If the company got overcharged for materials, you don’t get a refund either.

Unless the company wants to. Apparently, Costco has said they will be providing refunds:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/costco-pass-along-tariff-refu...

Yes, it's effectively a transfer of wealth from the consumer to the companies above them, much like everything else these days

Yup. More theft from regular Americans.

That's what I wonder too.

Ultimately it's the customer who paid more for his his'goods, not the importer.

Is the us government seriously going to give American citizens money to some Chinese importers ?

Absolutely and I highly doubt those businesses will lower the prices on anything they raised prices on. Double dip FTW.

I keep seeing basically this comment over and over, which on reddit would be expected but I'm surprised how much it pops up here. I would expect the HN crowd to be a bit more cognizant of the fact that the consumer is at the end of a potentially long chain and that direct-to-consumer refunds through that chain are at best impractical and at worst literally impossible.

This study actually follows that chain:

https://www.nber.org/202603/digest/pass-through-tariffs-evid...

In this case the importer was losing money post tariff so was the exporter. the consumer was actually paying more than the tariff (due to margin).

making each actor "whole" in even this short, cut-and-dry chain would be extremely difficult not even counting the overhead of each entity issuing refunds. A product with multiple importer inputs and more hands in the pot would be nearly impossible to even trace and you'd have to be able to definitively construe that each change in price at each step was directly related to tariffs, maybe someone in the chain was already going to raise prices some and then didn't raise any more on top of the tariff thus the tariff increase was absorbed by a pre-planned price hike.

Did people get charged more? yes. Are you getting your money back, no. does it suck? yes. Is it some conspiracy to make importers more wealthy? no. Were more than just end consumers harmed? yes! Is this fair? fuck no, but truly fair is impossible so might as well do something rather than let the corrupt government keep their ill gotten gains.

PPP 2.0