Nintendo: you know what? Fuck you. Our prices just went up for you. Games are $120 now. Fuck you, you'll still buy our pokemon slop we spent 0 effort making. Mario? Yep, $120, but now when he jumps he says "fucka youuuu!" You'll still buy it, because Mario.
What is the logic behind giving a company money for the tariffs? The costs were invariably passed to the consumer, so how does paying the company make any sense?
The logic was “these companies ate the cost” and when confronted with the fact that prices went up and the costs had been passed on to consumers, the clarification they provided was “nuh uh”.
and when confronted with the fact that prices went up and the costs had been passed on to consumers, the clarification they provided was “nuh uh”.
the argument is, when a price goes up, there will be fewer sales and therefore less revenue/profit
Which makes me want to say things that would get me banned for multiple reasons.
You have now been banned from Lemmy.World
MFW a zionist bans me, then my entire instance without a vote, then unbans the instance, then censors everyone who complains, then mods me, then unmods me, then bans me again, then unbans me, VIP, ban, unban, ban.
This is America. You’re not a person unless you’re a corporation.
It didn't take long to go from "corporations are people" to "the only people that matter are corporations"
Is it expensive to file corporate taxes in the US? It really sounds like if everyone represented themselves as a corporation they would have more rights.
If you're looking for a new rabbit hole to explore...theres an entire crowd of people who firmly believe that the government creates a corporate version of you when you're born, and that your name in CAPS on the birth certificate is evidence of this.
There's also endless content of them confidently presenting these arguments to judges when they've broken laws and being immediately shut down by said judges.
The whole thing is a scam by Big Driver-Side-Front-Window to boost their sales.
the birth certificate
Berth certificate, making us all boats and therefore subject to maritime law.
It sounds like a stupid joke because it is but also one of their things.
What is the logic behind giving a company money for the tariffs?
Well, the logic is the fact that the tariffs were illegal.
The honourable thing to do would be to pay that money back to the customers, but that would make the shareholders sad and grumpy, so it's never going to happen.
Because the companies are the ones that literally paid the tariffs and the gov doesn't have records of how that burden was distributed, and thus couldn't possibly enforce it.
In short, they're completely unprepared for this situation they put themselves in.
Because the company handled all the nonsense of importing on behalf of the end customer (also most intermediaries).
The youtube channel HowNot2 talked about this a bit since they somehow became a(n actually really good) climbing gear store. Because tariffs were changing so frequently (often multiple times a day), basically nobody could plan for them. So companies had to balance their in-country stock with anything they were going to buy in the next few months... or even days. And try to figure out what price they might be paying.
Some companies basically just charged the tariff rate on any given day... which is bullshit since they would have bulk purchased whatever they could while they were "low". Others would eat the cost because they didn't want to lose customers by increasing the price of a preordered item. And so forth.
And... people who got their aliexpress on can tell horror stories of getting a bill once things made it through customs.
So... it actually makes perfect sense for the companies that dealt with this bullshit to get reimbursed by the christofacists. I would hope they would "pass it on" to the customers as an act of good faith (even if it is just a free game or something) but... this is a case where the problem isn't the corporations: it is the government.
The companies paid the tarrif, they get the refund.
The fact that tariffs allowed some companies to demand more money, is related but not causal, some companies will have had to eat shit because the market wouldn't bare the increase.
I'd love for the lawsuit to succeed and it set the precedent that when governments issue refunds they can force companies to pass it on to the customer, but I think it's unlikely.
It's also complicated by the way pricing works.
If the tarrif is for $15 but the uncertainty allowed a company to increase prices by $20, how much should the customer be refunded?
And what if the tarrif was $15 but the market only allowed a $10 increase and the company ate shit on the other $5?
Now what if none of these numbers are set in stone and all of the numbers are guesswork? Should the government audit all companies that changed their prices?
They should not be allowed to price based on "uncertainty" - if the tariff increases by 15, the buyer should pay that much and no more. So, anyone who bought at the increased 20 dollar price should receive 5 back.
Of course they'll never do this.
All pricing under capitalism is based on uncertainty.
What the market will bare isn't a known thing.
Side-note: this is why YIMBYs are dumb as fuck when they apply econ101 to rents.
Also what happens when the companies are forced to eat part of the tarrif, if the tarrif is 15, but that pushes the prices above the maximum profit point (units sold * per unit profit) then how much tarrif back should the customer get?
Fuck that. They should push back against the government.
They did and they got the tarrifs refunded.
The issue is that with markets nothing is tightly coupled.
How do you prove a customer paid for a product and that this product paid a tarriff
Not that difficult, actually. The company pays a tariff on the specific product being imported, which would have been recorded. Customers who then buy those products should receive itemized receipts, either physically from a store or electronically via email when buying online. The receipt should also indicate a payment method that can likely be matched to a bank statement if needed.
Match the itemized receipt to the tariffs paid, there you go.
The harder part is directly linking the tariffs paid to the price the consumer paid. The tariffs were inconsistent and changed a few times, and we don't know if all price increases were caused directly by tariffs or if there were other factors as well. Moreover, some companies ate the cost in some cases, notably Nintendo, who chose not to increase the original pre-tariff price of the Switch 2, but did for Switch 1 and accessories for both systems. Nintendo will likely be refunded for all of those, but not all of that was a cost passed on to the consumer, so it's hard to figure out at that specific a level.
This lawsuit is definitely going nowhere, at any rate, so this is basically all just idle musing.
How do you verify if the receipt is real?
If your company isn't keeping track of receipts for goods sold, the IRS is going to have an absolute field day with you about time they decide to audit the company.
Okay so the U.S. government should have to interact with however many private companies with their own standard for storing data, and then handle contacting the consumer and figuring out how to get the refund?
The whole thing is bad. Having to give refunds directly to consumers is near impossible to implement in any reasonable way.
Edit: the biggest hurdle is by far scammers. The U.S. government has historically been terrible at sussing them out. No way anyone'll find a pile of receipts. Noooooo shot that could be a problem.
Matching payment method/date/cardholder name to bank statements. You can prove that you paid X amount of money to Y company on Z date, and the matching itemized receipt received from that company indicating that you bought A, B, and C products that may have been tariffed.
Harder to prove if you paid with cash or gift card. Doable, but probably more trouble than it's worth to effectively collect pocket change after lawyer fees take their cut from the class action settlement.
Friendly reminder that the Boston Tea Party was about tariffs. We know what works.
I would eat the cost of gas to watch people tweeting their Switch 2’s into the harbor. Boston or Baltimore this time around?
Imagine what gon' happen when you try to tax our whisky.
A rebellion? Because that didn't end so well.
And the players should win this case. It’s pretty obviously true that Nintendo would be recovering tariff money twice.
Nintendo:
Here is the thing. If they win, it's great for them. However, all the other companies are currently updating their legal documents to reflect that they will get any forms of reimbursement and not be passing them on to the consumer. Not only that, but they are not planning on reducing the price of any of the products. So, even if the tariffs dissappear, they still win.
The only way to win the game is to not play it.
Heh. Yeah right. They passed that tariff cost on to you but no way will they pass the refund on.
We should do a blanket class action lawsuit against all corporations throughout history, demanding all the wages they owe, refunds for the prices they gouged, and the artificially created inflation.
Or they could settle by paying for worldwide universal healthcare and UBI.
Nah. Seize the means, comrade.
Fuck settling. Every time we’ve settled with the capitalists they just claw everything back 10 years later. We need to permanently make them extinct.
We won't see a cent of the money stolen from us by Donald Trump and his gang of pedophiles.
My company lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in tarrifs. We passed those on to the customer since we couldn't take a 50% hike on costs.
We have no way to refund money we don't have.
How did your company lose hundreds of thousands if they passed them onto the customer? If you made the customer pay, your company has the money and can pass on the money you get from the government to your consumers
We've sold maybe a 10th of what we sold pre-tariffs. W have probably lost closer to million in sales due to the tariffs. Customer's aren't buying parts for preventative maintenance, they only purchase when it's an emergency and they are losing tens of thousands of dollars an hour in production. US manufacturing is in trouble.
You don't sell the same amount of product when you have to increase the price. You may need to shrink your business to not get the remaining margin getting eaten up by operational costs.
Honestly, everyone needs to just cut the loss and move on. At least on the monetary front. Trump should see repercussions for enacting an illegal tax.
Nintendo stands to recover the same tariff payments twice—once from consumers through higher prices and again from the federal government through tariff refunds
Uh...those are the same funds? They didn't just pocket the tariff fees, they had to pay them in order to get a refund.
Right, that's +2 and -2, so even. The customer is -1, and that's it.
Maybe in a just society the business that actually ate the costs and didn't pass them along could get a refund but not the rest? Idk what a mess, that has problems galore too
I mean, Nintendo probably does benefit, but I can't see how there's a case here.
The government does have an obligation not to impose illegal tariffs on importers.
Nintendo doesn't have a legal obligation not to raise prices. They, as with pretty much any vendor, can charge whatever they want. You can't win a court case unless they did something illegal.
What limits them from doing that is that they'll lose sales, especially if competitors don't.
Companies could have gambled on the tariffs being overturned in court (as they were) and eating the losses with the hopes of recovering them later. That's a risk, but some companies did do that. They benefited from gaining sales from their competitors. Nintendo didn't take that route; they probably lost sales, but they also avoided the issue of taking losses on a per-sale basis.
EDIT: Well...okay, if you could show that Nintendo tried to get the tariffs imposed and then overturned as some sort of intentional mechanism to cause many vendors to increase prices without incurring actual costs to themselves
which I am confident that they didn't do, but using it as a hypothetical
you could maybe make some kind of antitrust case on price-fixing. But it doesn't sound like that's what the lawsuit is claiming, and in any event, what would be illegal there wouldn't be collecting the refunds.
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