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Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)
21–30 of 43 posts
Re: Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)
#22Should note that this article is from April 2025. Digikey sruvives and the tariffs are supposed to be refunded.
The supreme court overturned the emergency act tariffs, but trump immediately used another statute to re-instate tariffs (effective for six months, anyway).
For china, the supreme court ruling was effectively a 5% reduction in tariffs. The situation remains dumb.
https://www.china-briefing.com/news/us-china-tariff-rates-20... (Url says 2025 but has been updated continuously)
Re: Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)
#23It's hard to overstate how screwed hardware design and prototyping would be if companies like digi-key went under. There's only a few electronics distributors like them around and most of them are centered in the US.
If we lost Digikey, Mouser, and AVNET, it would be catastrophic. Entire US engineering divisions would leave for Shenzhen.
What about farnell and arrow?
Re: Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)
#24Anyone who works in the semi industry has been hearing management try to be politically correct when trying to explain how badly tariffs are screwing everyone over every quarter. Tying themselves in knots to avoid saying how idiotic the trump administration is. And here we are trying to wait him out until the us gets a president with a brain. Good luck I hope all can outlast this.
Re: Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)
#25If only the people responsible for the tariffs, who miss no chance to (miss)quote Reagan, would take the time to listen to his actual words regarding tariffs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t5QK03KXPc
Re: Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)
#26It seems that no one ever mentions that every dollar given up to tariffs is that much less for growing staff, equipment, facility and R&D expansion. It's literally a drag on the entire GDP and ecomomic growth. More subtle is that every dollar saved in buying components from China is more money for all of the forementioned.
Lol DigiKey has been itemizing tariffs for years. They're not "giving up" any money; it's literally an extra line item on your invoice.
For the same reason when small local businesses charge you a 3% service fee to use credit; they're not giving up that money because you wouldn't have been charged it otherwise.
Re: Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)
#27When I order from Mouser (a Digi-key competitor based in Dallas) they plainly charge a 10-15% tariff fee. I'm struggling to understand why this solution isn't obvious. You have to pass the cost onto the consumer, or your margins dwindle. It's trivial math. > People are also having to intervene in once-automated tasks. Thousands of orders that used to auto-flow directly to the warehouse floor for same-day shipping now…
Yeah that’s what I thought too. I think people are find with some 50-100% hike of prices on ham radios, oscilloscopes, and even phones, if local production starts to appear.
You can buy US manufactured oscilloscopes from keysight. A 50% price hike on one of them is enough money to buy a new car, with enough left over for a few months of bay area rent. There are much better uses for that money than throwing it into the money furnace of tariffs, like paying employees or buying half a dozen lower-end scopes manufactured in Asia.
Re: Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)
#28It seems that no one ever mentions that every dollar given up to tariffs is that much less for growing staff, equipment, facility and R&D expansion. It's literally a drag on the entire GDP and ecomomic growth. More subtle is that every dollar saved in buying components from China is more money for all of the forementioned.
Lol DigiKey has been itemizing tariffs for years. They're not "giving up" any money; it's literally an extra line item on your invoice. For the same reason when small local businesses charge you a 3% service fee to use credit; they're not giving up that money because you wouldn't have been charged it otherwise.
If you read the article, you'll see the paragraphs about all the paperwork to set up a FTZ, the delays in fixing broken/changing tariff calculations, and the fact that some of the other parties involved simply aren't paying their share of the costs. All of those affect digikey's costs.
The parent's point also applies to the companies buying product. Every dollar they spend on tariff line items is another dollar they're not sending back into the economy via expansion and wages.
Re: Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)
#29I remember ordering parts from Digi-Key in 1980 or so when I was in high school. The catalog was less than 1/4 inch thick, and listed various surplus things on the back.
It was cool to see them grow into a real competitor for the big distributors.
Re: Small U.S. town, big company. Can it weather the tariff Blizzard? (Digi-Key) (2025)
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
What lol no they’re not. None of those benefits of a price hike go to American workers. They get low wage factory jobs, not old school pension jobs, and all their stuff goes up in price? Laughable. I doubt Americans won’t even pay 5% more to get stuff made in the USA.
Ah OK, so when do we see production coming back to North America? On the other hand, didn't TMSC and other manufacturers plan to open a few spots in the US?
Perhaps after the incompetent performative fascists are evicted, all of the structure fires they wantonly started have been put out, and there is some halfway-competent administration that appreciates the scale of the problem we are dealing with.
Tariffs would have helped 20 years ago, but here they're basically just a wistful dementia echo of something that could have been. Applying a policy that's decades out of date merely further strangles American industry. This article is a great example if you actually examine the details of the situation - Digikey is an input to the types of domestic manufacturing that actually employs labor, yet blanket tariffs simply make them even less competitive.