Tariffs are great. They protect the struggling domestic IT industry and gives it time to ramp up its production of vintage computer parts.

And herein lies the rub: It's been like this in many countries for the longest time. In Thailand, say, you receive an order from abroad, the post office sends you a slip and you have to pay the assessed duties to receive the package. It often ends up feeing arbitrary; some stuff comes through, others get assessed at a higher value and you have to show receipts and convince them that no, this isn't that expensive of an item. The officially published rate of X matters little when the assessed value is up to an overworked official (in the most generous of readings of the situation). Nothing's exempt; somehow gifts from family and used items always seem most likely to trigger the tripwire.

Ship something through DHL or a similar service, and they follow the letter of the law so you'll both end up paying the official duty (at least there, it's almost guaranteed to follow the declared value) plus their processing fee, storage fee, and whatever else they include. I've easily paid double the price of a product for all of those fees together.

And worst, it's all unpredictable. At least if there's a 10% sales tax you can calculate that into if you want to buy an item. But once you get hit enough times, you start just not feeling like it's worth the mental load, time, and random financial hit to order stuff.

America had no idea how good they had it, in the before times.

I had this happen with FedEx. They released the package and delivered it without me paying. I submitted a dispute, which they say could take up to 6 months to process. I hate having this hang over my head, as I don’t want anything going to collections, but figured if I paid it I would have a harder time getting my money back.

Mine was for a watch I got serviced. My own watch that I shipped out being returned to me… not a new import. If I end up having to pay what FedEx is saying I owe, it would have been cheaper for me to buy a new watch than to get it serviced, which is very upsetting. The whole process has been a horrible experience from the very start and I regret the entire thing. I should have just risked getting it serviced locally… or not done it at all.

At least this guy got the option to know what was happening. A few years ago I randomly got a letter from the IRS (or some other 3-letter agency - I can't recall which) demanding I pay thousands of dollars because I imported "industrial equipment". I found this odd as I'm just a normal consumer who buys crap of Amazon and whatnot - I'm not importing tens of thousands of dollars worth of industrial equipment.

I verified everything and it wasn't a scam; the government was legitimately about to take me to court or start garnishing my wages or something like that. They said that UPS or FedEx had told them I imported the equipment but never paid import duties.

I got ahold of the case worker for my case and told them it must be some error. After a week or two of back and forth, we finally figured out that it was for a laptop that a user in Canada had shipped back to me when they left the company, and it had been mis-categorized and valued on the import documents. Since we had purchased the laptop in the US in the first place and shipped it to the user, the case was dismissed and I didn't have to pay anything, but it's always a mini heart attack when you get a letter from Uncle Sam saying you owe thousands.

I just got an invoice from ups to pay a $16 brokerage fee to jpmorgan for collecting a $0.60 tariff on a sticker included in a box with a custom keyboard shipped from Taiwan. Seems like wall street is making out better than the US on this arrangement

As an European, I'm kinda pissed we don't retaliate the duties.

I'd rather take a financial hit than act so weak and passive.

I swear between chat control, selling out EU's privacy to US tech companies (you can check how many times Palantir & others met commission members, it's public), the insanity of the ICE ban and this tariffs passivity I'm very unhappy.

Also, it's too convenient to only focus on material goods when the biggest US exports are gazillions in financial and IT services.

I’ve had a similar thing happen to me recently. 500$ tariff on $130 of stuff. The tariff should have been like $20. UPS has been completely non responsive and still won’t show me the customs forms. Total scam.

UPS sucks today.

I've had a UPS business account for over 35 years. In the past year or so they've become just terrible. Any call you make to them will have a hold time of at least half an hour. Many of my calls have gone over an hour. Usually you'll get transferred at least once. Also, earlier this year they outsourced their billing services to a third party, requiring additional consent on their website, and billing calls are now answered by an overseas call center.

I had to call them several times a few months back. What triggered everything was a fraudulent shipment made using my UPS account. I thought that I got that straightened out after two calls lasting about 2.5 hours total.

I got another bill the next month for the same fraudulent shipment where even though my shipping costs had been refunded, UPS was charging me a "missing PLD fee" because the criminals who shipped using my account number did not create the shipment using my online account. So after another 1.5 hours or so, that got resolved too. (They don't seem to offer an option to prevent shipments from being initiated from anywhere other than the online account.)

While waiting on hold (both times), their pre-recorded on-hold content would urge me to user their webiste to resolve my issue, which I had already tried, and discovered that it was impossible.

I had to call them one more time the following month because they began charging me $20 per month for no apparent reason. Without first notifying me, they decided that all direct bill accounts would now be charged this monthly fee. I was able to update my account with a credit card on file to get them to stop doing this.

I would switch to FedEx, but their customer service is even worse. I closed my FedEx account 20 years ago, but I continued to receive spam from them for over 15 years with no way to opt out (because of the existing customer relationship that no longer existed).

I had this happen to me on an order from Sweden. The order was about $450 + $50 shipping. I used an online tariff calculator and it said it should be 15%. So I was expecting ~$70. A few days before it is supposed to arrive UPS sends me a $242 bill for “tariffs, customs, and brokerage fees”. That basically made it 50% more expensive, but it was either pay it or loose the item. A month later they sent me an invoice that claimed the item cost $850. No idea how that happened. I am too scared to order anything from the EU anymore.

I guess we can’t know precisely how this happened without seeing UPS’s original Form 7501.

The amended one sounds strange. Why did they claim that the duty for the actual HTS code is $0, and attribute the entirety of the tariff to the special EU-origin code?

Our business got charged a 200% tariff on a UPS import from Japan, completely incorrect. The dispute is taking much longer than OP’s. Either UPS doesn’t know what they’re doing, or they willfully charge higher fees, or maybe they’re just understaffed from the massive layoffs they did to try to save their stock price.

edit: as a biz you (we) should use a legit import broker instead of UPS. But individuals like OP are stuck with no option.

In Germany, you can pre-register with DHL Express¹ with a bank account and optionally an EORI (Economic operators registration and identification) number, and then they immediately ding your bank account instead of providing their "disbursement service" where they 'benevolently' loan the customs fee to you for a 'minor' fee. I've not found similar options elsewhere, though I would assume they exist but might be corporate-only.

¹ annoyingly enough this doesn't even work with DHL, which is a separate thing from DHL Express in Germany.

In the country where I live, these kinds of fees are generally referred to "import taxes", because it's the buyer who's having to pay extra money which is going to the tax authority, not the seller.

While they can have an effect of encouraging domestic production, mostly they're a way to extract more money from the population.

> Lutnick Family Angling To Make Astronomical Sums Off Court Nixing Tariffs

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/lutnick-family-angling-...

Government insanity aside, the most insane part to me is that card networks allow partial refunds, but UPS wants to... mail a cheque?

Somewhat clickbait. The $684 duty charge was in error, and they got it reduced to the correct amount (an order of magnitude lower)

Ah this is just another step towards Turkification[0] of USA. This situation is just how it is in Erdogan's Turkey but you still have way to go if you are able to get your package out of the customs in less than a few weeks and no hustle.

When the trade deals and tariff conditions get sufficiently complex(it gets more complex every day as the president accommodates specific companies and personal favors), the bureaucracy also increases so at some point it becomes too much of a nuisance to bother with individual imports.

[0] https://www.theglobalist.com/the-turkification-of-america-tr...

Sounds like something that could be weaponized. Order a bunch of 'gifts' to be shipped to a target via UPS/FedEx or whichever vendor helpfully pays the tarrifs for you. Then your victim has to fight collections or pay up.

Never fear! That $2000 check will be coming your way soon.

I also imported a roughly $400 item from Romania. Was expecting a 30% tariff at most. Nope. $756. Sender says there is nothing they can do. UPS says that's the money I owe. They will send to collections if you go long enough without paying it. Reddit had no answers, and many are struggling with the same situation.

I hate UPS with the passion of a thousand dying suns.

I've long since opted to pay more to use DHL whenever I can, but a lot of Chinese suppliers simply won't deal with anyone except UPS. Drives me nuts.

If (when) SCOTUS determines that Trump's tariffs were illegally collected and importers are refunded, will end consumers who paid tariffs also be refunded?

UPS didn't charge it.

I had to pay a tariff charge of about $20 on an order of about $100 that I had placed about a year or so prior to this whole tariff bullshit. The idea that the president can decide to tariff whatever the fuck he wants is something that needs to go, since it's essentially levying taxes without representation. If somehow the current admin can't refund the money they stole from people then every single person involved should be thrown in jail and their property confiscated until that money is recovered.

If SCOTUS finds the tariffs unconstitutional in Learning Resources v. Trump, they should order refunds.