For Whom the Tariff Tolls
Welcome to total madness and get your wallet primed
I have to tell you about the biggest jaw-drop I’ve had in a very long time. This happened yesterday afternoon, and I’m still reeling.
As you know, I’ve been looking for something nice to wear for my New York City book party. Since COVID and the Internet has ravaged in-person shopping, even in a big city like Los Angeles, most of my browsing has been online. One of my favorite sites is SSENSE, which has a zillion indie brands and edgier mainstream stuff, and is famous for showing their clothes on women who have the shocked, blank, dystopian expression of someone who has just witnessed a nuclear explosion. Somehow it works as a vibe of some sort, and I’ve gotten lots of great items from SSENSE (shocked models not included, fyi).
Did I mention that SSENSE is located in the beautiful city of Montreal, which is in the sovereign nation of Canada, our friendliest national partner?
Anyway, a few weeks ago, I spotted a Dries Van Noten outfit on the site that I thought would be smashing for my book party. It was a silk brocade vest and trousers, and I ordered those, plus two different tops to try with it, plus a pair of shoes. I forked over a small fortune, tolerable only because I was sure I would return some of my picks.
I waited and waited for the package. I checked the tracking regularly on the USPS site, and my box of goodies seemed to be languishing, worryingly, in the US Customs site on the map; the little blue line showing its progress stalled there and emitted a slow, sad flash, which didn’t seem good. In the meantime, I read a news story about SSENSE reorganizing under bankruptcy protection, which chilled my heart a bit. For a week or two, I toggled between checking on the flashing light on the USPS site and the bankruptcy stories. But I had faith.
Yesterday I got a notice that the package had arrived. Unexpectedly, I was being summoned to the Post Office to pick it up, which gave me a whiff of apprehension. I dropped what I was doing (cooking dinner) and raced to the Post Office, a once-grand building in Hollywood with marble floors and oak paneling with only a light patina of graffiti. It was a beastly hot day, and the air in the non-air-conditioned building felt like wet dough. There was one clerk working, and she seemed crabby.
When I had my turn at the counter, I told her I was picking up a package. Here’s my ID, here’s my tracking. She looked it up on her computer and said I would have to pay a tariff. I had assumed such a thing might happen—this was a product made in Italy by a Dutch designer being sold through a Canadian company and shipped to the US, and knowing the current flurry of tariff declarations I suspected the burden of paying it would be mine to love and cherish. I thought…maybe it would be sixty bucks. I wasn’t thrilled by the thought of paying sixty more bucks for the order, but it was the number that seemed tolerable, so I prepared myself for it.
After a moment, the clerk returned from the storage room with my box. She removed a piece of paper affixed to the box, read it slowly, and then began smiling—a crack in her previously crabby demeanor. “You… owe… TWO THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DOLLARS AND TWENTY SIX CENTS!” she said. She was now laughing.
I started laughing, too. “Hilarious!” I said. “But seriously, what do I owe?”
“TWO THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DOLLARS AND TWENTY SIX CENTS!” she said. Announcing the sum seemed to delight her. It had begun to dawn on me that she wasn’t kidding, and once I caught my breath I squeaked, “What????” She pushed the paper through the slot in her window, so I could read it myself. And it really said $2101.26 due from recipient. Tariffs, to be collected upon delivery.
The heat in the room now felt like a million-pound loaf of soggy bread. “I can’t pay that,” I stammered. “I won’t pay that.” The clerk nodded and said she’d just mark the box as rejected, and it would go back to Canada. “I’ve been sending back a lot of boxes lately,” she said. “I know it’s crazy!”
I know it’s crazy, too. So long, Dries Van Noten outfit, and most likely, so long too to SSENSE, although the website now says that the company will cover the tariffs and no additional charges will be presented upon delivery. But the math is cuckoo. Is the company going to pay $2000 to ship me clothes that I might not even keep? Or even if I do, are they going to take an immediate fifty percent haircut in their profits? Madness, I tell you. Madness.
xS
Ready for more madness? From Heather Cox Richardson today:
Meanwhile, Trump continues to insist that he must have the powers of a dictator to make the country prosperous again. When a court found his use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to justify his sweeping tariffs was illegal, he said, “If you took away tariffs, we could end up being a third-world country,” although the U.S. was not a third-world country before Trump launched his tariff war in April. He has said he will take the case before the Supreme Court.
If he loses there, as Elisabeth Buchwald wrote for CNN, the U.S. might have to pay back more than $210 billion to the American businesses that have paid the tariffs. On Monday, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo pointed to a story Louise Matsakis and Zoë Schiffer of Wired reported in late July: Wall Street companies, including Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services company run by the sons of billionaire commerce secretary Howard Lutnick since Lutnick joined the Trump administration, have been buying up the rights to collect tariff refunds if the tariffs are struck down.
Where are outraged U.S. consumers and politicians who are supposed to be representing them --- senators,congressmen, etc. As a Canadian, I can't for the life of me figure out how/why these American reps just seem to be MIA!