GCN Tech Show - The tariff tantrum, and the effects on the bike industry and riders

Equipment
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I think the many americans are about to get the clue that WE pay the tariffs. The sunset of the ‘de minimus’ rule makes the ridiculous tariffs apply to everything no matter the cost (subject to exclusions), so people will not be able to dismiss them and will be forced to pay them and deal with the blow back too!

… a major shipping loophole expired at one minute past midnight on Friday. The de minimis exemption, as it’s known, allowed shipments of goods worth under $800 to come into the US duty free, often more or less skipping time-consuming inspections and paperwork.

The loophole helped reshape the way countless Americans shop, allowing ultra-low-cost Chinese e-commerce sites like Shein, Temu and AliExpress to pour everything from yarn to patio furniture, clothes to photography equipment and more into US homes.

Its impending end has rung alarm bells across social media, with a baseline tariff as high as 145% depending on the carrier set to take effect on Chinese imports, potentially more than doubling the cost for all those cheap products deal-hungry Americans scooped up.

And the end of the de minimis exemption for Chinese goods will also distill abstract, complicated, messy, hard-to-follow trade policy into something much easier to understand: a receipt.

Gone will be the days of less accountability for their illogic, and at least part of their fantasy world will be chipped away. YES, WE PAY THE TARIFFS!!

“I can’t afford to buy from Temu now, and I already couldn’t afford to buy in this country,” Rena Scott, a 64-year-old retired nurse from Virginia, previously said to CNN Business.

Lower-income households will suffer the most from the end of cheap Chinese e-commerce sites. About 48% of de minimis packages shipped to the poorest zip codes in the United States, while 22% were delivered to the richest ones, according to February research from UCLA and Yale economists.

EDIT: Another article on the change in de minimus rules Temu is blocking US shoppers from seeing non-local goods…

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My partner purchased an item thru a decently reputable catalogue (yes, we got one in the mail) and ordered online. Turns out it’s shipped from Hong Kong. An email says it’s kicked up in some red tape currently. We might be f’ed….tbd.

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https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/05/wahoo-fitness-adds-tariff-surcharge-to-trackr-radar.html?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR4NsEqeHzR64kWJzpep5XTTgfFg5NQCzk6qRVQRv90M03n5fnzxrc0mqP57zw_aem_Av_5vl4Bi6hyLY_RzDLs0Q

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Usually if you just post everything to the left of the first question mark, it’ll work and not potentially include meta data, etc… It’ll automatically show the webpage too apparently.

Interesting, they could have been more forward with why the ‘service charge’ was added, and that it’s a tariff…

And DC gives them the ripping they deserve! GO GET 'EM!!

Pretending things are shipping charges isn’t consumer friendly (or honest), and frankly, more importantly – doesn’t actually apply any meaningful pressure to enact change. Further, when Wahoo communicates the price of the Wahoo TRACKR Radar to media outlets (or their own site), it’s listed at $199, when in reality, it’s actually $249. Thus, it’s factually dishonest.

And REI just jacked the price up to ‘hide’ the tariff, but more honestly report the price. Wahoo could do better, but they would attract the administration’s focus. I’m sure

Sauron eye tower
Sauron eye tower2048×1536 142 KB

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“They who would give up liberty for temporary security deserve neither one.”
–Benjamin Franklin

I expect all companies to behave legally AND ethically. If doing so creates any pushback from authorities for purely political reasons, then I consider it their responsibility to respond to that pushback… again, legally and ethically.

This is everyone’s responsibility in a free society. Respecting – and asking others to respect – the rule of law is a far more fundamental and important moral responsibility than nearly anything else. Freedom is not free.

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I agree with you, but I also think there’s a risk to the consumer when they hide the tariff that it’s a step toward just keeping the price higher when the tariff goes away, so not only are they complicit through silence, but they could be setting up a future where the cost impacts are permanent.

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They call it ‘Capitalism’. Like the whole idea of shipping jobs offshore was to ‘save money’, and some people even said prices would go down too. The prices didn’t, but the quality sure did!

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Bull.

No, capitalism is when other people compete on price, quality, or other factors to take away the business of those who are trying to price artificially high. Capitalism is when the consumer has choices and can act among them, with minimal (not zero, but minimal) interference from the government.

If one company, or several, are able to keep prices higher than a supply/demand equilibrium would dictate, then that is NOT capitalism but some external force (regulation, tariffs, barriers to entry, tax incentives, etc) interfering with the free market. Companies who have grown so HUGE due to public securities markets and economies of scale that they are nearly impervious to competition are a bug, not a feature. That’s why anti-trust needs to exist.

You act like “they” (all business owners) are this evil force screwing over the country. And with rare exceptions (because monopolists and abusers DO exist, but they are not the norm), they are people risking their capital and their time to serve their customers and add value.

You’ve expressed this kind of viewpoint a lot. And you are free to dislike business owners of all kinds… but what you’re suggesting is not just factually inaccurate but physically impossible.

By starting and running a business, entrepreneurs did something most people don’t, and which is CRITICAL to a healthy free market: they put their own assets at risk to build something that people will buy.

And it’s been well-proven that people will collude to artificially reduce competition to line their pockets IF there are only 3, maybe 4 players maximum. Beyond that number, someone always decides that they can make even more money by stealing market share, so they undercut the cartel and we’re back to price competition. There are MILLIONS OF COMPANIES in the overall market, so the kind of “they” you repeatedly speak of is simply not a real thing.

If you think it’s so easy to make a killing with your own business and simply do whatever you want with the customer… try it!

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Absolutely. That risk is real, and the most effective antidote to that risk is sufficient and healthy competition.

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Continuing the discussion from the other thread @Jolyzara posted

Interesting that specialized lists tariffs for some of the new bikes while other products had a direct price increase like sworks framesets, sworks recon/torch, workd cup wheels. Not sure these are tariff related since some of these have been released few weeks ago. Just like allied increased the price on the bc40 and able out of the blue

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And a funny thing is that adding a tariff as a final line before taxes means that you’re paying taxes on tariffs.

I might be wrong - lots of time I’m hehehe - but a tariff is neither a good nor a service to be taxed.

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But some states and localities tax things like service contracts, handling charges, etc. Instead of taxing people that pay such charges.

‘They’ could tax people and organizations that aren’t currently taxed, but those orgs are firmly entrenched in politics and will fight any moves in that direction tooth and nail, even burning down the country to avoid paying any taxes. Almost all other countries, I’ve read’ DO tax them, and they feel ‘patriotic duty’ (supposedly) having to pay them. :person_shrugging: We wouldn’t need tariffs at all. Government could forgive taxes and not tax the lower classes and still make tons of money. (And India/Pakistan might make all this moot)

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To be honest, my comment was more based in my previous background. I was/am a Lawyer in Brazil, and worked closely with tax. I’m 100% sure that a surcharge add before tax - meaning an “extra” - would spark judicialization. Particularly because it’s a written rule that there can’t be tax on top of taxes. Also, Brazil is a civil law country, so legislation largely differ from the US.

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I do understand in the current political environment wanting to expose the impact of a huge increase in tariffs. And ‘hide’ with quotes is accurate IMO. it’s not like REI or other US retailers have ever listed tariff costs before. They just list the price and we pay it or we don’t

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As REI is the downstream retailer, they aren’t “hiding” the tariff. If Company X increases its price to REI to cover the tariff, all REI sees is that its cost for item AA went up. It can’t reverse engineer the increased price of item AA to know how much of that increase is due to tariffs, and would “evaporate” if the tariffs are removed / lowered. So I don’t blame retailers who aren’t directly importing the item, but buying from a manufacturer who does the importing.

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Judicialization is when the same goods / services being taxed in two different countries.

Import duties / tariffs are applied in the receiving country and any VAT is applied on top of that. Both parts are applied in a single country.

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Have a team custom kit order from jakroo going through international shipping this week

Individual packages, direct from China to each team member

Some packages got tariff warnings from UPS, some didn’t. Our jakroo rep assured us it was a mistake and no tariffs are due on any of them

I’m not sure the legally correct answer, but seems likely that neither the shipping nor manufacturing companies do either

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That’s how our Cuore team orders/kits come in as well. No tariffs hit us and we got them last week. Curious about future orders though.

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Curious if anyone has purchased wheels from a place like Light Bicycle, Farsports, etc.

I saw on Panda Podium they had an article (About the recent US tariffs – Panda Podium) talking about it and mentioned you could choose to prepay duties which tacks on $100 and they will pay the whatever the tariff costs. This seems kinda low if you were buying a ~$1600 wheelset. Though I have read in the past these places will often report the cost of goods as much lower than the actual cost

When I was playing around on Elite’s website they have on top of the website “Free shipping & Customs duties included for US/EU/UK/Australia.”

So it looks like some of these DTC companies are eating some of the costs in order not to lose US customers? Does make it complicated though since some are doing that and others not