‘I am crazy and spent $ 400 online’

Earlier this year, Deborah Grushkin, an enthusiastic online shopper from New Jersey, “Freaked Out”.

US President Donald Trump had signed an order to stop allowing packages from China worth less than $ 800 (£ 601) to enter the country without importing and customs procedures.

It was a movement, supported by traditional retailers who had been discussed in Washington for years in the midst of an explosion of packages that glide under the limit in the US.

Many countries, Including the UKConsider similar measures, partly stimulated by the rapid climb of Shein and Temu.

But in the US, Trump’s decision to end the carve-out, while ordering a Blitz new trade rates, including import taxes of at least 145% on goods from China, yielded a one-two punch that has made companies and shoppers falter.

The E-commerce brands established in the US, which were set up around the system, warn that the changes can cause errors of smaller companies, while shoppers such as Deborah Brace for price increases and shortages.

With the Deadline of 2 May, the 36-year-old fell around $ 400 last month on items from Shein-Inspulatory Stickers, T-shirts, sweatshirts, mothers gifts and 20 tubes of liquid eyeliner.

“I felt it might be my last kind of hurray,” she says.

The use of rules that are known as “the minimis”, with which packages with low value can become to prevent rates, customs versions and other legal requirements, has risen over the past decade.

Take-up accelerated during Trump’s first term when he raised rates on many Chinese goods.

By 2023, such shipments represented more than 7% of consumers imports, an increase of less than 0.01% ten years earlier. Last year almost 1.4 billion packages entered the country with the help of the exemption – more than 3.7 million a day.

Proponents of the carve-out, including shipping companies, say that the system has streamlined the trade, leading to lower prices and more options for customers.

Those for change, a group that includes legislators of both parties, say that companies abuse rules that are intended to facilitate gifts between family and friends, and the rise has made it easier to slide products that are illegal, counterfeit standards and other rules in the country.

Trump recently called the minimis a “scam”, which means that concern breaks over higher costs. “Maybe the children have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” he said.

However, polls suggest that concern about his economic policy increases as the changes come home.

Krystal Dufrene, a retired 57-year-old from Mississippi who is dependent on disability payments for her income, says that she has been nervously checked the prices on Temu for weeks, and has recently canceled an order for curtains after the price more than triple.

Although she eventually found the same item for the original price in the US Warehouse Network of the platform, she says that the costs of her husband’s fishing nets were more than doubled.

“I don’t know who pays the rate except the customer,” she says. “Everywhere, cheap things from China sell, so I’d rather order immediately.”

When the rules surrounding the minimis changed last week, Temu said it would stop selling goods from China in the US, directly to customers of his platform, and that All sales would now be handled by “locally based sellers”With orders fulfilled from the US.

Even without the last rates, economists Pablo Fajgelbaum and Amit Khandelwal had estimated that the end of the minimis would lead to at least $ 10.9 billion in new costs, which, according to them, would be disproportionately supported by lower income and minority households.

“It feels a bit like the end of an era,” says Gee Davis, a 40-year-old author from Missouri, who used Temu during a recent home movement to buy small items such as an electric can and the organizers of the kitchen cupboard.

She says it was a relief to be able to pay the extras easily and the new rules felt like a “cue -handle” of the government to take large, deep -rooted American retailers such as Amazon and Walmart who sell similar products – but with a larger Mark -up.

“I don’t think it’s good or fair that small treats must be (limited) for people who are richer.

“It would just be a real disappointment if anyone who was under a certain threshold of the household income simply could no longer pay for themselves.”

As with other changes in Trump’s policy, there are still questions about the meaning of the shift.

The president was already forced to suspend the policy earlier, because packages began to stack up at the border.

Lori Wallach, director of Rethink Trade, who supports the end of the minimis for the safety reasons of the consumer, says that the end of the exemption is important “on paper”, but it fears that the administration will take steps that will weaken its implementation.

She points to a recent customs knowledge, which said that products that have been affected by many of the new rates can enter the country through the informal process, a movement that facilitates some legal requirements.

“Practical, because all these things can come through informal access, it will be extremely difficult to collect rates or to be able to inspect much more than before the change took place,” she says.

Customs and border protection deny that the relocation will undermine enforcement, and notes that companies are still obliged to provide more information than before.

Companies have indicated that they take the changes seriously.

Both Shein and Temu last month Customers warned that prices would riseWhile Temu says that it quickly expands its network of sellers and warehouses established in the US to protect its low prices.

Other business groups say that much smaller, less controversial American brands produce for American customers abroad – and may not survive.

“If the rates were not in place, it would be as if you were taking a bit of bitter medicine,” says Alex Beller, board member of the Ecommerce Innovation Alliance, a company lobby group and a co-founder of PostScript, who works with thousands of smaller companies on texting marketing.

“But in combination with the other rates, especially for brands that produce in China, it will just be an insurmountable shift.”

In a letter to the government last month, men’s clothing company, known for its adapted suits imposed in China in China, warned that the end of the minimis was a “significant threat to the viability” of its company and other medium -sized American companies such as it.

Steven Borelli is the Chief Executive of the Athleisure clothing company Cuts, which produces outside the US, to send products to a warehouse in Mexico, where packages are emailed to customers in the US.

His company has insisted to reduce his dependence on China and to put orders in the country months ago. Yet he says that he is now considering the price increases and job reductions.

He says that his company has room to maneuver, because it is suitable for customers with a higher income, but he expects that “thousands of” other brands will die without changes in the situation.

“We want more time,” he says. “The speed with which everything happens is too fast for companies to adjust.”