When UPS charged me a $684 tariff on $355 of vintage computer parts

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.

Its funny how little US citizens know about this, meanwhile in the rest of the world we have been paying import duties our entire lives. When an item is posted abroad forms have to be filled detailing the sender, the nature of the goods and the value. Some sellers willl bend the law for you and decalre the value of the goods to be lower than what you actually paid if you ask nicely. The main danger being that if the parcel is lost the sender will lose out on any insurance claim.

The other option is to prepay tarrifs during the purchase of an item. Fedex and DHL usually offer this service which includes epedited customs clearance.

I would have just been happy if the declared value was what I paid, instead of almost double.

  I used an online tariff calculator and it said it should be 15%.

I got tempted by one of the Brymen/EEVBlog multimeters. There's still stuff on US gov sites (and tariff calcs) suggesting we've a free trade agreement with Australia. The reality is that a 40% tariff is likely to be applied, and the worst case is that someone decides that the copper tariff also applies and in lieu of a declaration of the amount of copper the US gov just assume the whole thing is solid copper. The sad part is that puts a brand new, made in RoC multimeter (BM2275) in spitting distance of a used, working 33401A but not an assembled-in-the-usa-with-global-components Fluke.

Lesson learned: don't trust tariff calcs and assume the worst case. Even if you order something when tariffs have been dropped you're still at risks for broad sweeping tariffs to come into effect by the time your item arrives at a US port.

Moving forward: big companies are far better able to deal with this tin pot dictator chaos, let them handle importation if you can. DigiKey (ugh), Mouser, and Newark all show the tariff as a line item. I'm quite sure at least one of them is fudging COO and all three have some remaining US inventory of some items so there's still some entirely legal tariff avoidance.

Likewise AliExpress choice involves shipping to what I suspect is AliExpress' bonded warehouse and they handle the applicable tariffs. I've recently decided to learn how to solder and there's still plenty of 99 cent crap available from AE if you're willing to (ab)use the new customer discount.

> Its funny how little US citizens know about this

Is it really? It sounds like you're implying it's some kind of woeful ignorance, but I say it's perfectly reasonable:

1. Each US state is already in a open-borders zero-tariff framework with all other states, which covers a very large portion of what people purchase.

2. Until recently, most individual consumers didn't need to think about tariffs on international goods, since most purchases were <$800 and covered by the de minimis rule. (Which AFAICT was in place for ~80 years.)

> AFAICT was in place for ~80 years

Sure, but it wasn't $800 for 80 years: the $800 change happened in 2016... the threshold was $200 from 2016-1994, starting at $1 (and tapering up) in 1938.

So it looks like there are 4 distinct spans in the past [0] where a nominal value kept getting decayed by inflation. To put them here with inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars in parens:

* 1938 to 1977: $1 ($22 -> $5.43)

* 1978 to 1992: $5 ($25 -> $11.50)

* 1993 to 2014: $200 ($446 -> $272)

* 2015 to 2025: $800 ($1087 -> $800)

* 2026 to ????: $0 ($0 -> $0)

The point I'd like to make from this is that Americans under 50 weren't adults-with-money in time to ever encounter those older more-restrictive spans. If you're under 28, the highest-exemption is the only situation they've ever known until now.

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/small-parcels-big-problem...

I disagree, it's woeful ignorance (and sometimes even willful).

When Amazon and all first came out they didn't charge sales taxes and states were pretty unhappy because largely nobody was paying the sales taxes they were supposed to on their tax returns.

Maybe I just have low standards like "never click the link from the Nigerian prince who needs assistance moving funds", but this again seems like a "they never encounter it so why would they know it" situation, judged harshly because of fundamental attribution error. [0]

* Most Americans have no other encounters with "use taxes" in their day-to-day lives.

* It's natural to assume the vendor (or new Internet Computer Thing) is continuing to handle it, especially when that's how all their regular purchases work.

* The tax functionally didn't exist for many decades, at least when the retailer had no in-state presence.

> states [...] tax returns

22.7% of Americans in states without income tax: "The what?" :p

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error