If youve never experienced costco or been a member, this is difficult to understand but there is an undercurrent, nay, a prevailing sentiment of savings value and above all else things like rebate and cash back. Costco has established transparency for the consumer so pocketing the money is an egregious offense for most customers.
- credit cards offered by costco offer generous cashback
- most costco food items include discount pricing thats predictable and visible in the price itself. the decimal value of the price can even determine if the item is being phased out.
- even costco memberships are broken down into savings and the staff will gladly quantify your expenditures and potential cash back should you change or upgrade a membership. unused membership portions are even refunded.
- the refunds. no questions asked, for virtually anything, any time. this is where the costco member expects tariffs to be refunded as well.
I fully expect these to get refunded back to customers.
I occasionally get a gift card in the mail for a product I already purchased from Costco because they negotiated a better price for the batch after the fact.
> a prevailing sentiment of savings value and above all else things like rebate and cash back.
I did some consulting work there a long time ago building some software to manage inventory in one of their departments.
When we asked about their goals, like improve margins, they said "absolutely not, we will not increase beyond 14%". When we asked why, they said "the minute our customers think we are increasing margins, we will lose members, and membership is the goal."
Costco uses a convention for their retail (doesn’t work for by-weight) products where e.g .97 typically means it’s a limited run or to be discontinued.
There are others as well, they have more precise meaning for their internal procurement processes but that’s the customer facing rule of thumb.
If they had listed a line item for tariff fees then I could see the argument and would say that any refunds should go to customers. By not listing a tariff line item, Costco absorbed the additional costs and likely increased prices. In that scenario they, Costco, are the ones that should be entitled to a refund.
This is the same if you walk the chain backwards. Suppliers to Costco that simply raised prices and internally absorbed the tariffs are the ones due a refund, not Costco. Suppliers that sent Costco and invoice with a tariff line item should be on the hook to refund Costco (which means they should be seeking a refund from the US)
Amazon did try to add that line item and the administration pressured them to remove it. And you are making a very big assumption that either Costco or their suppliers absorbed the cost of the tariffs. Because I don't have a link handy, one study I read said more than 80% of the cost of tariffs came from the consumer's pocket, not the supply chain.
It's not like Costco told them that. Buying something because a third party misinformed you (or in this case, was only temporarily right) doesn't invalidate the transaction.
You think a seller has some price obligation to you? If they set a price and you pay the price, what they paid for the good is irrelevant unless you had some cost-plus contract that they violated.
Even if that was the case, your infering that customers who paid these fees are not entitled to be refunded when their suing the u.s. government for reimbursement of those collected fees.
If the narrative that u.s. consumers paid inflated prices because of this then the money should go back to the consumers.
I guess Costco suing for a refund means they need to finance that campaign, and Costco consumers can do the same to them; maybe Costco should just drop their claim and let consumers try and recover from the US government...
Costco's position seems pretty unremarkable to me. What % of modern retail sales are both paid in cash, and unconnected to any loyalty/reward program? I'd bet it's under 10%. And even then, a company could refund everyone it knew about, then say "bring in your receipts" for the remainder.
I remember a story on Walmart's data analysis capacity being something like 2 years of line item data for a customer. I've read numbers that suggest 10PB / day ingested from their ecommerce operations and 2-3 PB/hr data processing. Pretty incredible.
For modern ecommerce, figurative recording every twitch of your mouse in their store, I'd believe that.
But to save only the "SKU, qty., unit price, date" receipt info - which you would need to process tariff refunds - that'd be maybe 16 bytes per receipt line? To hit even 1TB/day, you'd need a billion customers, each buying 64 items. On that one day.
I live in a moderately cold area and pay less than $2000 a year to heat a ~2000 square foot home. So something that improves the efficiency of the building would have to have a pretty low cost to even pay back at all.
There's probably a few lower cost things that I am overlooking, to the tune of netting out a few hundred dollars of savings after however many years they took to pay back.
A well built home with more insulation will, according to physics, lose less heat in any given scenario. So policies that push for things that improve buildings can reduce energy use.
Do you think we have reached peak building efficiency or something?
Huh, back in the 2001/2002 timeframe I worked at an old company that gave everyone a Windows laptop but us engineers also had UNIX accounts on the server cluster, which we logged into for dev work.
Our company was hit with one of the worms (don’t remember which). Thousands of emails constantly coming in and everyone scrambling to delete them - except people like me, who were on vacation. I returned to an inbox that instantly crashed Outlook. IT was trying to find a solution. But I logged into the UNIX cluster, opened Pine, and deleted all the crap, page by page. When I got most of it done, Outlook started working again.
IT was shocked but then told everyone else to go do what I did, eliminating their need to do any work. So I guess you win some and you lose some..
ILOVEYOU was in 2000 and behaved that way. I remember we just shut off our Exchange servers until there was a fix. Email was still new enough that the world didn't implode.
Yeah I get the point, I'm saying it's not really a good point, running Windows and Outlook on a secondary system is fine. Forcing the astronauts to learn to use some other system would be a waste of time and probably worse than whatever it is you see as the problem.
If you're talking about uranium enrichment, that's like saying we increased the amount of gasoline on earth (by refining crude oil). Natural uranium is ~99% non-fissile, and ~1% fissile, and we're only removing part of the non-fissile isotope to obtain 5% concentration of the fissile isotope. Uranium still needs to be mined, spent fuel can be partially recycled, but you need some new natural uranium input in the end. That said, non-renewability of uranium is a non-issue IMO, compared to the huge amounts of other non-renewable resources we're extracting.
Still, seems kind of hard to argue that retail sales are not an offer and direct acceptance of that offer.
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