During the height of Trump’s trade war with China, where tariff increases were announced on an almost weekly basis, companies like Logitech responded by significantly increasing the prices of their products in the US.
Earlier this year, the US Supreme Court ruled that these tariffs were illegal and must be returned to manufacturers. However, there’s been no sign of companies passing on the refunds to customers, and a class action lawsuit is now seeking to correct this …
The Trump tariff saga
Last year, Trump seized on the US trade deficit with China and seemed to imagine that imposing far higher tariffs on products made there would force companies like Apple to move their manufacturing to the US.
That was, of course, always impossible. The US lacks the manufacturing infrastructure, expertise, and affordable labor force needed to support the production of consumer electronics on the scale of major brands.
Trump persisted in his claim that the tariffs would be paid by China, when the reality was that they were paid by US brands importing their manufactured goods – and those increased costs were passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. At the height of the madness, those tariffs reached 145%.
In Logitech’s case, the company increased the prices of around half of its products by as much as 25%.
Consumers should be refunded
The US Supreme Court eventually ruled that Trump did not have the authority to unilaterally impose these tariffs and said that the sums paid by US companies must be refunded. This is now happening.
The problem is that the costs were ultimately paid by consumers through the price increases, and there’s no sign that any of the affected companies plan to issue refunds to their customers.
Law firm CPM has now filed a class action lawsuit against Logitech, seeking refunds for those who paid the higher prices while the tariffs were in effect.
Millions of customers bought everyday products—a mouse, a keyboard, a webcam—and paid an invisible tax that the Supreme Court has now ruled should never have been collected […] Logitech kept every penny. That’s not passing through costs. That’s pocketing them.
9to5Mac’s Take
There’s no doubting the principle here. The companies paid the tariffs, passed on the extra costs to their customers, and are now being refunded by the government. Morally, they should refund that portion of the purchase price to customers who bought their products during this period.
The logistics of doing so are likely to be massively challenging, however. Logitech would have to identify all of the purchases made through a huge range of third-party resellers, track the price they paid, and calculate the percentage of this due to the tariffs.
If the lawsuit does succeed, it could set a very interesting precedent – though we would note that the lawyers are the only ones who get rich through class action lawsuits, and that the average payout to consumers is usually very low.
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