De minimis: US small parcels loophole closes pushing up Shein, Temu prices

I ordered an FPGA development board from China last month that unfortunately didn’t make it out of the country before tariffs&#x2F;end of de minimis set in. So it’s now sitting in a consolidation warehouse overseas while I figure out what to do with it. Paying almost double its value in taxes alone just kills its viability as a hobby, and sourcing it overseas is the only way to get hands on hardware without shelling out $2,000+.<p>There’s a whole cottage industry over there where they harvest semiconductors from junk&#x2F;e-waste and turn them in to usable products again. I assume that’s where the actual FPGA chip came from.

What’s the definition of loophole? How is shipping small packages without taxing them a loophole if that’s the exact thing the exemption was introduced for? Is driving an electric car and getting a tax credit a loophole too?

I&#x27;m in Europe. My wife buys a lot of stuff directly from China via their internal&#x2F;domestic marketplaces 1688.com and TaoBao.com. (Better prices, better service, just use a translator app and ship to a freight forwarder.) Currently, those domestic&#x2F;internal marketplaces are being flooded with cheap stuff. Like $5 jackets of very decent quality. Now&#x27;s the best-ever time to be a Chinese consumer. (Or one with a freight forwarder and o3 handling translation, as long as you&#x27;re not in the USA.)<p>I don&#x27;t know how hard the manufacturers themselves are complaining, but to some extent you have to imagine that they anticipated this and are looking to recalibrate production and reroute goods.

I am not in favor of how the administration has handled this at all. But I am in favor of reducing our dependence on Chinese imports.<p>The externalities for all the cheap stuff we import are too high and the market will never do anything about them.

Just read an article about how overseas shippers have been flooding warehouses up here in Canada stockpiling cheap goods destinated for the US market, hoping for the tariffs to get dropped soon:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;PjEgL" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;PjEgL</a><p>Article notes that if the tariffs don&#x27;t get dropped shortly, the cost of warehousing will exceed the tariff cost, and the goods will get dumped into the Canadian market. (Win? Maybe?)<p>Then we have companies that set up their distributor model to be North American wide, screwing Canadian consumers (adding in tariff overhead for them and taking it as profit) because they still route their goods through the US: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;petapixel.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;04&#x2F;30&#x2F;leica-raises-prices-in-canada-to-reach-price-parity-with-tariffs-in-the-us&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;petapixel.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;04&#x2F;30&#x2F;leica-raises-prices-in-cana...</a><p>Everything is a mess

Alternate headline is &quot;US introduces higher taxes and more bureaucracy&quot;.

Up to $800 is not &quot;small parcels&quot; in my book. We used to have the similar (but lower value limit) exemptions in (some) EU countries but those have been abolished several years ago, as well as discounted shipping rates for China as it was finally upgraded away from &quot;developing nation&quot; status.

From what I’ve read in other articles that stated it more-clearly than this one, US <i>de minimus</i> is suspended for only China and Hong Kong (for now…), right?

There goes your dirt cheap microcontrollers send from aliexpress for $3.

&gt; After a series of rises to the threshold, it allowed retailers to ship packages worth less than $800 to US customers without having to pay duties or taxes.<p>&gt; The European Union has also proposed plans to scrap duty-free exemptions for parcels worth less than €150 (£127.50; $169.35).<p>Does the threshold apply the package entering the border (a container) or the package for the foreseen destination (the cardboard in your mailbox)?

This is going to be bad for people who get medicines from abroad. Medicines can be unaffordable as it is.

How inflationary (or not) will this be. Will just switch to domestic products or will they just reduce consumption overall.

I wouldn&#x27;t want to be in the landfill business right now.