Nothing has changed wrt the personal exemption. Imports under $800 are exempt (i.e. you always had to pay tariffs on an expensive watch). I don't know how many commenters here actually realize it, but the de minimis exemption changes only apply to commercial import, which is how Temu and others could send a $10 piece of crap from China to your doorstep.

I don't know if the Swiss post office has realized this, but it's true.

Edit: one bit of nuance (see my comment downthread with some of the actual laws and the EO) is that if you buy a watch from Chrono24 or something then it's more like the Temu use-case, and I think the personal exemption probably doesn't apply? But if you go to Switzerland and pick up a $799 watch and post it back or carry it on a plane, then there's no problem.

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lxgr 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> the de minimis exemption changes only apply to commercial import

What exactly distinguishes a commercial import from a personal gift? How on Earth would the USPS adjudicate the difference?

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timr 2 days ago | parent [-]

Well, I'm not a customs agent, but I'd imagine they do it in the same way they adjudicate anything else: inspection. Some things get through by chance, of course, but not at a rate you'd want to rely on if you're a business.

In particular, if I walk into a random post office and send a one-off shipment internationally, the paperwork, origin, packaging, manifest, etc. is vastly different than what, say, Temu was doing to ship a $10 widget to US consumers at scale.

The rule you're talking about is not new, so presumably they've figured it out.

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lxgr 2 days ago | parent [-]

The $100 rule might not be new, but given that it was by far exceeded by the $800 de minimis exemption until now, it just didn’t matter.

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timr 2 days ago | parent [-]

This has nothing to do with the value threshold. US customs had to know the difference between personal packages and commercial packages before the change.

You asked me what distinguishes a commercial package from a personal gift.

	▲	lxgr a day ago \| parent [-]
		> US customs had to know the difference between personal packages and commercial packages before the change. Presumably for things like import restrictions (I could imagine somebody sending homemade cookies is treated differently than a large-scale food importer), but not for a decision on whether to charge or not levy duties though, right?

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kevin_thibedeau 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> how Temu and others could send a $10 piece of crap from China to your doorstep.

The postal union treaty also externalized shipping costs.

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pj_mukh 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yea I was asking really about what the various post offices are actually doing, as opposed to what the Trump admins hopes they would do.

I have to actually deal with the former.