Two gamers have filed a class action lawsuit against Nintendo, alleging that the company will be unjustly enriching itself with any refund it secures from the U.S. government over widespread tariffs last year that, among other things, hiked the prices of Nintendo hardware and accessories.
“Unless restrained by this Court, Nintendo stands to recover the same tariff payments twice—once from consumers through higher prices and again from the federal government through tariff refunds, including interest paid by the government on those funds,” the suit states.
What is the logic behind giving a company money for the tariffs? The costs were invariably passed to the consumer, so how does paying the company make any sense?
The logic was “these companies ate the cost” and when confronted with the fact that prices went up and the costs had been passed on to consumers, the clarification they provided was “nuh uh”.
and when confronted with the fact that prices went up and the costs had been passed on to consumers, the clarification they provided was “nuh uh”.
the argument is, when a price goes up, there will be fewer sales and therefore less revenue/profit
Which makes me want to say things that would get me banned for multiple reasons.
This is America. You’re not a person unless you’re a corporation.
Is it expensive to file corporate taxes in the US? It really sounds like if everyone represented themselves as a corporation they would have more rights.
If you’re looking for a new rabbit hole to explore…theres an entire crowd of people who firmly believe that the government creates a corporate version of you when you’re born, and that your name in CAPS on the birth certificate is evidence of this.
the birth certificate
Berth certificate, making us all boats and therefore subject to maritime law.
It sounds like a stupid joke because it is but also one of their things.
There’s also endless content of them confidently presenting these arguments to judges when they’ve broken laws and being immediately shut down by said judges.
The whole thing is a scam by Big Driver-Side-Front-Window to boost their sales.
It didn’t take long to go from “corporations are people” to “the only people that matter are corporations”
The companies paid the tarrif, they get the refund.
The fact that tariffs allowed some companies to demand more money, is related but not causal, some companies will have had to eat shit because the market wouldn’t bare the increase.
I’d love for the lawsuit to succeed and it set the precedent that when governments issue refunds they can force companies to pass it on to the customer, but I think it’s unlikely.
It’s also complicated by the way pricing works.
If the tarrif is for $15 but the uncertainty allowed a company to increase prices by $20, how much should the customer be refunded?
And what if the tarrif was $15 but the market only allowed a $10 increase and the company ate shit on the other $5?
Now what if none of these numbers are set in stone and all of the numbers are guesswork? Should the government audit all companies that changed their prices?
They should not be allowed to price based on “uncertainty” - if the tariff increases by 15, the buyer should pay that much and no more. So, anyone who bought at the increased 20 dollar price should receive 5 back.
Of course they’ll never do this.
All pricing under capitalism is based on uncertainty.
What the market will bare isn’t a known thing.
Side-note: this is why YIMBYs are dumb as fuck when they apply econ101 to rents.
There’s no logic. They don’t know how to fix the things they broke.
Taxpayers paid the tariffs once when prices got hiked, paid the resulting inflation costs, now we are paying those companies back with taxpayer money, which will continue to drive up inflation again.
We’re paying 4 times.
The logic is real “dumb” or simple. The company that paid the tariff gets the refund.
Tariffs are paid at the port of entry and before you are allowed to physically get the goods out of the port. So the payer is not always the manufacturer. Sometimes it’s an importer or middleman. Sometimes a retailer. It could be you if you shipped in a package from overseas.
The companies are the ones who paid the tariffs directly and then passed the cost onto their customers.
What is the logic behind giving a company money for the tariffs?
Well, the logic is the fact that the tariffs were illegal.
The honourable thing to do would be to pay that money back to the customers, but that would make the shareholders sad and grumpy, so it’s never going to happen.
How do you prove a customer paid for a product and that this product paid a tarriff
Not that difficult, actually. The company pays a tariff on the specific product being imported, which would have been recorded. Customers who then buy those products should receive itemized receipts, either physically from a store or electronically via email when buying online. The receipt should also indicate a payment method that can likely be matched to a bank statement if needed.
Match the itemized receipt to the tariffs paid, there you go.
The harder part is directly linking the tariffs paid to the price the consumer paid. The tariffs were inconsistent and changed a few times, and we don’t know if all price increases were caused directly by tariffs or if there were other factors as well. Moreover, some companies ate the cost in some cases, notably Nintendo, who chose not to increase the original pre-tariff price of the Switch 2, but did for Switch 1 and accessories for both systems. Nintendo will likely be refunded for all of those, but not all of that was a cost passed on to the consumer, so it’s hard to figure out at that specific a level.
This lawsuit is definitely going nowhere, at any rate, so this is basically all just idle musing.
How do you verify if the receipt is real?
If your company isn’t keeping track of receipts for goods sold, the IRS is going to have an absolute field day with you about time they decide to audit the company.
Okay so the U.S. government should have to interact with however many private companies with their own standard for storing data, and then handle contacting the consumer and figuring out how to get the refund?
The whole thing is bad. Having to give refunds directly to consumers is near impossible to implement in any reasonable way.
Edit: the biggest hurdle is by far scammers. The U.S. government has historically been terrible at sussing them out. No way anyone’ll find a pile of receipts. Noooooo shot that could be a problem.
Personally, I think the easiest one is the US government refunds the tariffs to the company with the requirement that the company has to give it back because the company already has all that information
However, if We were to continue this hypothetical situation where the US is the initiator.
All they would need to do is make it so it’s a hard requirement in order to get the tariff return that the companies provide basic transaction data For that duration, They could even dictate what format they needed it in. (or Alternatively they could assert they have a system in place already to handle it themselves but I think most would just let the gov handle it in bulk processing than need to make a framework for it)
Then for returning the money, there’s a few options. They could either use the existing framework that they have to send returns to cards on file because it’s almost certain that they have direct access to every major card network. Or they can filter the master list by the card identifiers at the beginning and send them to the banks/card companies and let them deal with it.
For cash transactions, it would be a pain in the ass, but that’s going to be the case for both distributions, because there’s no link to an actual identity. What they would have to do is they would have to compare the receipt to the transaction data that they have, which you are right, they could scam you on. However, they would have to know where it was purchased, they would have to know the time stamp, they would have to know the amount spent.
Honestly, the most annoying part of that entire deal would be that people who paid in cash, regardless, are going to have to reach out to some system to say, hey, I spent this money, where’s my return? But I don’t think fraud is going to be a very big risk case here.
Honestly, they could probably even set up an online portal to do everything for you. You just have to supply the information needed, much like how unpaid claims are
that the company has to give it back because the company already has all that information
Do they?
Let’s use Nintendo as the example.
First and foremost, how much did they change the price of the switch 2 based upon tariffs? More specifically, how much can you prove they did? Should a company that chose to eat the costs of the tariffs themselves be penalized and forced to lose even more money over NOT raising the price every time fuckface did? What about the specific case of the Switch 2 where they intentionally waited a week or three to announce the price after revealing it to factor in expected tariffs?
Also, what about the units they had stockpiled ahead of Liberation Day? Do they now owe “the customers” money based on the date of sale rather than the date of import? Or does Baby Jane Doe get less because her gameboy’s serial number corresponds to a unit imported in March rather than May?
All of which ignore that Nintendo weren’t doing direct to consumer sales in the vast majority of cases. They went through intermediaries like Best buy and Amazon. Many of whom ALSO were playing the same math regarding stockpiled units and ordering more supply from Nintendo.
Because the company handled all the nonsense of importing on behalf of the end customer (also most intermediaries).
The youtube channel HowNot2 talked about this a bit since they somehow became a(n actually really good) climbing gear store. Because tariffs were changing so frequently (often multiple times a day), basically nobody could plan for them. So companies had to balance their in-country stock with anything they were going to buy in the next few months… or even days. And try to figure out what price they might be paying.
Some companies basically just charged the tariff rate on any given day… which is bullshit since they would have bulk purchased whatever they could while they were “low”. Others would eat the cost because they didn’t want to lose customers by increasing the price of a preordered item. And so forth.
And… people who got their aliexpress on can tell horror stories of getting a bill once things made it through customs.
So… it actually makes perfect sense for the companies that dealt with this bullshit to get reimbursed by the christofacists. I would hope they would “pass it on” to the customers as an act of good faith (even if it is just a free game or something) but… this is a case where the problem isn’t the corporations: it is the government.
Nintendo: you know what? Fuck you. Our prices just went up for you. Games are $120 now. Fuck you, you’ll still buy our pokemon slop we spent 0 effort making. Mario? Yep, $120, but now when he jumps he says “fucka youuuu!” You’ll still buy it, because Mario.
I’ve been ootl on Pokemon since y/x, and even was barely paying attention before someone else bought it for me. But the shit I saw when sword shield(? First switch title) was wild. They really were just phoning it in, and people still bought everything else they dropped! The only reason I got a switch was for prime 4, and likely won’t be getting a switch 2. Sucks watching my nostalgia be abused in real time.
You can still enjoy the games you are nostalgic for with emulators.
I love how nintendo are switching our youths back towards old school tactics. Emulators and piracy are having their renaissance.
Never left for me. 😎
We won’t see a cent of the money stolen from us by Donald Trump and his gang of pedophiles.
My company lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in tarrifs. We passed those on to the customer since we couldn’t take a 50% hike on costs.
We have no way to refund money we don’t have.
How did your company lose hundreds of thousands if they passed them onto the customer? If you made the customer pay, your company has the money and can pass on the money you get from the government to your consumers
We’ve sold maybe a 10th of what we sold pre-tariffs. W have probably lost closer to million in sales due to the tariffs. Customer’s aren’t buying parts for preventative maintenance, they only purchase when it’s an emergency and they are losing tens of thousands of dollars an hour in production. US manufacturing is in trouble.
Okay? Not sure why your sales numbers make any difference. Of what your company did sell, you raised the price to cover the tariffs. You did not pay them, your customers did, so if a refund for those tariffs falls into your hands, you should pass it on to the customers that paid them. Having a shitty year sales wise doesn’t magically make that refund yours.
So the years you have good sales did you ever pass the extra earnings on to the customer?
Edit: ****crickets ****
We should do a blanket class action lawsuit against all corporations throughout history, demanding all the wages they owe, refunds for the prices they gouged, and the artificially created inflation.
Or they could settle by paying for worldwide universal healthcare and UBI.
Fuck settling. Every time we’ve settled with the capitalists they just claw everything back 10 years later. We need to permanently make them extinct.
Like everything else Trump does this too was a grift by him to funnel money to the rich. He should be a part of this law suit.
Friendly reminder that the Boston Tea Party was about tariffs. We know what works.
Imagine what gon’ happen when you try to tax our whisky.
Imagine… Or just read how that went in 1794.
A rebellion? Because that didn’t end so well.
I wonder why they chose Nintendo. To base this class action off of. They could have chosen any company to go after, like Walmart or Apple.
Because Walmart doesn’t sue their customers for buying and improving upon their products.
Nintendo bites the hand that feeds. Treats their biggest fans like piles of subhuman garbage. Short of Nestlé, very few companies deserve a taste of their own medicine more than Nintendo. Fuck them.
Edit: And they’ve been this way for as along as I can remember. Back in the early 90s, Nintendo tried to sue to stop Game Genie from becoming a thing. Sega, on the other hand, made it an officially licensed product! Nintendo has never had any chill. I wish they were the ones that lost the console war instead of Sega. They don’t deserve to be as popular and beloved as they are.
…and Sega isn’t a console anymore because of bad decisions.
I don’t think this is a good argument for your point
