Tariffs: paid by the citizens
Refunds: paid by the government (with the citizens’ money)
Make it make sense
This is a tricky one, though, isn’t it?
The end price of the console is ultimately set by the retailer. The retailer will typically make that price higher than they got it from the manufacturer. Some of that cost was paid by the retailer as tariffs, maybe some extra manufacturing costs were higher because of tariffs.
Who is getting the refund? A Japanese company? Or the Americans who had to pay tariffs? Either way, Sony don’t sell directly to the consumer, so the retailers would have to be gifted a refund by Sony, and then choose to trace and refund their customers.
I’m I completely wrong about this? How should this work?
Sony can’t get a cut if it’s a used physical disc., which is why they’re moving to digital only.
Since they passed that cost to the consumer, they should be legally required to play it back to the consumers. A refund on a tariff that the consumer had to pay should not be legally pocketable by the business, that should be legally considered theft or robbery.
It is not the fault of the business, but if they incur more operating costs refunding the money they overcharged on the consumer, then they need to sue the government to be reimbursed for that.
They’ll just follow suit with Nintendo, who are already being sued for this, with their defense being, “the customers got what they paid for.”
Let me play the devil’s advocate.
The question is, how do you legally know that they passed all that cost on to the customers? After all, customers did not pay the import fees directly. It will be a hard case to make.
Also, a majority of Americans voted to introduce tariffs. It was a big part of Trump’s campaign from the start. The reason Sony received this money in the first place was because of errors made by the American government, making the tariffs illegal. It was the US government that is responsible for this money, not Sony.
All the prices went up.
Also, 77m voted for Trump which is 32% of the voting age population.
As a percentage of the overall population it is ~23%.
That’s not a majority.
The prices went up, and customers accepted that price. Bargaining after the deal is made generally doesn’t give you a strong position.
The American definition of a voting majority is not relevant here. What matters is that Americans put Trump in place, knowing he would impose tariffs, making foreign products more expensive. Just because millions didn’t vote for him, doesn’t exclude them from the consequences.
Please stop using that logic. The people that voted is a representative sample of the population, done. Is you’d forced every one of voting she to vote then it probably would have been similar result. Because people that didn’t want to go both will have their vote split randomly to candidates.
Honestly given these two choices, not voting means you’re ok with either.
This completely ignores both jerrymandering and voter suppression, both things real and impactful in US voting outcomes.
People who can vote and do not could just as easily have been lazy Trump voters as anything else. They’re political dark matter. They don’t absolve a populace.
“Of the people who didn’t bother to make a choice at all, maybe most of those didn’t want this” is not a compelling argument.
The person above me said a majority voted for it and I corrected them. I’m not sure what relevance your comment has to our exchange.
“Of the people who didn’t bother to make a choice at all, maybe most of those didn’t want this” is not a compelling argument.
It’s just as well I didn’t make that argument then. I don’t appreciate being strawmanned.
PS5 lifetime shipments reached approximately 95.3 million units on a sell-in basis — meaning shipped to retailers, not necessarily activated in consumers’ living rooms. That’s genuinely impressive territory, approaching Nintendo Switch numbers.
If by approaching Nintendo switch numbers you mean 60 million units behind the switch lol
