TL;DR I didn’t make it in time. Fuck you Trump!
Edit: For those asking, this was https://www.irvwpc.com/ Please support them if you can.
All the business owners voted trump and now they’re crying about free trade 😂
Trump is a Russian asset. America will fall within a year. Russia and China will expand their territories freely until Europe is ready to arm itself.
I bought a bunch of electronics from China back in December. No regrets.
…so you ordered this in July when he announced the tariffs?
Hold off. Kraznov is getting so much shit he is going to walk it back, so he says. Can’t trust him any more than a rabid bat though.
I cant wait until the European/Mexican/Chinese parts that I order from the USA that always arrive with a customs declaration of Origin:USA … starts biting me in the ass because of their ignorance and Canadian Customs tries to hit me with Tariffs that shouldnt apply.
the better option is to just stop doing business with American shops. and thats what I’ve chosen, the USPS and Canadian Postal service are both such shitholes, that I have legitimatley recieved stuff from the UK, Poland and Denmark faster than I’ve recieved stuff fom Illinois and Iowa , in the orders I’ve made this year. For small things too.
Any time an eligible item crosses the US / Canada border, a 25% tariff is applied. This is how the US does it, so this is what the Canadian government is copying.
This is terrible for auto manufacturing, where various parts cross the border multiple times between raw materials, loose parts, assembled parts and assembled vehicle. Every time those parts or materials cross either border, it gets tariffed 25%.
I believe if your item comes from the US, lands in another country, gets re-labeled and then enters Canada, it won’t be tariffed, but don’t quote me on that.
How do they define “an item”, because couldn’t a bunch of people get together and order stuff from outside the US and then just have it all delivered in one big box? Are they going to open every box to make sure that there’s only one item in it, how do they know it’s not just one big item?
For example if I order one washing machine then that’s one item but if I order various parts for a washing machine then that’s lots of items, but technically the washing machine already contained those parts that were considered one item
The tax is on the value , if you declare your washing machine has value of 1$ then the tax would be labelled accordingly but that would be a fraud.
Hence if you order parts of the washing machines you would have to declare value of the individual part and it would be taxed accordingly.
I believe it has to be declared on the packing manifest, but it relies on the expeditor being truthful. That’s my understanding of it.
I don’t think it’s about the place of manufacture, but rather the place of origin. A lot of items are manufactured all over the place.
It is inane that one of the options is “just hold on for a few days and see what happens” and that it is a viable option at all. Government is in shambles.
There’s only one thing businesses hate more than tariffs and that’s uncertainty. They would be happier with the tariffs being definite, than this maybe existing and maybe not existing on a almost daily basis.
Because even if he gets rid of the tariffs, he’ll try this again in a few weeks once he’s forgotten about all of the push back and has randomly decided that Canada is still shipping drugs into the US. Because fentanyl can’t be made in the US, everyone knows that.
He’s stupid but not that stupid. He doesn’t even care where any drug originated from. He surely slotted “hot-button drug name” into place and blamed Canada because he wants to put pressure on them.
One of the few things in his entire life Donald has learned and been able to apply is the US Republican playbook for blame-throwing.
This is 100% because of Trump’s flip flop ways. Fuck this guy and his MAGA cult.
#trumptarrifs
C’mon, it writes itself.
Edit: OK, #trumptariffs. Don’t try to drink and spell kids.
From the covfefe guy I wouldn’t be surprised if he misspelled himself.
#TrumpTardifs
Naw…
#TardisTrump
Send him back to the 40’s where he belongs. Preferably to the front lines of Leningrad in 1941. Let’s see how much he likes Russians and fascists then…
#TrumpTardigrades
They will finally inherit the earth once humanity and 3/4 of animals burn away.
#trumpiffs
It writes itself? Is that why it has a spelling error?
Props to whoever this company is. This is one of the best bits of customer service I’ve seen in years.
This should be the standard lol. Who you dealing with, the mafia?
I mean technically it’s not the company’s responsibility. If you’ve ordered something and they’ve sent it in a reasonable time frame and it just gets charged extra on entry. It’s not the company putting the price up, it’s your own government, so you don’t really have a recourse.
Solid boundaries, clearly communicated. Giving the customer a choice without hurting their own bottom line. I agree. Excellent handling of the situation.
I may don’t know how the law works but I believe (at least in my country) if you agree on the conditions you can’t pull a Darth Vader and alter the conditions after signing/ordering and paying.
Now if there is a clause that states otherwise this may change.
But I agree, at least they are open and upfront with it.
Doesn’t matter on their end. If they wanted to they could ship it and let it get held up by customs with a demand to pay the tariff to release it.
They are not changing anything. They are warning the customer import charges wil incur if the purchase proceeds. They gain nothing and stand to lose a sale.
Import duties are not always part of the agreement.
They didn’t change the rules, there is now a charge by the government on it getting delivered, not by the company.
I would change “not always” to “practically never”. Every e-commerce site I have ever used warns you that you are responsible for import duties if shipped internationally.
The doctrine is called force majeure. Most contracts have a force majeure clause.
If an external factor makes a contract impossible as agreed, the contract can be made void under force majeure. This is very common, and suddenly applied tariffs would likely be covered by a force majeure clause because neither party were responsible for them.
Good thing there isn’t hundreds is miles of unprotected border to snuggle across.
Hmmm… sounds like I need to be spending more time at the border. Question: do we get to choose who we snuggle with or is it like a first come first served situation
I hate to sound like I’m attacking OP, but unprotected border snuggles are a risky behavior. Please consider having protected border snuggles instead. It feels the exact same, I promise.
I will finally get to snuggle with my girlfriend in Canada!
You get to pick, but of course it needs to be consensual. But Canadians are very friendly and free with their hugs.
That’s a lot of snuggling
Its a little bit of sexy snuggling that could happen anywhere and any time!
Quite a bit. With increasing prices in the US, lots of people sneak up north with snuggling in mind. You do need to be careful at the official border crossings though. Snuggling is generally frowned upon.
Question: what would happen if lots of people swarmed right next to the border without actually crossing?
We’d have to snuggle with our fellow Americans. That would be weird.
Hmmm… sounds like I need to be spending more time at the border. Question: do we get to choose who we snuggle with or is it like a first come first served situation
Honestly; I’m impressed they both messaged you and gave you options.
Usually you wouldn’t find out until the mailman is demanding payment for the package he’s holding hostage in front of you.
Right?? My first thought was, damn. That’s some good customer service 🤯
Is the USPS even equipped to collect customs fees? As USian I’ve never paid an import fee as an end consumer ever in my entire life. All of this is so stupid.
The CBP collect import taxes. You never had to pay it because there was a longstanding rule called “De Minimis” which exempted all items under $800 from import taxes. the 2nd trump administration overturned the De Minimis rule (does not require congress AFIAK).
Usually, if you buy from a US reseller, you don’t pay it directly, but if you order directly from outside of the country, it goes through customs and you’ll have to pay it.
You never had to pay it because there was a longstanding rule called “De Minimis” which exempted all items under $800 from import taxes.
I can understand why they’d want to get rid of this… It was very generous and often meant that buying goods from an overseas supplier was cheaper than buying the exact same items from a US-based supplier. For example, I’ve bought MikroTik hardware from a Latvian supplier (Getic) because it ended up noticeably cheaper than buying from a US store, even after shipping.
Most countries have duty-free thresholds that are much lower, around the equivalent of $50-100 before taxes and duties are applied. The US limit used to be $200 until 2016.
In Germany the threshold is around 200 Euro, more precisely up to an import VAT of 10 Euros, where the state can’t even be bothered with the paperwork. 150 for import duties, though that doesn’t apply to alcohol, tobacco and perfume, unless everything is under 45 Euros and both sender and recipient are natural persons and no money has been exchanged.
You don’t want to completely abolish thresholds as you don’t want to spend more money on collecting taxes and duties than you collect. The general strategy of the financial police seems to be to make paying duties as inconvenient for private citizens as possible, they’ll hold back the parcel and you have to go to them, probably a couple of towns over, and fetch it in person. The smart thing to do when buying from alibaba or such is to choose shipping from a EU warehouse as then all the import stuff has been dealt with by the seller.
We still do have duties within the single market, btw, because different taxes on alcohol, tobacco, etc. Relevant mostly for ølvikingar.
protectionism doesn’t work tho
I agree, and don’t think there should be any tariffs.
Having said that, a US store that has to pay sales tax is never going to win over a foreign store that doesn’t have to pay sales tax. Even after shipping, the exact same product will likely be cheaper to buy from the European store.
If you buy something from Europe under the de minimis exception, there’s no tax applied at all. European countries/companies usually don’t tax buyers from outside the EU, and the US doesn’t tax it either.
Applying the same tax for both US and international purchases makes sense IMO. This is what Australia does: The sales tax rate is 10% across the whole country, and foreign stores that sell to Australians have to collect 10% tax and send it to the Australian government. Collecting taxes at the point of payment, even for foreign stores, avoids customers having to pay taxes separately when the package arrives in the country.
This is probably why the EU itself recently changed the rules and VAT (the EU’s version of Sales Tax) is payable on all purchases from outside the EU, no matter how small the value, but import tax remains only payable on purchases above €150.
They also set up a system so that non-EU retail sellers can collect VAT directly on payment - just like EU ones do - so for example a buyer from the EU buying stuff via AliExpress will have the VAT added to the price during checkout.
They also set up a system so that non-EU retail sellers can collect VAT directly on payment
That’s what Australia does too. Since the sellers already had their systems set up to handle it for Australia, it was probably easy for them to extend it to be used for the EU too.
I was surprised too! I guess Canadians hold up to their reputation 🙂👍
Yeah, Canadians are good people. I like them a lot.
Canada has all sorts of people, like every other country. Canadian mining companies are awful in Mexico, negotiating draconian concessions from corrupt governments, which allows them to extract minerals very cheap while ignoring environmental laws.
I understand that corrupt politicians are to blame, but Canadian businessmen can be surprisingly impolite and exploitative.
Canada as a nation has a concept of common good.
America is obsessed with the idea of not helping the poor because if they’re not incentivized to “bootstrap,” they’ll get lazy.
Americans die of not having access to drugs that are developed In America and subsidized by American tax dollars.
I think we all know which is more ethical.
AtkinsRéalis (known as SNC-Lavalin at the time) is a Canadian construction company that was at the centre of a huge scandal in Canada. They were caught bribing the son of Libian dictator Gaddafi to get a contract to build a prison, allegedly for political prisoners.
While the Justice Minister was having this company prosecuted, the Prime Minister (Justin Trudeau) demanded that she give AtkinsRéalis a slap on the wrist and a deferred prosecution agreement. When she refused, she was driven from her position.
Canada’s government has a history of propping up bad actors like this, and goes out of their way to support several oligopolies that run significant chunks of the Canadian market. Bell/Rogers/Telus own most of Canada’s mobile and internet offerings, Loblaws/Sobeys/Metro own most of Canada’s grocery stores, much of Canada’s produce and meat are controlled by cartels, etc… The maple syrup cartel is very powerful and wealthy and yes you’re reading that right, there is a maple syrup cartel and even a maple syrup black market.
One special mention goes out to the Canadian Real Estate industry, which is full of actual crooks all over the place and just disgusting. Did you know in Canada it is legal for a real estate agent to represent both sides of a purchase? Agents also will refuse to work with any of the bargain agencies that charge less than the standard 2.5% commission, basically locking them out of the industry. This crap is part of why housing prices have bubbled so hard, and together with price fixing by landlords they have managed to keep Canadian housing prices at levels so stupid homelessness has increased several times over.
Canadian people are often too fixated on not being seen to be a problem, what some call “politeness”, to the point they won’t even stand up for themselves. That unwillingness to protest or try to change things has allowed this to happen for a very long time. Because of this awful “politeness” many Canadians are even cheering on new laws limiting union action.
tl;dr Canada is a banana republic and Canadians are cucked
I heard of how nice Canadians are, but where I live, all the Canadians I met so far are a bit of douche. Maybe it is just coincidence on my part, or the nice ones stay in their country.
Or if everyone around you is an asshole then …
florida is in a world of hurt once canadians completely stop going the state. we know they also grow citruses and houseplants, but it probably isnt enough for the state.
Tariffs? Oh right, import taxes. Fuck Trump.
And most of the media went right along with wording such as “tariffs on China” rather than than “tariffs on US buyers”
MSMs are totally complicit because the owners of these msms are trump supporters. CNNs and the others are just fox-lite.
“media” is already plural btw
They should just call them import or sales taxes, the average person doesn’t get tariffs.
Ew…I don’t even want to know what cheeto based sexual diseases you’d get from fucking trump…
You might come down with a severe case of Eric.
I worry it’s a lot, and many different varieties. They may be thunder-doming in his body as we speak, with only the injections from the pre-teen blood banks he has trapped in the basement keeping everything at bay.
Fun fact: he’s powered by syphilis - keeps him crazy but it keeps him going.
drug induced dementia, and incontinence.
Hey, at least the company seems decent and understanding. I just hope stuff getting more expensive will change the minds of some Trump supporters that aren’t completely braindead yet.
the minds of some Trump supporters that aren’t completely braindead yet
I’m not sure they’ll change their minds, but just discourage them from ever voting a republican again and that’s good enough. They can sit at home on election day and let us save the country. (hopefully elections still exist)
Both of them?
After the November election we bought a fridge early we were mildly interested in that is manufactured in Mexico. It seemed conspiratorial to consider possible tariffs in the purchase equation considering decades of free trade with NAFTA and later USMCA.
Yet here we are and we’re very glad we bought the multi-thousand dollar fridge pre-trump-tarrifs.
In November, the boyfriend and I went ahead and pulled the trigger on replacing both of our aging laptops (even though it was a bit earlier than I’d like- I just play a lot of Stardew Valley, I don’t really need anything fancy).
Thank goodness for that. I’m sad other people won’t have been as fortunate.
Yeah, my car shit the bed right before the election and I had to get a new one.
Looking back, I’m glad I got it when I did. It was manufactured in Mexico, like most cars in America. If my old car had lasted 6 more months, I might have ended up paying 25% more for what I’m driving now.
Our fridge is 12 years old and we’re just hoping it keeps chugging on 🥲 Four more years!
“Additionally, the $800 exemption for low-value goods has been removed.”
I didn’t even know such a thing existed, it’s not something reported on the news.
So every product will be hit with the tariff raising prices, and not just expensive products getting the tariffs. Yikes!
This is what allowed Temu and Alibaba and Wish and the like to happen (their business model was to send every single product as a single package worth under 800$, leading to enormous shipping times and waste etc., but they don’t have to pay import taxes).
enormous shipping times
This definitely improved over time. I don’t order much from Aliexpress, but the last two items I ordered arrived in just over a week - a similar time frame as ordering from a US store that doesn’t do fast shipping. A few days in China, then on a plane, then a few days in the USA.
I’ve seen a similar thing happen overtime for Aliexpress shipping to Europe - it used to take 2 months to were I am (Portugal), now it takes a bit over a week.
I think they set-up some kind of consolidated shipping operation so that the sellers on their site can ship things via Aliexpress’ own system, which is way faster (and invariably involves air-shipping via The Netherlands) and often is listed as Free Shipping.
I’ve bought once or twice from sellers there that don’t use it and those packages still take 2 months to get here.
I mention this because it makes sense that Aliexpress has set up a similar system for the US given that it’s a market which is almost as big as the EU.
They also have warehouses in the EU which means that as a customer you don’t have to deal with duties and import VAT at all.
damn!
And it’s not even this government’s first big unambiguous fuck you to the common people.
Why does this article describe it as a “loophole”? It’s not a loophole; it was intentionally written into law.
