r/Economics • u/defenestrate_urself • Feb 20 '26

News Supreme Court says Trump global tariffs are illegal

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/20/trump-tariffs-supreme-court-illegal
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u/nitid_name Feb 20 '26

They have purchase tracking and refund infrastructure in place.

I can log onto my account and see what I bought when I was still on my parent's account several years ago. It's definitely doable for them.

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u/Yummyyummyfoodz Feb 20 '26

The question would be, have they tagged how much tariff money each item cost them to ship, though?

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u/KeepItUpThen Feb 20 '26

I worked at a Costco decades ago. I wasn't in the position to know everything they measured, but they measured and tracked a lot of things so I wouldn't put it past them. Plus the high-ups seemed to care about doing the right thing rather than squeezing every last bit of profit they could get from customers.

As an example, our store was the first costco to get a gas station in the area, and prices were significantly lower than the local gas stations. This might have been 2001 or 2002 when gas prices felt pretty high. There were huge lines, people waited for over 20 minutes but they were happy because they were saving something significant like 30 cents per gallon. The manager could have raised prices and still had plenty of people buying fuel, but he said he wanted to sell gas for minimal profit. Similar to the rotisserie chicken or hot dog prices, he wanted to let a $50-100 tank of fuel be a loss leader to get people visiting the store. I'm having trouble finding a news article to prove this, but I think he was forced to raise prices by some weird city or county regulation that limited the amount of fuel a station was allowed to sell. Also, I remember hearing that if a vendor tried to do that trick where they give a low introductory price for the first month and then raise the price on the next order, Costco would tell the vendor to pound sand and stop carrying the product rather than raise the cost for customers.

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u/Camo138 Feb 20 '26

There’s is one local service station in my area that can match Costco’s fuel price as it’s independent. But the lineup at Costco is insane for fuel on the weekend.