If we lost Digikey, Mouser, and AVNET, it would be catastrophic. Entire US engineering divisions would leave for Shenzhen.

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.

> > 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 often miscalculate tariff costs.

> Charge a blanket tariff fee like Mouser.

The importer still needs to pay the correct tariff.

Also, according to the article, a big part of the problem for is that Digi-Key does substantial business selling imported parts to non-US buyers. It’s fantastic for the US that this business can exist (money flows into the US and actual good jobs are created), but the tariff system makes is difficult to run this part of the business and there’s a lot of pressure to move those jobs and the revenue to a different country that doesn’t have this problem.

The accounting of it all would be far from trivial.

Mouser has become unreliable. Most of the analog parts we've ordered get cancelled and customer service has no clue why.

Just once I managed to get to some kind of manager who told me point blank "we won't sell this part to startups."

I worked at Mouser as an engineer for a few years. This included work on the service that charges this blanket tariff rate, which includes incredibly complex business logic that ended up taking half the year to make. and that was with upper management pushing us very hard to get it done. Digi key from what i understood is a smaller company that lacks the ability the capacity to get something like this done as fast. or at least thats my best guess. Mouser knew the obstacles digi key dealt with when it came to things like capacity, storage, and developer power. I remember the discussions about how we could "beat" them out in sales revenue and why we were more "bulletproof" in the way we did business.

Anecdotes are not data, so here's some data:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/C307RC1Q027SBEA

US Factory build out investment increased from $80B/year to $240B/year under Biden.

Trump's economic policy has managed to undo $30B of that so far, and the trend is accelerating.

Even if tariffs are refunded at some point, the cost of implementing and managing the tariffs, list sales, lost opportunities and so on are not. Nor is the cost of recovering the tariffs from the government.

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)