Amazon Itself Is Practically Made in China
The retail giant’s tiff with the White House over tariffs is indicative of a much larger problem.
Amazon planned to display the cost of tariffs on its products until Donald Trump called Jeff Bezos. Except Amazon did not have plans to do any such thing. It’s the supposed tariff outrage of the day for the Leftmedia.
It started Tuesday morning when Punchbowl News — a “membership-based news community” named after the Secret Service nickname for the Capitol — reported that “the e-commerce giant will soon show how much Trump’s tariffs are adding to the price of each product.”
It wasn’t long before White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denounced the “hostile and political act by Amazon.” Trump then called Bezos, the billionaire socialist inauguration donor and special guest with whom he has developed a rapport. Bezos has not been Amazon’s CEO since 2021, but he’s still executive chairman. “Jeff Bezos was very nice,” Trump said. “He was terrific. He solved the problem very quickly, and he did the right thing. He’s a good guy.”
The “solution” was that Amazon was never going to display the cost of tariffs in the first place. “The team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products,” Amazon spokesperson Tim Doyle said in a statement. “This was never approved and is not going to happen.”
Haul is a more direct competitor to Temu, which is basically a consumer portal that connects consumers with manufacturers in China. Temu now includes a line item at checkout to show the “import charge.”
Amazon may be lying about whether this idea was ever in the works, but the company’s explanation is believable for a couple of reasons. Calculating the specific tariffs on goods depending on the country of origin and product category would require a significant programming overhaul, and Trump has, by design, made this an ever-moving target, so the calculation would frequently have to change. Far more importantly, Amazon doesn’t want to tell you how many products it sells now cost 145% more because they are made in China — even on a direct-from-China site like Haul. On the contrary, Amazon goes to great lengths to hide the country of origin for many products.
Amazon trails only Walmart in retail sales in America, and both companies sell gobs of products (sometimes cheap knockoffs otherwise known as stolen intellectual property) made (sometimes by slave labor) in China. Before China joined the World Trade Organization under Bill Clinton — and long before Amazon existed — Walmart heavily marketed the fact that its products were “Made in the USA.” Those days are long gone. As for Amazon, The Daily Wire says the retail giant “sources over 70% of its products from China.”
That’s hardly surprising. If you’re one of the millions of Americans who’ve shopped for gadgets at Amazon, you know that identical products are often sold by random companies you’ve never heard of. PJ Media’s Steve Green tells of one scenario involving companies like RayCue, GIISSMO, and PULWTOP, explaining:
There’s a factory somewhere in China, maybe using Uighur slave labor, probably using stolen intellectual property (IP), and certainly with a CCP stamp of approval. It churns out jillions of identical consumer goods, but it doesn’t export them. Export companies wink in and out of existence, set up shop on Amazon with some semi-random name, selling identical goods at near-identical prices.
Good luck getting customer service from Ubangiwangi when your widget dies before the warranty is up because the owner, the mysterious Mr. Chow, went out of business. He set up a new shop — BICHENCAMARO, this time — in the same offices, exporting the same garbage from the same factory.
Back to tariffs, the Bezos-owned Washington Post reported on its own poll, saying, “Nearly 2 out of 3 Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the tariffs.” Well, Trump’s tariffs aim to rectify some terrible imbalances in recent decades. That doesn’t come free, and not imposing tariffs is costly, too.
Regardless of Trump’s goals or the merits of his plan, tariffs are taxes, and consumers bear the cost. “In April,” Newsweek reports, “the Treasury Department reported $15.9 billion in tariff collections, compared to $9.6 billion the previous month.” Who paid for that? We did.
No wonder Trump doesn’t want that fee displayed, even if he also argues the goal is worth the price.
Few companies want to deter customers with a lengthy list itemizing all the specific reasons a product costs $X. Materials, machinery, transportation, wages, benefits, union dues, other nations’ taxes and tariffs, etc. all factor into a product’s retail price. Yet there are also plenty of instances where tolls, taxes, and fees are separately listed on your receipt. It’s a good reminder that government costs a lot of money, not just the service or product you’re buying.
Leavitt asked rhetorically, “Why didn’t Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?” On the one hand, that’s a bit of a non sequitur, but on the other hand, there’s no way Trump’s tariffs add anything remotely as much to the price of goods and services as Joe Biden’s massive inflation bomb did. There’s also no chance that U.S. tariffs are as costly as the policies and, yes, tariffs other countries impose upon American companies and consumers.
And Amazon doesn’t seem to mind helping China do it.
