MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
American shoppers paid some of the more than $100 billion collected by the Trump administration for emergency tariffs. Now that the Supreme Court has thrown those tariffs out, NPR personal finance reporter Stephan Bisaha tells us whether shoppers can expect to get that money back.
STEPHAN BISAHA, BYLINE: If you shopped at the athletic wear company, Fabletics, over the last year, you may have spotted an extra fee.
ERIN VANDENBERG: Everything I have bought since then has had that tariff charge on it.
BISAHA: Erin Vandenberg (ph) bought cardigans, vests, fleece-line leggings all from Fabletics. And for the last year, they all came with a tariff surcharge.
VANDENBERG: They're making it very obvious what's happening, but also, you're like, oh, you know, maybe I don't want to buy this.
BISAHA: For her last order, before discounts, the clothes were valued at about $520, including 30 bucks from tariff costs, and she still paid.
VANDENBERG: But I don't love it.
BISAHA: Fabletics is far from the only company that passed along some tariff costs to customers. Fabletics just spelled it out on the receipt. Vandenberg has no idea how much she paid in tariff fees to other businesses. Now that the emergency tariffs were ruled illegal, Vandenberg would love that money back.
VANDENBERG: I live in Illinois, and our governor literally sent an invoice (laughter) to the president for - I think he's asking for $1,700 for every household.
BISAHA: That's Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. Fellow Democrat, California Governor Gavin Newsom, is also pushing for tariff refunds. So are shoppers likely to get those checks or any refund?
ROBERT SHAPIRO: Probably not. And if you do, it'll be pennies on the dollar.
BISAHA: Robert Shapiro is an international trade lawyer with Thompson Coburn. Consumers should not get their hopes up because first in line for refunds will be companies. Any refund to shoppers will trickle down through them.
SHAPIRO: We're all splitting the check. But we may not all be splitting the recovery, if we can get the recovery.
BISAHA: But why do shoppers have to wait for companies to get their refunds first? After all, a recent study by the Federal Reserve found it was both American companies and consumers who paid the majority of the cost of tariffs. Shapiro says the reason is because those companies literally paid the import fees to U.S. customs. So they go first claiming their refund from the government, then those refunds can trickle down to customers. Shapiro says some businesses will pass along some savings.
SHAPIRO: Other companies will not. They'll just take it as a gain.
BISAHA: Shapiro says the shoppers wanting a cut might need to sue, but it can be tricky to figure out how much of a price increase was actually for tariffs, especially when it wasn't on the receipt.
SHAPIRO: If you're a company that said, here's your tariff surcharge, I think you're more likely to be in a position where someone's going to have a claim to recover part of that.
BISAHA: Like Fabletics in their tariff fee. In a statement emailed to NPR, Fabletics said, quote, "the surcharge only partially covers our cost increases, but we felt it was important to not pass the full burden of cost onto our consumers." As far as potential government refunds, the company said there are still a lot of questions about how they'd work, and some tariffs are still in place. Erin Vandenberg's not lawyering up or preparing a lawsuit, but she'd be up for suing companies if it meant getting her money back.
VANDENBERG: Yeah (laughter). I mean, at this point, I feel like those are sometimes the only way you can hold businesses or companies or government accountable.
BISAHA: Now, it's not always simple to know who to sue for tariffs, especially for something like a bike or a coffee maker that has lots of different parts and different suppliers all paying their own tariffs and that you bought from a store instead of directly from a company.
VANDENBERG: But for companies where it's really obvious, it's like, yeah, you should probably figure out how to reimburse people if you get reimbursed.
BISAHA: If they get reimbursed - neither the Supreme Court nor the Trump administration have spelled out how refunds for retailers would work and getting them could take years of legal fights. Stephan Bisaha, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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