer, but I don't buy tea that much either. Otherwise I don't order much online so I haven't seen direct changes in price.
I don't usually back Kickstarter board games, but I managed to find a few that looked interesting and back them at just the right time that they had to come back and ask for extra shipping charges due to tariffs.
I ordered something from India a few days after the 50% tariff on all goods went into effect. I forgot about that when I ordered, and after I remembered I figured that FedEx would contact me to collect the tariff before delivering the package, but the FedEx guy handed it to me this afternoon. I didn’t mind not having to pay an extra 40 bucks, but it sure would be nice to know what the hell is going on.
I build and fly FPV drones as a hobby. The entire hobby has been shaken to the ground because of tarrifs, since virtually all of the parts are Chinese. Especially bad as well is the looming ban on DJI imports. DJI is by far the largest and most sophisticated manufacturers of commercial and photography drones, and the video system they manufacture, the DJI O4 is by far the most sophisticated one that was basically the gold standard for FPV video. They've completely pulled out of the US market due to tarrifs and the looming ban, so people in the US have had to use other alternatives.
I order a lot of stuff off of AliExpress and it's just a roll of the dice how much things will cost at this point. It makes it impossible to budget for anything.
Militarily, that's kind of bad - imagine if all AR-15s were Chinese. Except there's not much point building Western drone factories right now, since the moment the Ukraine war ends, you know Ukraine will retool their military drone factories for selling on the civilian market, and prices will absolutely flatline.
But, why would Ukraine wait? They have the drone factories running now, so why wouldn't they cash in on their drone expertise to get some money flowing through their domestic economy? Presumably either 1) they don't have any spare capacity and 100% of all output increase is going straight to the military, 2) it would be too onerous to switch from military to civilian context (e.g. civilians don't care about being resistant to jamming/electronic warfare but do care about the drone lasting a long time before it breaks (military drones tend to be shot down etc so lifetime is less important), or 3) they're concerned about accidentally leaking military secrets re: drone production, to Russia.
Unfortunately, Ukraine still cannot build drones completely domestically. The carbon fiber frames, the motors, and the plastic parts aren't too difficult to stand up. The flight controllers require chip fabs to create from scratch though, and Ukraine or even the US is just not set up to build those at scale.
Currently, it's also not economically viable for anyone but china to sell those other drone parts either. Ukraine can produce a carbon fiber frame, but they can't produce a carbon fiber frame that they can sell for 20 bucks and still make a profit. They don't have the combination of low wages, light regulations, and very automated, streamlined supply chains and manufacturing lines that china has. So they can produce that stuff for their military because their objective is just to get as much on the front lines as possible, but they can't actually set up an industry to sell the stuff just yet.
FPV drones use in warfare also aren't resistant to jamming, with the exception of fiber optic drones. They're pretty much completely identical to drones used by hobbyists, except 5" and smaller drones are more popular for hobbyists because of practicality, while FPV drones used for warfare are usually 7" and bigger because they need to carry payload. 7" and bigger drones are mostly used for long range flight by hobbyists though.
I don't know if this is specifically related to tariffs, but coffee seems to be up about 20% in the last 6 months.
I would also like to know how to discern if pricing is actually up because of tariffs, or if there are opportunists that can raise prices and then just blame them on tariffs.
There is an article and discussion about rising coffee prices in ~food
I’m into mechanical keyboards as a hobby, and I know a one-man Canadian business I’ve bought from in the past had to completely stop US shipments while Tariff things were being figured out (because at one point UPS/FedEx were charging an additional ~$50 fee on a ~$50 order as tariffs & brokerage fees, and the fees being very inconsistent between orders, and orders being returned etc).
I think he’s resumed shipping to the US as the shipping providers have figured things out and are providing a Delivery Duty Paid solution (after about a month of stopped US shipments), but that will be passing on the tariff directly to the consumer (which makes sense from his business perspective). I think it’s roughly a 25-35% increase, depending on switches vs keycaps due to material differences.
He’s been very transparent in a discord channel and on his website, which has provided an interesting view into the situation and all of the headaches it’s been causing.
Gamers Nexus did an in depth report on the Tariff impact featuring discussions with various computer providers a a few months ago. There was a similar level of transparency that I found really interesting.
Has anyone seen changes at the border in either direction? They did always check at the Canadian border coming back in, but it was mostly a quick glance in your trunk and your word unless something made the border people think you were sneaking in produce.
I got stopped and searched on the way back from Canada a couple of weeks ago because I said that I did not have anything to declare and they mentioned the bag of snacks my kids were eating in their seats, so I think they are really upping the searches.
Tropicana grapefruit juice is nearly $7CAD, which is criminal. It should be ~$4 tops.
There is other stuff, but I think about this the most.