When DHL delivered mail to Adafruit Industries last week, it wasn’t a typical invoice but a gut punch: a $36,126.46 customs duty bill that had to be paid within seven days.
The bill comes from Trump’s multi-layered tariffs that can stack up to 170% on certain electronics components. For Adafruit, a company that supplies makers and engineers with specialized electronic parts, this creates a perfect storm.
These components were ordered months ago before tariff changes, can’t be sourced elsewhere due to intellectual property restrictions, and must be paid for immediately — not after sales are made.
Great job. Tariffs killing American companies.
Working as intended…
Correction — small American businesses. The large ones can easily pass on the cost to consumers.
It was meant to conglomerate them. One less Amazon competitor to them.
Adafruit makes some seriously useful PCBs.
If you have ever tinkered, you likely have some sort of requirement that needs a little more tech to make work. Afafruit cover that gap, and all their stuff is open source.
A genuinely good US tech company.Not only that, but they make a LOT of libraries that make using those sensors WAY easier. Arduino, CircuitPython, and more. And lots of well-written tutorials! They care, and it shows. They don’t deserve these tariffs…
We don’t like intellectuals nor investing in the future around these parts.
Money now only.
Also, somebody ate my marshmallow I can’t find it.
Needless to say, most companies aren’t Apple. They don’t have cash reserves, can’t reroute shipping, can’t lawyer/bribe up, can’t afford to lose money for even a month. We’re going to see the first bankruptcies and/or layoffs soon. Shit.
Use trumps tactic and dont pay it
I was just about to buy most the stuff I need for a cyber deck from them
Do it, they need every drop business they can get.
I’m ordering a round display and driver I was planning on testing out later. Was gonna wait but now I want to do it now to hopefully help them survive this.
It’s pretty funny to sell something and then pay more than what the sale was worth to import it. I can see a lot of US businesses getting hurt this way from the volatile auction-based tariff prices (out my ass) by losing customers or having to eat the loss.
I often hear good things about AdaFruit, so it made my terrible experience with them all the more disappointing and unexpected.
I won’t launch into the full story, but I had placed what was to me an expensive order. One item of the cheapest things I bought was missing a part. Their customer service folks were so dismissive and unpleasant, they made me try to resolve the issue with their supplier (iirc piminori or something along those lines), they insisted that there was no way this could happen because it would never have passed their quality control team, that it wasn’t their responsibility to make it right, etc. It was such a bad experience that I’ve never returned.
So honestly, I have no sympathy here. From my perspective, this sort of thing could not have happened to a more deserving company.
