The question is, how do you legally know that they passed all that cost on to the customers? After all, customers did not pay the import fees directly. It will be a hard case to make.
Tariffs were announced which applied to PlayStation products. The prices consumers had to pay for these products increased at the same time. It is not hard to know that the price increase is related to the tariff. Also, I cannot find it right now but I think Sony even publicly blamed price increases on tariffs.
Now personally, I strongly believe businesses abused the announcement of tariffs and the general person being a total idiot when it comes to knowing what tariffs do in order to increase the and consumer price by MORE than what the tariff added at point of entry. I believe this ALSO should be illegal as price gouging.
Also, a majority of Americans voted to introduce tariffs. It was a big part of Trump’s campaign from the start. The reason Sony received this money in the first place was because of errors made by the American government, making the tariffs illegal. It was the US government that is responsible for this money, not Sony.
Voting habits or trends are entirely irrelevant to the conversation. I dont care about politics, nor is it part of the issue. The government added a tariff on an imported good. The business passed the cost to the consumer instead of paying it themselves. If the business consumed the cost themselves, they would legally be entitled to the refunded money; they were the ones that paid it. But since they passed the price off to the consumer (or distributor, depending on the sale endpoint if they weren’t making a direct to consumer sale), they are not legally entitled to any of it. Therefore if they keep the money instead of refunding it, that should be legally considered theft. Like when an employer makes a payroll mistake and accidentally underpair an employee, they cannot keep that money they have to pay it to the employee it belongs to.
It should be the responsibility of the government to enforce that the money gets to its legal owner. However, because Sony has all the sales records related to the refunded money, it is Sony’s responsibility to process the refunds to the effected sales. In the case of a distributor (like Target or Amazon), once they receieve the refunds for the tariffs those distributors now have the responsibility to use their own sales records to issue refunds to the consumers that paid it, unless the distributor consumed the tariff cost themselves.
Should these efforts incur extra cost (IE, the financial employees have to work more hours than they are already on payroll for), then those additional costs should be the government’s responsibility to pay to the business. If there is no extra cost, the business isnt entitled to extra money. They already pay employees to handle financial records for the business, so unless they need to be staying overtime and working very long hours, this would already be part of their regular job responsibilities.
Perhaps this explains what I said SHOULD happen a bit better. I am sure that isnt what actually will happen and the business is just going to fight to keep the money. Greed always wins in this world.
MagnificentSteiner@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
All the prices went up.
Also, 77m voted for Trump which is 32% of the voting age population.
As a percentage of the overall population it is ~23%.
That’s not a majority.
mycodesucks@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
People who can vote and do not could just as easily have been lazy Trump voters as anything else. They’re political dark matter. They don’t absolve a populace.
MagnificentSteiner@lemmy.zip 19 hours ago
The person above me said a majority voted for it and I corrected them. I’m not sure what relevance you comment has to our exchange.
It’s just as well I didn’t make that argument then. I don’t appreciate being strawmanned.
blackbeans@lemmy.zip 17 hours ago
The prices went up, and customers accepted that price. Bargaining after the deal is made generally doesn’t give you a strong position.
The American definition of a voting majority is not relevant here. What matters is that Americans put Trump in place, knowing he would impose tariffs, making foreign products more expensive. Just because millions didn’t vote for him, doesn’t exclude them from the consequences.
raze2012@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
No, we really didn’t. It was forced on us, credit card and car debt is at record highs, homelessness increased, spending power at the average household is down. And part of the reason companies are getting refunds is over potential lost sales. I. E. Because some customers did in fact refuse to accept the price.
Yup. Once again, no regrer there, huh?
blackbeans@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
I understand that Americans suffer under this and that many people are actually against tariffs. We don’t have to disagree there.
However this article is just about the Sony PlayStation. No one forces people to buy a PlayStation. And Sony, a Japanese company, is also not affiliated with the US government.
LemmyEntertainYou@piefed.social 8 hours ago
“It was forced on us so we optionally decided to pay for luxury items using other people’s money via a credit card.”
thevoidzero@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Please stop using that logic. The people that voted is a representative sample of the population, done. Is you’d forced every one of voting she to vote then it probably would have been similar result. Because people that didn’t want to go both will have their vote split randomly to candidates.
Honestly given these two choices, not voting means you’re ok with either.
natecox@programming.dev 17 hours ago
This completely ignores both jerrymandering and voter suppression, both things real and impactful in US voting outcomes.
thevoidzero@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Sure, but even accounting for all that, what do you think would be the votes? 55% and 45% instead of 49 & 51?
Even if it was 60/40, the fact that 40% of people are actively supporting all this means it’s too much.
Yes those problems are real, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the big big problem of a significant part of population that wanted/wants this even now.
Miaou@jlai.lu 13 hours ago
It ignores it because that’s a different point that’s being made a.k.a moving the goal post. The people saying “oNlY 20ish % of thE poPuLaTiOn” would still claim this shit even if there were no gerrymandering at all.
Not that I’m not denying the publicly admitted election fraud, but in most western democracies AFAIK non voters are the majority. That doesn’t mean none of them have legitimate leaders