hdsrob
There's no doubt that some super wealthy companies paid the tariff, raised prices, sold directly to consumers, and get the tariff back as pure profit.
But there's also a lot of layers and nuance that people are missing outside of those dozen or so companies.
Most retailers (especially small ones) don't import anything, and a lot of those tariffs were on raw materials (like steel or aluminum), or small parts that get imported by the container or ship load, and then broken up and sold through a dozen layers of wholesalers / resellers to eventually get to a machine shop or a manufacturer, that then gets added to other material to become a component or product, and sold to wholesalers, etc and passed through the same layers again, and possibly even exported as a complete product.
All of this is what makes the prospect of refunding all of the illegal tariffs directly to consumers a real mess.
Sometimes I'll run in for just cat litter and a bag of coffee (the local ones carry a regional brand of whole bean coffee that's okay for the price).
We have both Sam's and Costco (we generally get different things at each), and they are just a couple of blocks apart, so if our bi-monthly shopping is heavy to one, I might only need a couple of items at the other.
Absolutely. ...
I own a software company, but we sell computer hardware to about half of our clients as well. We passed the increase in hardware to our clients as our suppliers passed it down to us.
But I'm not an importer, and my main supplier imports about 50% of what we buy from them. The rest they buy from manufacturers that import their own product, or importers (or possibly even wholesalers that buy from importers), and we buy some stuff at retail, since we just don't buy enough to justify wholesale.
We absolutely struggle to be competitive, and more so now than before. We don't have VC money, or credit card processor backing that many of our competitors do, so can't give hardware away at below cost, or for free. At the end of the day, we decreased our markup to help keep prices down, knowing that we'll ultimately make it up on software licensing over the next few years.
Even then, our customers are all businesses that paid the increased tariff at the end of the day, so how do they get their taxes back, since most people are suggesting returning taxes to individuals.
The whole thing is a freaking mess, without any real good answer that will actually make everyone happy.
I don't think that the government ever promised a tariff rebate to residents directly.
The rapist or Musk may have offhandedly suggested on social media that they would, but anyone that believes anything they say is a fool.
Most don't even directly pass the cost to the consumer, they pass them down the line to retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers, etc.
Then those companies add the additional cost to the product as the sell them .... So only the importer is getting the refund, and only a handful of very large resellers are actually importers. Most small businesses buy from importers or wholesalers, and they won't get anything back either.
when Microsoft decides to EOL
Will never happen. The freaking VB6 runtime is still supported in Win11, and there's a mountain of .NET Framework code still out there.
Framework 4.8 still gets regular security updates, and will for years to come.
Even worse is that I used to be able to get Crucial drives for less than Samsung, and I trust them way more. The Samsung ones are fine, but we've never lost a single Crucial SSD in 14 years.
I'll take a look at the PNY ones. We actually can use 256gb, since these are just backup drives that get a data dump every 5 minutes, so that may save some $.
We buy a decent amount of half TB SSD drives to add to desktop PCs that we sell to customers.
Samsung EVO drives have gone from $47 to $285 in the last year.
My brother in law worked at the BMW plant and they weren't supposed to have their phones on the floor at all.