I can't cite details, but I believe that case law has settled this many times.. When a customer enters a commercial business, there are implied contracts that are enforceable.. I am thinking of restaurants first. I believe it is the responsibility of the goods and services provider to show prices accurately and honor them, and variations of that are well-understood in court. These kind of transactions are common for thousands of years in the West.
>They went up to $1.25 in '21 I think. It was extensively cover by the press.
I'd love to see a citation on that, since I think you're mistaken -- there's plenty of things that are still a dollar, mostly stuff like packages of napkins or plastic cups, cards and other sundries.
(What was extensively covered was that they were no longer a "everything is a dollar" store.)
This has been a problem (for others) for years and apparently nobody knows why or how to fix it. So go through a checklist of disabling, uninstalling, clearing, removing, inserting, restarting, updating, toggling, calling, waiting, praying.
Waze (also owned by Google) seems to get it close(r), but it should be noted that actually driving to/from those addresses can't really be done. You can drive to where you might be able to SEE the destination, but not really get there.
In its defense, it has improved greatly. Back in the day, Google Maps told me to switch ferries in the middle of the sea. The car loading ramp was at an angle, so if I could just build up enough speed...
This really made me laugh. Has Will Ferrell already made a skit for Funny or Die where he precisely follows Google Maps driving instructions and runs over a bunch of old people and children? It could be very funny.
When I was a kid I loved "Dinosaur Time" by Peggy Parish (and illustrated by Arnold Lobel). Originally published in 1974 it ends, "Dinosaurs lived everywhere for a long time. Then they died. Nobody knows why. But once it was their world. It was Dinosaur Time."
There was a revision to the book (not sure the date) with changes to the text and an expanded author's note at the end that talks about the new things we understand about dinosaurs including how Brachiosaurus are no longer believed to have spent their time in water to support their weight and how it's now believed an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs.
Yes, dB is a mess and if we could do it again we ought to use something more explicit like just annotating the units with log10 such as log10(W). Then it's easy to use other convenient units like log2(W) or if you want to reproduce dBV: 20log10(V). dB is fine shorthand, but it gets used all the time in places where things should be explicit.
This isn't what it says in the thread. It's saying Nike and retailers need to maintain their markup rate on their unit cost.
> And if Footlocker purchases Nike shoes for $75, then they retail them for $150. Everyone needs to fixed percentages to avoid losses.
The problem with your breakdown is you're mixing unit costs and net profit in a way that doesn't work. For example, say after increasing the price in accordance with your summary, the volume of sales halved (just to pick an easy number). Then the $17 marked as "Footlocker expenses" increases, likely to around $34, and Footlocker's profit becomes -$10. The absolute expenses haven't changed. They're still paying the same amount for their employees and storefronts. But with half as many shoes sold, the expense per shoe is doubled.
It's not just sales volume that affects the $17. Other costs like credit card fees or shrink scale with the unit cost as well.
Just to say the obvious, they are also going to sell fewer/cheaper shoes according to the demand elasticity since the consumer price is 32% higher. Despite Nike making slightly more on a per-shoe basis, they are probably going to make less overall.
I wouldn't assume that they wouldn't segment products. Nike already offers more expensive lines with higher margins to offset less profitable ones. Why should we expect them to pass on direct costs to customers?
The blog also doesn't acknowledge the externalities of shipping. Having a "Nike USA" brand that becomes their premium domestic flagship won't incur the same logistical expenses or tariffs. I may be biased because I'm from a debtor colony that understood there's no way free people can compete with slave labor, but the distaste for compensating workers is largely a classist taboo.
People are theorycrafting ways to lose, but I would only expect that from a company that was trying to signal their disdain for current trade policy, not actually run their business.
The piece to add there is that all this money is getting paid by the consumer. The overseas piece doesn't change, same number of US dollars going to the other country. The $24 increase in cost is paid by the US consumer.
That's what I don't get. It's always phrased as the US somehow making all this money when in reality it's Americans that are paying for it. Among other reasons to be able to afford tax cuts in the future. Sure this will hurt other economies but primarily right now it seems to hurt the American economy and people the most.
It's just a sales tax. I don't know why people opposing tariffs never talk about them in this manner because sales taxes are something people innately understand if they have spent any time in the US and "tariffs" clearly aren't as well understood.
It's worse than a sales tax. Tariffs have a few market-distorting effects that a sales tax doesn't.
* Domestic consumers and companies are incentivized to potentially go for the 2nd best product. This over time can impact productivity as the tooling will decline over time as inferior solutions are bought.
* Reduced competition. We've seen this with the 25% "chicken tax" on pickup trucks. Arguably one culprit in US automakers falling behind is that they had a protected market around pickup trucks where it was hard to impossible for foreign competition to keep them on their toes. So US automakers retreated more and more into this safe haven.
* Destruction of economies of scale: If everyone wants the entire supply chain to be replicated in their country, we obviously loose economies of scale and thus efficiency. This sounds like it would be small but having multiple Shenzhen's is just not viable and we'll have to deal with higher prices and less product choice.
* Galapagos island syndrome: Over time separation of markets can lead to incompatible technologies which amplifies all other points.
Agreed, complex policies open the door for unintended consequences and have higher enforcement cost. If you do a sales tax or VAT it should be flat. If anyone thinks that it will be regressive or put poor people at a disadvantage, the answer IMO is UBI, even a small one can make up for sales tax on food while avoiding the deadweight loss from nonsense like that Jaffa cake nonsense.
> sales taxes are something people innately understand if they have spent any time in the US
The way they are done in the US is maddening. You go to the counter and find the price is higher than the tag price by some random amount. It seems to vary wherever you go and depend on what you buy.
There's actually a really good argument in favour of that -- and in favour of paying income tax not as a direct tax (withheld from wages) but with a delay.
It makes the taxes visible and painful and they will therefore (potentially) not rise as fast or as much.
It also puts more tax burden on the less wealthy. Sales tax is regressive; income tax is progressive.
But yes, that’s exactly why the American right makes taxation so cumbersome and horrible: to make people think that taxes are bad, as there’s this assumption you can have civilization without paying for it.
I think that's an argument, but not necessarily a good one
Need to balance transparency in pricing vs. visibility of taxes. I don't think sales taxes are actually all that visible most of the time- it's not like the cashier is telling you "and your taxes are $X." But it does make it much harder to detect if the store is charging you more than list price.
>And if a US shoemaker wanted to undercut the import, a Made in USA shoe that sells for $100:
Somewhere in there you have to also figure in the cost of the fact that shoe factories and the suppliers of the goods to make shoes also don't exist in the US and will cost millions, and years, to get setup.
Every country has optimized their own economy so it's incredibly cheap for us to import shoes, or it was. Now it is not, so sure we could try to make some cheap shoes here. But now we have to make cheap shoes, grow cheap citrus veggies, make cheap computer chips, make cheap needles etc etc.
How much capacity do you think the US has to manufacture these things? and what about the supplies?
You can buy made in USA sneakers like New Balance 990 series. Generally all the materials except the sole are US sourced. Retails for $200 a pair. What kind of sneakers do you buy?
Running a manufacturing business in the US is more expensive. Consumers largely won't pay more, it's a limited market. The machinery for molding soles only makes economical sense at a large scale.
They’ll pay more if the imported shoe costs the same or more.
The US does massive amounts of injection molding. I just signed off on my molds to be cut and run this month, how much experience do you actually have with this I wonder?
There is no default price.