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.
You have now been banned from Lemmy.World
This is America. You’re not a person unless you’re a corporation.
It didn’t take long to go from “corporations are people” to “the only people that matter are corporations”
The companies are the ones who paid the tariffs directly and then passed the cost onto their customers.
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.
That’s great in theory, but in practice these days the US sets tariffs the way rideshare companies do surge pricing.
Also what happens when the companies are forced to eat part of the tarrif, if the tarrif is 15, but that pushes the prices above the maximum profit point (units sold * per unit profit) then how much tarrif back should the customer get?
Fuck that. They should push back against the government.
They did and they got the tarrifs refunded.
The issue is that with markets nothing is tightly coupled.
Personally, I don’t think anyone should get anything back for unnecessary luxury items like video games. Food and health products? Maybe. Video games? No way. If you’re willing to pay $90 for a video game designed for five year olds, you can afford to take the hit.
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.
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.
Corruption
That is far from the universal standard especially for non-s&p500 companies who compete against the prices set by the s&p500 companies. In competative markets/industries the importing party doesnt always have controll over when their order ships and what the tariff rates will be at time of shipment. It takes 3-6 months for large import orders to be dwlivered with landed price adjustments. The list price isnt going to fluctuate with every penny movement. The price is dictated by the market price and share of market a company holds. So a lot of times the tariff shock isnt going to find its way to the list price in any less than 3-6month time span. To reiterate, this is for products in a competative market. Your iphones, pc parts, game consoles are not competstive markets. The pipe fitting valve (PVF) industry is a v9mpetative industry. Hundreds of mfgers, accross hundreds if not thousands of skus
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.
You reminded me of a b rated movie about some old coots in NY. There’s a kid who says that to anything anyone says to him.
a b rated movie about some old coots in NY.
What, you mean this?
1974 Law and Disorder - free on YouTube
I was really just trying to be funny by mentioning the film Nintendo would like everyone to forget, which also happened to vaguely meet your description, but thank you for telling me the correct one.
I quit gaming. It’s in a shitty state so why bother?
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
You don’t sell the same amount of product when you have to increase the price. You may need to shrink your business to not get the remaining margin getting eaten up by operational costs.
Oh yeah, our sales have tanked this year due to the tarrifs. Customers keep asking us to find ways to avoid tariffs, but the parts are MADE IN GERMANY
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.
So the years you have good sales did you ever pass the extra earnings on to the customer?
Edit: ****crickets ****
€hareholders,baby!
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.
The whole point is that the economies of scale don’t work to pay your staff and fixed costs at lower numbers. The damage is nonreversible, like economy studies show when you have uncertainty on the market.
Honestly, everyone needs to just cut the loss and move on. At least on the monetary front. Trump should see repercussions for enacting an illegal tax.
Like getting Al Capone on tax evasion, I’ll take it.
You want to move on, like a coward or progressive. I want a war queen that bears grudges for generations.
We are not the same.
I said specifically monetarily. There is no winning that fight. Either way we pay and end up giving even more money to capitalist class.
Wrong. Have you seen the warehouse fires? We have been “moving on” from every injustice we’ve experienced for our entire lives. Its past time to put your civility to bed and become the gremlins the government fears.
Get mad. Break shit. Burn down the fucking bourgeois bullshit. Throw a dildo at a cop. Piss on your local politician.
Whatever you do, DO NOT BE COMPLICIT.
That’s exactly why I said monetary in the context of these tariffs. You’re not reading what I’ve actually written, your putting a lot of added meaning that isn’t there. String up the traitors, but suing the government or company for tariff money is not going to work.
Not with that attitude.
Do you know how much money is lost by workers every year on “use it or lose it” vacation systems? Its hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. And do you know what you can do to get that money back? Launch a fucking lawsuit.
Do not give up. Do not become complicit in your apathy. Fight in ALL venues, be that taxes, courts, or in the streets.
None of that has to do with tariffs. You’re still not reading what I wrote. Work on reading comprehension and then come back.
Friendly reminder that the Boston Tea Party was about tariffs. We know what works.
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.
You gotta bide your time. Can’t build your forces when you are busy scraping for food. Make them think you are satisfied with the minimum, and prepare in the meantime. UBI doesn’t mean people don’t work; it means they can work for what they want to work for.
Nah. Seize the means, comrade.
Let’s see more of this.
Heh. Yeah right. They passed that tariff cost on to you but no way will they pass the refund on.
Hence the reason of the the lawsuit
Good luck with that. It may take ten years and result in a huge settlement which each individual consumer will get less than a dollar back. The lawyers will certainly make the most.
They won’t get less than a dollar; they’ll get a coupon toward additional purchase from the sued company.
Class action is only about punishing the company and not minding that lawyers will pocket all the proceeds.
The way Nintendo prices things a $5 off coupon is gold. I bought my kid a Legion Go instead of a switch. He can actually pay Forza on it vs Mario kart.
And the players should win this case. It’s pretty obviously true that Nintendo would be recovering tariff money twice.
Customers should get the refunds as this is business already transacted. Nintendo should get a “loss of potential sales” award due to it being priced out for many consumers, due to the tariffs. How that number would be determined is best left to people smarter than me.
Its even messier. Nintendo is a customer of the companies that produce the discrete parts, and paid tarriffs on them. Then they sell to a retailed at wholesale who sells to the consumer. The retailer may or may not also have paid a tarrif on the finished product. So what waa the final retail proce composed of? How much of it was Nintendo’s? How much of it was… Say… Walmart? Who is on the hook for it for the consumer?
What a fucking mess.
Is Nintendo one of your hose companies that’s essentially the same price everywhere?
Nintendo:
Almost perfect. You forgot to replace “community chest” with “shareholder portfolios”
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 Nintendo have been litigious cunts the past few years and it’s poetic justice?
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
Bad decisions about the cost and timing of console releases and failure to support older systems. Nothing to do with IP management or legal decisions.
Because they’re gamers, not Walmart customers. It’s literally the first two words
I think it’s presumptuous to assume that the increase in prices that just happened to be identical to the tarrifs had anything to do with the tarrifs.
all of this shit fuckery is a big win for lawyers ;)
How exactly was Nintendo unjustly enriching themselves. Sure it’s morally wrong. But legally? Nintendo is free to raise their prices, tariffs or no tariffs, it’s not price gouging since Nintendo products aren’t essential goods. And people are free to buy their products or not buy. That the government wants to give them a bag of money is a different matter from the price hike, if they want to sue someone sue the government.
That the government wants to give them a bag of money is a different matter from the price hike
It is not. They raised the prices precisely when the tariffs went into effect. There is no other plausible explanation as to the reason for the hike. You are licking corporate boot.
Im not licking boot I did say it was morally not right. The suit just doesn’t have any legal ground to stand on especially not with the current admin.
