Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

There was chatter about this in one of the NYC subreddits over the weekend.

Apparently ending the de minimus exemption is closing the grey market for e.g. sunscreen; places that used to sell Japanese sunscreens on American shelves no longer are.

There's a frustratingly long list of goods that the US decided to put requirements on in previous generations, and then stopped maintaining. Sunscreen is one; other countries have invented sunscreens that feel better on your skin than the old styles, but aren't yet approved in the US. Motorcycle helmets are another. You may have seen the MIPS system - the yellow slipliner that's become popular in bicycle helmets. Scientists have realized that rotational impact leads to concussions and similar brain damage, but prior helmets only protected against naive impacts. Europe now requires helmets to protect against rotational damage. The US requires that manufacturers self-assert that they meet a very old standard that ignores rotational impact. They do not recognize Europe's new standard.

Closing these de minimus exemptions is making it harder for discerning consumers to buy higher quality goods than are currently available in the US right now. Protectionists are going to see this as a win.

More background on helmet standards:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BUyp3HX8cY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76yu124i3Bo

> Closing these de minimus exemptions is making it harder for discerning consumers to buy higher quality goods than are currently available in the US right now.

Everything has a trade-off.

On the other hand, it also prevents companies from dumping artificially cheap and crappy goods (TEMU) on US markets and making it nearly impossible for others to compete.

Unsuspecting consumers buy a super cheap (subsidized) crap product on Amazon or Temu or Shien or wherever - probably a knock-off of an American product, have it shipped to the US, then it disintegrates after a couple of uses or stops working, and we wind up with pollution, additional landfill, and relentless consumerism that's harmful to the country all so we can help a certain country whose name starts with a C keep the lights on and keep factories running so that they don't see unemployment numbers tick up.

Legitimate businesses selling higher quality products where they exist will be able to figure it out. Or not. It's not a big deal if your sunscreen is slightly worse than the Korean version (which I use). Maybe it just hasn't been approved because they haven't done the work to apply because they can get around working with our government and making sure their product meets our safety standards because of the de minimus loophole?

There's also safety concerns, which I think the CBP did a good job of overviewing here: https://www.cbp.gov/frontline/buyer-beware-bad-actors-exploi... . Send drugs or guns or illegal animal products to the US, get caught, who cares you live in (not the US) so you can just spin up another sham company and do it again.

The tradeoff here is “pay the middleman markup tax” for the most part.

Instead of getting cheap Chinese made clothing for $5, you now get to pay Walmart $17 for the same thing.

If we are going to outsource production in order to save on consumer goods costs, the consumer should be the one reaping the surplus - not capital. Properly informed buyers were quite capable of getting quality product out of China for a tenth of the cost of exactly the same thing stocked on major retailer shelves here.

While there are certainly abuses of the current system, it would be best to close those loopholes vs. just give a bunch of profits to giant companies for effectively doing nothing more than having scale and volume. If you’re lucky they may do some curation too.

Not everything was Temu or Shein. Plenty of smaller factories basically going direct to consumer in a win win sort of scenario. They get paid more, and the customer doesn’t pay any middlemen.

> Instead of getting cheap Chinese made clothing for $5, you now get to pay Walmart $17 for the same thing.

Right... but now that is (arguably) cost competitive with American labor and manufacturing. Or at least it's more cost competitive than it otherwise would be.

I mean this is kind of the price of putting what we say first. Want higher minimum wages, higher environmental standards, unionized labor, benefits/healthcare, lunch breaks, etc.? We will have to pay more, and we should, for those things.

> We will have to pay more, and we should, for those things.

No. US labor costs are high and working conditions are better, in large part, because US labor is worth it and US productivity is high. That labor is spent in high value industries and is often highly skilled.

We should accept we're better at some things and trade according to the principle of comparative advantage.

I don't disagree with you, but I think it would be better for society if we had fewer gig workers and Wal-Mart greeters, and more artisans who become more price competitive.

I don't think making things more expensive for consumers is going to help that happen. I think it's going to steepen the divide between capital and labor.

And most of the products we're talking about that are coming in via de minimis are not exactly competing with US "artisans."

Indeed, I'm helping train future US artisans, and we depend upon being able to get input components cheaply and consistently, which is becoming more and more of a problem and endangering my programs being able to do as much.

But as I look around with our current trade strategy (pre-tariff) I've only seen exactly what you describe happen - the divide between capital and labor has only increased exponentially, and as prices have gotten lower people we see less entrepreneurship, less new business starts, fewer products made in America, and more consolidation into Wal-Mart scale corporations.

> And most of the products we're talking about that are coming in via de minimis are not exactly competing with US "artisans."

Sure they are - they're much cheaper, mass manufactured goods which people default to because they are only exposed to the price of the product. Raising the prices of those goods makes artisan products more cost competitive.

> and more consolidation into Wal-Mart scale corporations.

I think this has more to do with the effective abandonment of antitrust mechanisms.

> Raising the prices of those goods makes artisan products more cost competitive.

Look, I don't want an artisan UART board, and I don't think that my programs can ever afford "artisan UARTs." I'll just give up teaching this stuff to students instead.

I don't know what you mean by artisan UART board - artisans and craftspeople don't, in my view, need to have anything to do with programs or universities or teaching or students - like you sit at home and work on making stuff, maybe you can sell it at a farmer's market or if you make something really good start your own business which could just be a single shop you run. Not to suggest there aren't or can't be training or teaching programs, but that's not a requirement.

Today that's much more difficult because a bar of soap at Wal-Mart is $1 or something and entrepreneurs can't make stuff that cheap when they're making it by hand using real ingredients or honing a specific craft - and it doesn't even end up with shelf space. The suburban, 1-stop-shop big box retailer, drive your SUV down the highway to buy cheap stuff from not America model drives down entrepreneurship and closes off small competitors and artisans.

> I think this has more to do with the effective abandonment of antitrust mechanisms.

That's a factor but not the primary one.

I buy stuff -- small circuit boards, electronic components, unusual milling cutters, bearings, etc. The existence of these things as commodities lets me do a lot of deep EE and ME work with high school students.

The US will not build a supply chain for these at any reasonable price. And shouldn't. These should be commodities and US labor should focus on higher value things.

(Not to mention that US suppliers don't really like selling at low quantities and most don't really love selling to education or hobbyists).

Tariffs just directly make my programs less feasible.

Note that de minimis-- which we're talking about here-- has something to do with what's at Amazon because of drop shippers, but basically nothing that is sold somewhere like Walmart.