The logic was “these companies ate the cost” and when confronted with the fact that prices went up and the costs had been passed on to consumers, the clarification they provided was “nuh uh”.

This is America. You’re not a person unless you’re a corporation.

The companies are the ones who paid the tariffs directly and then passed the cost onto their customers.

The companies paid the tarrif, they get the refund.

The fact that tariffs allowed some companies to demand more money, is related but not causal, some companies will have had to eat shit because the market wouldn't bare the increase.

I'd love for the lawsuit to succeed and it set the precedent that when governments issue refunds they can force companies to pass it on to the customer, but I think it's unlikely.

It's also complicated by the way pricing works.

If the tarrif is for $15 but the uncertainty allowed a company to increase prices by $20, how much should the customer be refunded?

And what if the tarrif was $15 but the market only allowed a $10 increase and the company ate shit on the other $5?

Now what if none of these numbers are set in stone and all of the numbers are guesswork? Should the government audit all companies that changed their prices?

The logic is real "dumb" or simple. The company that paid the tariff gets the refund.

Tariffs are paid at the port of entry and before you are allowed to physically get the goods out of the port. So the payer is not always the manufacturer. Sometimes it's an importer or middleman. Sometimes a retailer. It could be you if you shipped in a package from overseas.

Because the companies are the ones that literally paid the tariffs and the gov doesn't have records of how that burden was distributed, and thus couldn't possibly enforce it.

In short, they're completely unprepared for this situation they put themselves in.

There’s no logic. They don’t know how to fix the things they broke.

Taxpayers paid the tariffs once when prices got hiked, paid the resulting inflation costs, now we are paying those companies back with taxpayer money, which will continue to drive up inflation again.

We’re paying 4 times.

What is the logic behind giving a company money for the tariffs?

Well, the logic is the fact that the tariffs were illegal.

The honourable thing to do would be to pay that money back to the customers, but that would make the shareholders sad and grumpy, so it's never going to happen.

The Art of the Deal

Corruption

It makes sense if you're grifting

How do you prove a customer paid for a product and that this product paid a tarriff

Because the company handled all the nonsense of importing on behalf of the end customer (also most intermediaries).

The youtube channel HowNot2 talked about this a bit since they somehow became a(n actually really good) climbing gear store. Because tariffs were changing so frequently (often multiple times a day), basically nobody could plan for them. So companies had to balance their in-country stock with anything they were going to buy in the next few months... or even days. And try to figure out what price they might be paying.

Some companies basically just charged the tariff rate on any given day... which is bullshit since they would have bulk purchased whatever they could while they were "low". Others would eat the cost because they didn't want to lose customers by increasing the price of a preordered item. And so forth.

And... people who got their aliexpress on can tell horror stories of getting a bill once things made it through customs.

So... it actually makes perfect sense for the companies that dealt with this bullshit to get reimbursed by the christofacists. I would hope they would "pass it on" to the customers as an act of good faith (even if it is just a free game or something) but... this is a case where the problem isn't the corporations: it is the government.