Nothing says “We ain’t friends no more” like a trade war. Ghosting somebody is so 2020. If you really want to hit your former buddy where it hurts, try to ruin them economically.
You may enact sanctions; remember old frenemy Russia, when it briefly looked like Russia and the West were gonna be buds in the ’90s? Or you may just launch a trade war against them overnight.
The Trump administration chose the latter when it enacted tariffs—basically, import taxes paid by people and companies bringing the goods into America, not the target country—on much of the world.
No country was hit as hard as China, which got a 145% tariff on nearly all of its goods. Not only that, but Trump revoked the de minimis that allowed for shipments worth $800 or less to enter the US from China duty free. That hits especially hard at Shein and Temu, which ship eye-wateringly cheap stuff (usually of very low quality) directly to customers from China.
The de minimis revocation takes effect on May 2, 2025. Bloomberg News, however, has been tracking prices of Shein and Temu products and has noticed that they’ve already begun to rise. In some cases, they’ve risen up to 377%.
shein who? Temu what?
Shein and Temu have managed to nail together the addictiveness of social media, the baffling ordeal that was the 1990s’ pop-up internet ads, and that game show, Supermarket Sweep, where people run around as a timer counts down, scooping up “deals” like they were passengers on the deck of the Titanic, if the Titanic were unfettered capitalism itself.
Trump loves tariffs, looking at them fondly as a fix for what ails the American economy. Few people, left, right or center, would disagree that we’ve got an ultimately bruised and twisted economic system that’s skewed from working for most hardworking people.
The White House in April 2025 enacted the strictest tariffs in American history since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, neglecting to mention that most historians argue the Act lengthened the Great Depression by years. Whoops.
Perhaps “Make America Great Again” is short for “Make America Great (Depression) Again.”
The post Shein and Temu Prices Jump Up 377% Due to Tariffs appeared first on VICE.
