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Safety in numbers: Every retailer should include the tariff upcharge on their receipts [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-10
Not long ago, Amazon sort of floated the idea of including the tariff fees on the products they sell to show consumers why something costs more than they expected. Those tariffs were not implemented on the consumer view of things — they were floated as something to potentially show on the hauling of things (thousands of item X for distributor Y). Amazon caved pretty quickly.
They shouldn’t have.
What would be useful right now is for every retailer, brick and mortar, online, conglomerate, and mom and pop shop — everyone that delivers a product, service, consumable or anything to consumers for a cost — to single out the tariff charge being levied.
Consumers already see a bunch of oddball line items on their bill, but the tariff needs to be included. Look at your utility bill or your phone bill. There are line items that you just sort of accept as part of the service provided. Regulatory fees, paper billing fees, regulatory fees, insurance fees — essentially, a lot of stuff that you see every time that is maybe a dollar or two tops.
But what if your discretionary spending showed a tariff fee? And what if every company showed it? What if you went went to Target or Wal-Mart or Kohl’s or Lowe’s or Home Depot or Best Buy or any other major big box store and your receipt started showing, “Price, Tax, Tariff, Total” on it? Wouldn’t that wake up at least some of the population?
Despite this dumbass government’s view that it’s somehow political retribution, it’s a reasonable thing to share with consumers on why their stuff costs more. What if all the companies did it at once? What if Amazon went through with their trial run on the consumer side of things and showed it to the millions that buy from them daily? And Ebay? And Etsy? And wherever you may buy things online?
The people have the power here. This group of grotesque malfeasance masquerading as an administration can whine all they want, but these are not government institutions, and they are free to do as they please, within the law. There’s nothing that says any company cannot disclose the source of extra costs being passed on to consumers.
Yeah, this group of incompetent morons will screech and whine, but so what. That’s exactly what we want. “They are disclosing the cost of tariffs!” is not a winning message, regardless of how it is spun.
It’s a simple way to display publicly, for every single American to see, that the tariffs hurt them (and everyone else). It’s simple messaging, something we seem to really struggle with. It helps educate the populace on why this was such a stupid idea to begin with, without writing a 2000 word essay on economics, without pointing fingers and screaming, “Told you so!” (as much as we may want to).
If retailers would start doing this, and this alone, in the next month or so, en masse, there wouldn’t be anything that could be done. What are they going to do, boycott everything and everyone? (They’re already sort of doing that with immigration.) The more people know, the more they get that we are in a fluster cuck of our own creation, and the quicker we can get out of it.
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