Tracking toy tariffs

I'm a big proponent of free trade so no de minimis is too small, in my mind.

My assumption with these small import shops based in China is that they're either circumventing the process somehow, underinsuring their packages to only pay the minimal amount of duty charges, or have found enforcement to be so sporadic that they're just sending stuff in and seeing what happens. Their bottom-line has probably taken a hit, but maybe not as big of one as it's supposed to be.

Re: de minimis, I'm not well-informed. Is the point to allow regular people to import goods without paying an added tax? And then businesses can't skirt the tax unless they import relatively small shipments? If that's the case, $800 is fine by me. $500 or even $350 would be fine by me.

I'm pretty sure Democrats were largely in favor of lowering the de minimis threshold before Trump was reelected, but I may be mistaken. I'd be curious about the rationale behind the policy.

cmoney said:

Yup, tariffs are basically a regressive tax policy.

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The same reason they want to get rid of income tax and property tax in favor of sales tax. Let the little guy pay for it.

De minimis is to protect American interests in regards to production and sale. Since we produce very little, all it really does is make sure the middle man (i.e. US based retailers) can't be circumvented easily by going straight to the source. The actual cost to ship an item from halfway around the globe should be protection enough against that as retailers here can more easily absorb that cost. As we've all seen in this hobby, sometimes that isn't always the case and shipping can be pretty cheap.

Bottom line, someone dumb it down for dummies like me who aren't business savvy or understand this horseshit at all.

What are WE, the consumer, paying on import orders? What percentage, what amount? Give me an example if possible.

RicksNerdLife said:

Bottom line, someone dumb it down for dummies like me who aren't business savvy or understand this horseshit at all.

What are WE, the consumer, paying on import orders? What percentage, what amount? Give me an example if possible.

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You're not going to like it, but the answer is "we don't know." We would have to see a manifest from a company taking in product during all of this nonsense. We know the tariff rates (currently China is 30%), but most companies aren't passing the entire tariff onto consumers. They've been eating some of it, but that's going to vary from company to company and a lot of economists are predicting that they're going to start eating less of it. Most were hoping the tariffs would be abandoned or lowered so they absorbed more of it than maybe they normally would, but they're running out of patience.

The only hard examples out there are from companies charging a tariff fee. I bought a Mondo figure yesterday and was charged a tick over 9% in the form of a tariff fee.

Misfit said:

You're not going to like it, but the answer is "we don't know." We would have to see a manifest from a company taking in product during all of this nonsense. We know the tariff rates (currently China is 30%), but most companies aren't passing the entire tariff onto consumers. They've been eating some of it, but that's going to vary from company to company and a lot of economists are predicting that they're going to start eating less of it. Most were hoping the tariffs would be abandoned or lowered so they absorbed more of it than maybe they normally would, but they're running out of patience.

The only hard examples out there are from companies charging a tariff fee. I bought a Mondo figure yesterday and was charged a tick over 9% in the form of a tariff fee.

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Then add in the fact that more and more postal services from other countries are pausing shipping to the US and that leaves consumers and companies who normally use those channels stuck with couriers who will charge duties/taxes/brokerage fees and who knows what Americans could be paying for small items coming in from other countries.

With India now getting hit with 50% (in effect today) I think most companies are now going to have to face the reality that these tariffs aren't going away anytime soon. So they'll make the decision it is time to up prices to what they "should" be based on tariffs.

domu said:

The chaos is the point. The confusion is the point. People will be so relieved that they don't have to pay an $80 tax on their $50 purchase, that they will forget that they are still having to pay more than they did before. It's a tax increase on all of us to pay for tax cuts for the rich.(Not to mention that it drives more business to private shippers and further damages the USPS.)

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Say it louder.

It's really important that we understand the de minimus issue and tariffs generally, aren't the SAME issue. The de minimus change is part of the Republicans' LONG-running plan to destroy the postal service. They've just found a neat way to dovetail it in with all the tariff confusion to hide their intentions.

Probably a stupid question: Do we know if private shipping services like FedEx and DHL are subject to the same $80 fee?

TheSameIdiot said:

Probably a stupid question: Do we know if private shipping services like FedEx and DHL are subject to the same $80 fee?

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It's supposed to be on everything shipped to the US valued at under $800, so yes, every carrier is hypothetically affected.

But of course none of them can figure out how to declare package values and report that to American Customs right now so that's why they're all shutting down shipments to the US. The new tariff rate on Japan is currently sitting at 15% so that's hopefully all we end up paying for Mafex, Figuarts, or Amazing Yamaguchi once Customs gets their shit together, but who knows, it could also be that giant fee we've been hearing about. I doubt that happens, but none of us can rule it out until they figure out how to make Trump's orders actually work at the ports.

It's looking more and more every day like all of us 9-year old girls are going to have to settle for just two Japanese or Chinese dolls this Christmas instead of our usual 30.

I'm particularly worried about my Mafex pre-orders for September. It's looking like Rogue is just about to ship, and part of me wants to do a backup order at BBTS since it's looking like this nonsense is going to last a while. I'm even more worried about the Figuarts Cyclops in December...that figure looks too good to miss.

Every day I ask myself how this happened again.

TheSameIdiot said:

Every day I ask myself how this happened again.

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Fear-mongering people who are barely paying attention to unknowingly vote against their own interests.

This has been the pattern of politics throughout human history, and even most of the American founders were actively afraid of it hundreds of years ago. It wasn't true in America during most of our lives in the mid-to-late 20th century due almost entirely to the FCC's Fairness Doctrine:


Reagan got rid of that in 1987, and disinformation has steadily increased ever since it paved the way for biased news sources like Fox, MSNBC, or the worse versions of both.

I strongly believe an equivalent to the Doctrine can be revived although it would need to work quite differently in the digital era.

About Mafex Rogue, I placed an order at BBTS months ago and canceled my HLJ preorder. I thought everything was going well receiving packages from Japan, so I placed a another preorder with HLJ since I originally planned on buying two. Then this idiot pulls August 29th out of his and I threw up my hands and cancelled every preorder at HLJ.

It seems like FedEx and UPS are ready for this de minimis change. Not sure why DHL and Japan Post aren't.

All of the articles I'm reading also suggest that FedEx and UPS are mostly applying the new tariff percentages to smaller-value packages and not the $80 and up flat fee, so for most of us that's 15% from Japan. The only potential hiccup is that Japan had to negotiate to get their tariff down to 15%, but due to some unspecified lack of clarity about the negotiation the Japanese trade minister cancelled a trip to the US this week to discuss the details of the deal due to some issue he has with terms that he didn't think the Trump administration were able or willing to resolve. So that 15% rate isn't set yet. I need to look up what the full rate is since that's what most likely will be in effect for the next few weeks.

If it does end up being 15% it's still worth us ordering from Japanese retailers depending upon what fees FedEx, UPS, or the others end up tacking on. If it's mostly just the extra 15% then it's worth it, but if they inflate it much beyond that it might not be. We probably won't know until next week once people start shipping assuming the duties go into effect tomorrow.

Not all of the Japanese retailers even use FedEx, so we may not be able to order from the ones who only use shipping services who are canceling shipments to the US. Has anyone heard if EMS is going to keep shipping? I've used them the most over the last year or so, and most of the Japanese retailers seem to use them.

EnigmaticClarity said:

So that 15% rate isn't set yet. I need to look up what the full rate is since that's what most likely will be in effect for the next few weeks.

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What I'm finding is that the current rate is 25% until the deal to get it down to 15% is finalized. And as I mentioned negotiations are paused so who knows when it could go down to 15%.