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- cross-posted to:
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- [email protected]
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Is the owner of the company purchasing a year’s worth in order to keep the price they charge down, or in order to raise prices in February when their customers expect it because of the new tariffs, and pocket the difference? While having avoided paying bonuses?
Definitely the latter.
Without having more detail I can’t speak with certainty, but, general principles of inventory management and cash flow discourage having a surplus of stock, as that ties up a significant amount of working capital in the costs of storing and handling it all - you risk not being able to pay your liabilities because you’ve sunk all your funds into inventory that hasn’t yet sold and generated more revenue.
Companies often have longer term contracts with specific prices agreed that can’t always be easily changed. Those contacts could quite easily become unprofitable if there are sudden increases to the direct costs of fulfilling them. So, rather than trying to fuck customers, this company is likely trying to stock-up at current market prices to ride-out the first year of tariffs, but in doing so, needs a large injection of working capital to cover the expenditure (hence cancelling bonuses), and also puts itself in a very vulnerable position where cash flow is concerned by tying up that capital in inventory - any further sudden and unexpected costs could lead to the business folding.
But that’s not even the point of this. It’s not the company is greedy or not, it’s this administration is causing this.
Oh I know. I was just trying to shed a bit of light on whether this company’s decision was an attempt to take advantage and screw people over, or a genuine survival measure.
The root cause is ultimately the tariffs that will be imposed by the US government.
In reality the decision will be more nuanced, and this company will likely raise prices wherever it can whilst also securing long-term stock at current prices to both avoid the tariffs and increase margins to recover the capital quicker.
But yeah. It’s all down to the government’s tariffs.
Yeah, this seems like those redhats need a union.
But that’s socialism!
Them: Make America Great Again!
So, like the 1950s?
Them: Yeah!
When corporate tax rates and union membership were much higher?
Them: Not like that!
if anything like it happens in Turkey, most businesses will buy early, stockpile goods as prices keep increasing (increased effect of tariffs + shortage of goods in market) and release them to the market for a hefty profit
they’ll pocket the difference, jack up prices, refuse bonuses next year, business slows, lay off half the staff, buy material on credit–maybe siphoning some of that off, bonuses are now a distant memory, jack prices up again. business slows to a crawl, lay off more. business falters. file bankruptcy with millions of outstanding debt to write off.
just like their diaper-wearing idol would.
Well you’re 💯 correct on what Trumps would do!
As an individual small business owner however, they could have gotten caught in the squeeze between contracts and tariffs.
That’s the thing though, most customers don’t expect the price increase because they’re fucking idiots who believes tariffs are good for the economy.
Large and small manufacturing companies have contracts for orders for months to years out with set prices, some of which might have wiggle room for costs but not to this extent. Plus manufacturing already tries to balance out costs across projects due to fluctuating prices for materials. If their materials double (or more) in price they will be screwed by the contracts and guaranteed to lose money on all of them.
Buying at the current prices means they will have to pay to have the materials stored in a warehouse, which will cut into their planned profits for those existing contracts. Hell, they might be buying at a higher cost than they normally would when fulfilling the contracts.
The company is getting screwed, not trying to fleece customers or their employees.
I’m pleasantly surprised how level headed the replies to that comment are.
Obviously I don’t know the business in question, but it’s quite possible that the company has a bunch of longer running contracts that would become a loss if the inputs become much more expensive.
Of course, businesses will use the opportunity to charge more, but sudden price hikes are a very real problem.
I want to hope that it’s this
I sell steel, and we have been telling everyone to buy as much of their estimated annual usage as possible right now in order for us to hold the pricing, especially if it isn’t mill runs and double especially for exotic alloys.
It’s going to fuck over so hard the small machine shops that are prevalent everywhere that just do whatever jobs get called out and don’t really have the sway or size to be able to negotiate a better deal.
The same machine shops that were flying Trump memorabilia.
This is almost certainly what’s happening. The proposed tariffs will be very hard on American businesses and devastating for the consumer. It’s quite literally a fairly severe tax on domestic companies and the American people. But, honestly, we could do with a less consumerism in this country. Unfortunately, it’s likely to cause a tough economic downturn that will hurt poor people the most.
that will hurt poor people the most.
As is tradition.
Beatings will continue
Be hilarious if Trump simultaneously collapses the economy and starts a green movement built around an inherent need for a second hand economy.
Stranger things have happened. Like him getting elected, for instance.
And 20 million voters disappearing into thin air…
Well, they didn’t disappear into thin air. 12 million less people voted for Harris, so basically the democrats lost the election more than Trump won it. Trump got basically the same number of votes as he did against Biden.
Yes that’s what I meant though. Their votes disappeared. Our electronic voting machines have known first hand vulnerabilities.
I think they figured it out finally. They’ve been trying to gain access this entire time, and some Republican traitors are being prosecuted for it as we speak. Or were. I guess laws don’t matter anymore since America is finished.
Does it matter? This wouldn’t have happened without Trump being elected and the looking threat of tariffs. Whether the owner is using that as cover for jacking up the prices or not, it’s still a LAMF moment.
Oh I don’t disagree! I’m just wondering if the owner is face-eaten or face-eating. Small business owners are more varied than big business leopards.
Roleplayers be like
Unfortunately, this kind of ignorance comes from a weakening of our education system. It’s not just on them that this has happened, and its only going to get worse if we don’t try to stop it.
Hey, exactly! The fact that we are even allowing this nonsense is a true testimony to how extremely important education is! If you remain ignorant, you are more easily persuaded to believe anything because you aren’t taught what “bullshit” is, and have no real ability to think for yourself.
Education is freedom from ignorance.
And that’s why red states are slashing school budgets en masse and continue to have consistently terrible academic performance.
Don’t forget the propaganda.
This!!! I don’t actually expect our K thru 12 education system to inform the average people about macro-economic policy impacts. This is about being gullible, hearing what you want to hear, refusing to listen to opposing opinions with an open mind, and hero worship.
So if there’s anything to blame on our education system (and society culture at large) it’s a lack of critical thinking education and an excess of magical thinking education that emphasizes blind agreement with authority.
Maybe it’s because I took economics as far back as high school, but even just from reading high school history books I knew what a Tariff was. How the FUCK did they not know that?
I am also willing to bet that they will eventually blame the democrats for breaking the system, as they always do.
Maybe thr PA education system didn’t include things like the great depression
There’s a fair portion of people 21+ that have difficulty playing blackjack because they can’t add to 21. Last night I was asked by a grown man what 9+1+3 is.
You’d be surprised how incompetent some people are.
Holy shit. I never put this together.
Last time I was at a casino I kept asking myself: who honestly thinks any of this is a good idea, or thinks that any of these are “games” in the conventional sense? Now I know.
Edit: I have also been confronted with people that simply cannot do addition, period. It’s wild.
The quickest and easiest way to win at a casino is not to buy in, don’t play. You’ve got the right idea!
Even if you’re competent at arithmetic in school, those skills can definitely atrophy. I say this as someone who’s unreasonably slow at basic arithmetic despite being an ex-mathlete; I got complacent because I’ve been learning and using graduate level maths, so I thought that would keep me from getting rusty. Nope — it turns out that basic arithmetic that you’d use in daily life is a different “muscle” to the kind of maths you use in academic research (which is obvious in hindsight)
I can’t imagine how much I’d be struggling if I didn’t have a good foundation to be starting from
You aren’t alone. Historically before calculators were common, engineers and mathematicians would actually have books with basic arithmetic answers already done, or they would hire people (usually women) called ‘computers’ (no joke, that’s what the term was used for before computers as we know it were invented) to do the basic calculations for mathematicians so they can focus on the more complicated stuff.
So even a highly talented mathematician from the 1910s and 1920s would still struggle as you do.
This is only tangentially related, but I’m reminded of a thing from Plato where he was complaining that communicating through writing was a bad way of doing philosophy. His concerns weren’t just around communicating ideas between people; he was even opposed to writing as an introspective tool to help a person think through their ideas, or make notes to come back to.
"And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.”
- Plato, “Phaedrus” ^([citation needed])
It’s interesting because I don’t think he’s necessarily wrong about the skill atrophy angle of it. It’s just a question of to what extent we need those memory skills in the modern era.
There is a question of just how much better or worse human memory was in the old days. Some say it was better because there just aren’t that many things people need to remember, so they can remember what they consider to be important more easily.
Laws were generally far more rudementary and easier to remember. People didn’t need to remember as many numbers as we do now, and as a general rule, the amount of news and events that the average person contended with within their lifetimes was also far fewer. I remember learning a fact that the average amount of news and information a person gets in just one week today is actually more than what the typical farmer would get in their lifetimes. That is mind boggling when you think about it.
I worked in customer service for 7 years. I am aware… so very aware…
To give you an idea, when I worked for Verizon mobile, it was a few times a week that I came across a client who did not know how to hang up their cellphone calls. No joke. It took such a while to get them off the hook it wasn’t funny. And if you ask me why I wouldn’t hang up on them, it was because Verizon had a strict no hang-up policy. You were not allowed to hang up on a client no matter what. It was grounds for immediate termination.
Maybe it was a HR call to test your patience with customers
One thing that fascinates me is that Trump’s definition of tariffs seems more like the definition of kickbacks.
As he was (is?) a landlord, he may also think of it as seeking rent, like how malls get rent from the stores inside.
This is definitely fake, but it’s tremendously funny so I choose to believe it’s real
This is definitely fake, but […] I choose to believe it’s real
2024 election in a nutshell
They all thought the foreign company paid the tariff.
This is probably what Trump thinks, too. I can easily believe he is that stupid.
I’m also wondering just what the fuck Trump and co. are going to do with all the money obtained from these tariffs. Just, like, spend it all on hookers and blow or what? Remember how you all believed this was the party of “low taxes?” Yeah, guess what a tariff is, fuckers.
This is probably what Trump thinks, too.
100%. If he isn’t reading it from a script that someone else wrote, he knows nothing about the topics he’s talking about.
He even boasts about “knowing more than anyone about XYZ”, yet, it can’t expand on the subject, can’t answer questions about it, is vague, and reminds me of how really bad LLMs answer questions.
I found some additional articles on what he said about this, and he did indeed flat out say he expects the “other countries” to pay the tariffs. For instance, this.
A sweeping tariff policy will kill two birds with one stone, Trump says: It could find a new source of revenue for the U.S. government, which could offset losses from lowering or eliminating certain forms of income tax, while extracting money from rival governments.
That’s not how tariffs have worked at any point in history.
Yup. He does a great job “selling” ideas that simply aren’t grounded in reality.
Like that wall that Mexico was going to pay for. What an idiot. Did his base think the United States would just send Mexico a bill for work completed and expect them to pay it? You couldn’t make this buffoonery up!
You couldn’t make this buffoonery up!
Well somebody did
I had a boss like this. Had all these million dollar ideas but no capacity to consider that someone else had the same idea and it either made no damn sense or it had already been done and people went to jail for it. Motherfuckers dream up grifts halfway and think everyone else is an idiot or sucker for not acting on the “golden opportunity”.
Don’t forget who paid for the wall … I mean Mexico totally was writing the checks…fucking idiots.
When it’s returned to the feds it’s just destroyed. Federal return is just the return of debt, it’s not more money.
Yeah he’s literally said that he thinks the foreign country pays it
I mean the whole point is paying a tariff so American companies make the goods instead for less.
But if paying Chinese poverty wages and tariffs is still less than paying Americans to do it, then guess what they’re going to do?
It’s also dumb to just assume that foreign companies can just flip a switch and start building/assembling whatever they sell in America. You need facilities, you need to hire employees, you need to train employees. You can’t just pick up your factory, drop it in Kansas, and just slot people into the building to work it right away.
Also, unless your plan is to exclusively export to the US, then it’s less cost effective to open up new facilities in the US. You just raise prices and and have the consumers take the hit for the tariff. There’s also the problem of logistics for raw materials for whatever products your manufacturing. Those also tend to cost more to acquire stateside.
The worst part is that policy is only a single bullet in the policy foot gun Trump has loaded. It gets even more expensive when the low cost labor is suddenly deported and/or put in camps. Which I realize isn’t even the worst thing about the immigration policy, but just pointing out that it too has consequences to these same people.
What do you mean my car is now valued for so much less? Well see all the parts are all manufactured overseas, so we have to pay tariffs to acquire the parts and they cost much more. Higher repair costs, lower value. Also, your car insurance just went up.
Repairs on any products you currently own, more expensive.
Don’t worry, in 10 years these prices will stabilize and we’ll still have 8 dollar an hour minimum wage, but a new car only cost 80,000 starting. Well that’s MSRP, Desantis banned direct sales of ICE cars without going through a dealership, so they need their cut.
We were going to subsidize vegetable based meat substitutes to drive the cost of food down, but instead we decided we should ban lab grown meats from existence, and not subsidize the vegatable based meat because if I I don’t know if I’ll like it, NO ONE else is allowed to try it!
Welcome to America, home of our grave
I don’t know if this post is true or not. However, a lot of people don’t know history, civics, & economics. (This is the result of the Reagan & Bushes dismantling of the education system.) I’ve told a lot of people to look up the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and the impact it had on our and the global economy. Tariffs will start a trade war. That’s what happened to our farmers the last time Trump was in office. He ended up having to bail out farmers which cost more than the tariff brought into the government. The Chinese simply bought their soy beans from other countries instead of paying for ours. There were a lot of farmers that lost their farms then.
I’m sure the corporate farmers were happy to buy up that land and cut the trump admin a nice check for the convenience.
I have been told many times to feel bad for those farmers, that they aren’t idiots, etc.
I thought I ran of fucks for them but a few more just flew out like butterflies from a dusty chest.
I hope ever single one that put up those massive Trump signs loses their family farms to big corporations.
We need fewer corporate farms, which are dirty as fuck now let alone after they gut the USDA. I hope that they lose their family farm to two gay dudes from Vermont who got really into organic gardening and decided to cash in their b&b for corgis to start growing high quality produce right here in America’s heartland.
A hardcore leftist reposting a tweet with the user/source mysteriously cropped out? 'yall a bunch of deramged, crybaby tards.
They don’t need to buy a year of stuff. They need to buy American. It’ll be more expensive, but people should not be cheap. We’re not appliances and Chinese people also aren’t appliances.
Who’s going to pay for all the expensive American stuff? Nobody, because they already barely afford the cheap Chinese stuff.
Well that’s because the money is going to China instead of back to Americans.
I mean, that sounds pretty reasonable. But can you list any countries with isolationist economic policy that are more prosperous than America? I can’t. How do you account for the loss of inflow of foreign money into America after America stops spending money elsewhere? You can’t.
Well that inflow is from what we’re selling, right? Not buying.
Also, Denmark? They seem alright. Correct me if I’m wrong about their policy.
Denmark just happens to have strong social programs, significantly better than the US has ever had. Free education, healthcare, employment benefits, and wealth distribution through taxes. Not comparable at all.
Trump’s Tariffs are BIDENS FAULT! And they’ll STILL be Biden’s Fault EVERY TIME I vote for the man who LITERALLY campaigned on creating these Tariffs!
“you won’t have to vote anymore” --the diaper, july 2024
So they immediately left that meeting and started talking about how to unionize, right?
Right?
Not sure what a union would have done in this case. The problem is near term cost of inputs vs long term contracts with fixed revenue.
I’m not saying it would be bad for this to kick them into forming a union, only that it wouldn’t have solved this problem unless the union had an education campaign to explain why excessive tariffs are bad.
And the union organizer’s name? Albert Einstein.
not exactly shocking, not the first time Trump has made tariffs. Last time they drove the cost of house construction up.
In already prepared. I haven’t bought anything but the small food essentials since 2020. I’m 100% with consuming and will for the foreseeable future.
Was about to pull the trigger on a new car, but decided to go a much cheaper route and replace my nearly dead computer instead. A mid-tier computer and me sitting at home gaming for a few years will be insanely cheaper and less financially risky than an SUV under Trump’s uneducated shenanigans.
Hold MAGA voters accountable for their choices. Every. Single. Day.
Thanks Trump.
I’m about to print off about a million of those “I did that!!” stickers that the magats loved to stick on gas pumps. You better believe those things are going everywhere.
I don’t want to put blame directly on individual voters, in the sense that they might be able to learn in 4 years, and “Trump did that” only addresses the symptom of the problem. “MAGA did that” sounds apt to me.
They didn’t learn in 2016, why would they now?
I’m already too optimistic but perhaps a more direct awareness campaign on how climate denialism, economic isolationism and anti-immigration stances hurt themselves, their friends family and neighbors, and directly make their lives worse.
This tells me the information pipe to voters is broken, and hacked.
People live in their own social media realities. There has always been ignorance, but it’s never been so widely personalized. And Trump and the GoP played it like a fiddle.
And just watch, the Dems are going to learn precisely nothing from this and campaign like it’s the 1950s again, thinking policy was their problem.
The sheer stupidity of the dems is kinda astonishing. The reason why Obama won is because he had a goddamn narrative. Yes we can! Change you can believe in! It’s almost like they were onto something… then they did nothing.
Dems learned nothing and are all out of ideas!
