The Trump Tariffs
I had been covering the ongoing saga of the Trump Tariffs going as far back as the end of last summer. Since I closed down Redpants USA and created a whole new website, I thought it’d be a good idea to recap what had happened and the ongoing mess. I’m also going to keep this very short - at least as short as I can given my propensity for rambling.
The Trump Administration implemented tariffs on imports from a bunch of countries, some of which were incredibly high. Shortly after, they ended the de minimis exemptions for low—value shipments. The de minimis exemptions basically allowed any shipment to the US valued at less than $800 to quickly and easily pass through US Customs without any import duties, taxes, or additional fees. By canceling those exemptions, virtually all shipments to the US are now subject to the Trump Tariffs. To complicate things, the policies for the tariffs was so poorly implemented that they caused a ton of issues.
Many postal services didn’t have anything in place to process shipments according to the new requirements, so they simply stopped shipping to the US. The policies are so badly written that even major carriers like UPS are having difficulty processing them and, in UPS’s case simply decided to not bother at all… and instead just started throwing shipments away instead of delivering or returning them.
Not only are the major carriers usually more expensive than postal services, but they also charge additional fees for processing shipments going through US Customs, which get added to import duties (and exacerbated by the tariffs). As if that wasn’t bad enough, those poorly-implemented policies aren’t even being enforced in any standard or uniform way. For example, I sent two shipments to the US at the same time, with the same contents, and the same paperwork. The only difference between them was the recipient. One was charged 50% more for import duties than the other, because the tariffs aren’t being processed consistently.
I’ve had customers complain about the tariffs (rightly so) and some even blame me for it (even though it’s completely outside my control). Trust me when I say I’m more upset about the tariffs than you are - they are, after all, one of the primary factors for me having to close down Redpants LLC. I lost my decade-old business because the tariffs caused so many problems and basically made the business unsustainable. Meanwhile, shipping carriers are rolling in the dough from all the extra fees they get to charge since postal services aren’t competing with them anymore.
But hey, the tariffs have made the US Government so much money that they supposedly can give people an additional $2000 in tax returns.
Keep in mind that although much of what I sell is kept in stock in Japan or ships from my partners in Canada, Poland, and elsewhere (and therefore is subject to the Trump Tariffs), some comes from within the US (brake pads and engine oils, for example) so there aren’t any import duties or tariffs - they’re domestic shipments so those don’t apply.
I do everything I legally can to minimize the effect of the tariffs on my US customers, but there’s no way to avoid them completely. I know from lots of actual experience that they aren’t being consistently enforced or applied, so I can’t include them in my shipping costs. Let’s all just hope that all this nonsense comes to an end soon, either through a system that actually makes sense and functions as intended, or by going back to how things used to be.