Should we all be getting tariff refunds right now?

Companies are getting billions of dollars back. How about us? It seems simple, right? We paid higher prices for imported goods because of tariffs. Then the tariffs were ruled illegal. Courts said the money paid to the U. S. government had to be refunded. Companies are getting that money now. It would seem like we, the customers, should get paid back, too. But … it’s not so simple. Once again, we’re dipping back into the drama of import tax law. We’re engrossed in the ups, downs, betrayal, and romance of … the Days of our Tariffs. In this edition: “Refunds and Regrets.” How and why some companies and people are getting their IEEPA tariff refunds and other people are out of luck. Live Show: - Planet Money Live at Kilkenomics. Kilkenny, Ireland Nov. 6th - 7th https://kilkenomics.com/ Read Planet Money: - Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life https://lnk.to/i3AukBdD - Our weekly longform Planet Money newsletter https://n.pr/3zrFvUB - Our weekly Indicator round-up newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/indicator Follow Planet Money: - Instagram https://n.pr/3FqLuws - TikTok https://n.pr/3sGZdrq - YouTube https://lnk.to/iCVDaW3C - Facebook https://n.pr/3h92GwS Listen to more Planet Money: - Our short, daily podcast, The Indicator from Planet Money https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510325/the-indicator-from-planet-money - Over 1,000 episodes in our archive on the NPR App https://app.npr.org/aggregation/510289 Merch: - NPR Shop https://shopnpr.org/search?q=planet+money&options%5Bprefix%5D=last - The Planet Money game, Sell Me A Sasquatch https://shopnpr.org/products/planet-moneys-sell-me-a-sasquatch-board-game?_pos=1&_sid=c2996cc29&_ss=r Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more atplus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. This episode was hosted by Kenny Malone. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and James Sneed. It was edited by our executive producer Alex Goldmark. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was engineered by Jimmy Keeley and Cena Loffredo. Special thanks this week to everyone who wrote in with a tale of tariff drama. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:17Speaker 01

  This is Planet Money from NPR.

• 0:23Speaker 02

  Shouldn't we all be getting tariff refunds right now? Because I have not received one, even though I, and likely you, listener, paid more in general for goods as a US consumer because the companies selling us those goods had to pay tariffs. And now, a ton of those tariffs have been struck down by the Supreme Court. The US government has started to pay billions in tariff refunds to companies who, again, passed along tariffs to us. So they get the tariff refunds even though they made us pay tariffs. Sometimes, they made us pay those tariffs indirectly, or just partially, by baking them into higher prices. But sometimes, as is the fateful case at the center of today's episode, companies flat-out told us, here's the tariff, you pay it.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Do you remember-- are you at your desk? Like, paint as much a picture of when you go through the process of buying this. This is gonna be the soap opera part.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  OK. I was honestly, probably in my bed, just scrolling.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  This is Planet Money listener Amy Choi. And, OK, being on a phone in bed is not obviously a soap opera scene. However, we here at Planet Money would argue that tariffs have turned even the most mundane parts of our lives into a slow-burning saga that may happen in small ways, but really do add up to an economic drama of historic proportions. It's easy to miss, it plays out in tiny ways, but we should notice them. And that is why, from time to time, we will force the spotlight of a soapy melodrama onto something like, you know, Amy Choi, sitting in bed, scrolling and scrolling. Not necessarily shopping, but then she sees the email.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  The email says that, hey, the Playdate is back in stock.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  The Playdate is a very small handheld video game console that is not made by any of the famous video game companies. I don't want to call it a modern hipster Game Boy, but it is a small-batch, pricey, retro-styled handheld video game device that sells out all the time. Until last year, at the height of the tariffs, Amy got the email. Playdate was back in stock. And you think what?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  You know, I'm thinking, hey, you know, I completely forgot that this thing existed, but it's cute. There's probably quite a few games, you know, on the catalog now. Let's give it a shot.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  Amy goes to checkout, Playdate console, $229. Cover that makes it look like a pizza box, $20. Tax for California, where she lives, $24.28.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  And I have a line item here for tariffs at $14.02.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Amy thinks, all right, I'll pay the tariffs.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  I think, as consumers, we sort of, we put a lot of trust in these companies, right? When we buy something, we're like, you know what? If they say I owe $14.02 in tariffs, then I must owe $14.02 on the tariffs, right?

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Amy didn't know it, but she was about to become a main character in the days of our tariffs.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  Like the sands through the economy, so are the days of our tariffs.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to Planet Money. Today's episode, refunds and regrets. Could a tiny video game system be the companion Amy Choi had longed for? Or could it be the beginning of betrayal? We will get an unusually intimate look from inside the company that passed their tariff along to Amy, and their decision about whether or not to also pass their refund along to her. Plus, why applying for your own personal refund is, yeah, it's a whole mess, but you may have options. We'll walk you through them after the break.

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• 5:27Speaker 02

  If I were in charge of tariff refunds, I would set up an official website with one of those, like, giant fundraising thermometer graphs. And every day, it would get a little less and less full of red until all the tariff money has been paid back. But there isn't that. Instead, the US government has to make these occasional filings with the Court of International Trade, which I've been pulling regularly to give me a glimpse into how refunds are going. And the last one I could find said that as of early September, $122 billion of tariff refunds had been paid back. To which companies, to how many companies, doesn't say. But what I can say is that about $200,000 of refund money is making its way back

• 6:12Speaker 02

  to the company that makes the Playdate video game console. Not because it was in the filing or anything, because I asked them. How do I say your name, by the way?

• 6:21Speaker 05

  Oh, it's Cable, just like a cable.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Cable, like Cable Guy.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  You got it.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Cable Sasser is CEO and co-founder of Panic, the company that makes the Playdate. They're based in Portland, Oregon. They're tiny, like 25 employees, probably most famous for helping launch a video game called Untitled Goose Game, in which you wander around and just be a goose. I know it sounds silly, but genuinely, it was a big deal and was very fun. Anyway, the dramatic part of Panic's story, the one worth soap opera-fying. Well, that starts about seven years ago.

• 6:54Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, we just really wanted to try something different. And, boy, did we try something different.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  The Panic company announced that they were going to make a physical video game console, even though they had never made and sold a physical object before. The Playdate was going to look a little like an early iPod. It was going to be taxi cab yellow. And uniquely, one of its controls was going to be a built-in crank. Imagine, like, the thing you use to work a fishing rod. Now, the initial run was only 20,000. Panic had no real idea what they were doing and decided to work with a consultant, who then decided to put them in a factory in Malaysia.

• 7:34Speaker 05

  The consultant we sort of worked with had had great experiences making things in Malaysia. Specifically, working conditions were good. He said you don't need to worry about something called Shadow Lions, which is where they make your product, and then they make a bootleg of your product.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  I like Shadow Lions.

• 7:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, some really interesting things that we learned through that process.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  The first 20,000 Playdates sold out in 20 minutes. Panic made more, those sold out. It was a mostly straightforward manufacturing business until Cable starts to hear the rumors in 2025 that President Trump is going to announce some huge tariffs. Were you thinking, like, please don't pay attention to Malaysia? Please don't pay attention to Malaysia?

• 8:18Speaker 05

  For sure. 100%. Exactly correct. There was a lot of that. Maybe there'll be an exception for, I don't know, something, yellow game systems. Like, I don't know, we were just praying.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Alas, the tariff gods did not answer. Yellow video game systems were not spared. Malaysia was not spared. It costs about $120 to make a Playdate. The tariffs were going to increase that cost by 10% to 20%, Cable said.

• 8:45Speaker 05

  At first, we ate the tariffs. For a few months, we're just like, I guess this is what everybody is doing. I don't know how, you know, we just gotta, we just gotta suffer.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  But after eating about $100,000 in tariffs, they simply couldn't make the finances work anymore.

• 9:02Speaker 05

  We thought, this is actually a really bad idea. What this is is a tax. We should just put it on the checkout as a tax.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Like, really explicitly pass that tariff along to the customer, as in an additional line item at checkout saying, here's how much extra you owe to cover the tariff. That line item that Planet Money listener Amy Choi saw.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  At $14.02.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  And next to that tariff charge was a tiny hyperlink, which Amy either actually didn't see, or she definitely didn't click on it. She didn't click on it.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  No.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  OK, so the CEO of Panic had written an explanation for the tariff line.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Oh, like, personally?

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Yes. It is so long.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  What did it say?

• 9:47Speaker 05

  OK, I found the original note, and let me do a dramatic reading.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, go ahead. Give me your best soap opera voice. Again, Cable Sasser. And here is what Playdate buyers could have seen at checkout if they clicked on their tariff line item.

• 10:01Speaker 05

  As of right now, United States Customs and Border Patrol is billing us 19% for every Playdate we receive at our warehouse in North Las Vegas, Nevada, because Playdate is manufactured in Malaysia. Our margin on Playdate is already quite low.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  So I'll just jump in here to say, the entirety of what Cable wrote would take about two minutes to read out loud. But the gist is, high-end materials, stainless steel, tariffs, really annoying situation, constantly changing, yada, yada, yada. Here is how the note ends.

• 10:30Speaker 05

  Just so you know, we hate this. We know money is tight for everyone. We thank you for your patience and your kind understanding. Our deepest dream is that we can delete this line item and this page someday soon.

• 10:45Speaker 05

  That was a lot.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  It is a lot, but Amy Choi didn't click on it and see any of it. All she saw was that Panic was going to charge her for the tariff, and it was $14.02.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's business as usual, right?

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Is it enough to make you question, to like hover for a second before you hit confirm?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  I am ashamed to say, for me, no.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Amy buys the Playdate. One week later, shows up. Oh, oh, it makes, okay.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  So that's the sound it makes when you unfurl the crank.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Next thing Amy knows, she's playing Root Bear, in which you pour mugs of root beer for bears.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  So that's what, that's the sound that it makes when the pour is right at the line.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  Or on lunch breaks, she finds herself playing a Devils in Space-themed pinball game.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Oh, and I went straight down the middle there.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Before bed, Amy's running the elevators at a hotel for penguins.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Now that mucks, is that a good thing?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  I think they're happy, yeah, because they got to the floor that they needed to go on.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Amy loves video games, on PlayStation, on the Steam Deck. But was, was this, this Playdate, was this something different?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  It's just, it's a joy to touch and hold.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  And I like the idea of it being there for me if I need it, even if I don't take it out a lot of the time. You know, it comes to my desk with me when I, when I start work for the day. And then, you know, when I'm back in my bed for the evening, you know, it's, it's on my bedside table.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Amy wasn't even thinking about the tariff she had paid anymore for the Playdate, but was a tariff betrayal looming?

• 12:27Speaker 06

  Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  November 5th, 2025, the United States Supreme Court.

• 12:33Speaker 06

  This is AIPA, a statute that Congress carefully crafted to grant the president admittedly broad powers to address foreign arising emergencies.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  You may remember this, the Supreme Court was asked to rule on these so-called AIPA tariffs. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act is a 50-year-old law that lets the president do some extra kinds of things during national emergencies. Now, President Trump had said one of those extra kinds of things was tariffs, and that is why or how he did a lot of the tariffs. The Supreme Court then said, no, that is not one of those extra kinds of things, and then undid those tariffs. And then lots of us said, wait, we've all been paying for these AIPA tariffs. Is the government going to give us back all of that tariff money they collected?

• 13:20Speaker 05

  I think everybody was just kind of waiting with bated breath to see what this was going to look like, but with the expectation that it would probably be a mess.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Maureen Thorson is one of the country's top trade attorneys, and as such, is becoming something of a regular on our show at this point. And initially, Maureen says, no one knew if there was even a plan for what to do with all of that tariff money the government had collected.

• 13:44Speaker 05

  It's somewhere in the $166 billion to $170 billion range is the figure that the government tends to cite in its own filings.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  And then, were we expecting, like, every dollar of that to be eligible for a refund?

• 14:01Speaker 05

  Well, it depends on who you talk to now.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  I'm talking to you, Maureen.

• 14:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know that trade lawyers expected anything. All of this was so novel. And we routinely had clients going, well, how does this usually work? And I'm like, there is no usually here.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, wildly unusual. And frankly, it's been hard to even track what's been going on as a reporter, which is why we asked you, listeners, for your own tariff refund stories, experiences, nightmares. And a lot of you got in touch with us. And I think the takeaway was whether you paid $14.02 on a tariff for a video game system like Amy Choi, or you paid a $250 tariff on a dress for your sister's wedding, like our dear Sarah Gonzalez did. Or maybe you paid around $18,000 in tariffs, like one listener and small business owner. The takeaway is that lots and lots of us are not in control of whether or not we will get to see a cent of tariff refunds. And that is because, generally speaking,

• 15:03Speaker 02

  we did not directly pay tariffs at the borders. Companies paid them and then passed them along to us, which means that it is the companies that are eligible for refunds. And then we, well, we are left to hope, pray, litigate for those companies to also pass those refunds to us like they passed the original costs on to us. Now, we called Maureen Thorson, trade attorney for some of the nation's biggest companies, because she is seeing this all firsthand better than we can. And the good news from what she's seeing is that the US government has been shockingly good at getting a tariff refund system up and running for the companies.

• 15:44Speaker 05

  You go into your data portal account with US Customs, submit a spreadsheet of all your entries by entry number on which you paid AIPA duties, and the agency works its magic on the backend, validates those entries, and then refunds your money.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  It's sort of like filing your expenses at your company.

• 16:06Speaker 05

  It's fairly simple. But again, if you're a corporate importer of record, it's fairly simple.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Sure. What is not simple at all is like, I don't know, what I would call everything else, including how a company might figure out who amongst us should get some of that refund money, and how they would refund that money, which depends on how they passed along the tariffs in the first place. So let's look at the two main ways, Maureen says, that companies did pass along tariffs to us consumers. Way number one is what we'll call the, the delivery company situation. In this case, you personally ordered something from another country. Your package arrived at the border, and someone needed to pay the tariff. And so UPS, or FedEx, or DHL, they paid the tariffs.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  And then the delivery company said to you, we're not delivering this until you pay us back for the tariffs, plus service fees, probably. Now, this was exactly the situation, you may recall, our beloved producer James Sneed ran into during our first episode of Days of Our Tariffs.

• 17:10Speaker 05

  I opened the door, and immediately he is like, I have this package for you. I need a check for $60.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  The good news for James, and possibly you, listener, is that UPS, and FedEx, and DHL are all setting up systems to get their tariff refunds back to you customers. It depends on the carrier, but you may get that refund automatically. You may have to do a little work.

• 17:36Speaker 05

  All right, pressing the button.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Producer James, by the way, went online to check his refund.

• 17:41Speaker 05

  Says you're, oh, what happened? Okay, that was strange. I got a error message.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, refunding millions and millions of packages and tariffs is a fairly complicated process, may have some kinks. But okay, that is the delivery company situation. What about all the other kinds of situations? Let's call those the pass-along situations, where you have a video game maker, or a shirt seller, or whatever, that imports their products into the US, paid their tariffs, and then charged us more when they sold those things to us, either by raising prices or maybe adding a tariff line item. Now, this is the category I really wanted Maureen Thorson, trade attorney's, perspective on. Like, should we expect tariff refunds from those companies?

• 18:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, and it's going to be difficult because companies reacted to the tariffs in a variety of ways. Some of them raised their prices to cover the entirety of the tariff. They passed the whole tariff forward. Some of them ate part of it. Some of them ate the cost for a little bit, but then eventually couldn't do that anymore.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Maureen and I spent about an hour doing some combination of what I might call tariff refund debate and therapy, because Maureen is very realistic. She knows how companies think. And I, I want my money back. But Maureen said, think about it like this. Like, you go to the store, and you buy maybe paper towels. And you notice that the paper towel company is now charging a dollar more.

• 19:12Speaker 05

  For a company that's raising its prices, how do you untangle how much of any specific price increase that a consumer might have seen, you know, on the retail shelf, was tariffs versus overall supply chain issues, versus inflation in the economy? Like, how do you tell that the price of these paper towels on the store shelf is actually like, hey, these went up by a dollar over the past year, and precisely one quarter of that is tariffs?

• 19:44Speaker 02

  I mean, I do, I'm very pro-consumer on this one. I do understand the logistics problems. But it is like, I overpaid, and then when that got straightened out, I didn't, I didn't get any of the overpay money back. And that's just like, wait a second. But you did get the overpay money back, but I overpaid. It's just like, the money's going to the wrong person.

• 20:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, but, I mean, realistically, what do companies do with money? They give the money to shareholders.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, buybacks.

• 20:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, they either, they either pay the money out to their shareholders in the form of dividends, or they use the money to make more things, better things, create more factories for making more things, et cetera. So they reinvest it.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  And you know who aren't the shareholders? The consumers who bought the items.

• 20:28Speaker 05

  Exactly. In terms of it being, is it absolutely like physically impossible for them to untangle that? Maybe not, but it would be.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  I mean, at what point are you like, well, we spent more money figuring out who we owed $5 to than was worth each person's $5? Yeah, yeah, that's true. That said, you could argue that the best possible conditions for a possible tariff refund is the situation at the center of today's episode with the Playdate video game system because they had individually broken tariff charges out on every single order with, of course,

• 21:07Speaker 05

  just so you know, we hate this.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  That very long CEO-written explanation.

• 21:12Speaker 05

  That was a lot.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  Panic's customers had paid about $100,000 in tariffs that Panic would get in refunds theoretically. And, you know, Cable Sasser, the CEO, says that, like, that much refund money, I mean, that is so much for his tiny, little 25-person company.

• 21:33Speaker 05

  It's, it's something. It's meaningful. And so, yes, there was the, you know, I'm going to say the little angel and devil cartoon characters on my shoulder, and they were like, hey, maybe, maybe people will forget. Maybe they won't, maybe they won't even know that you charged them a tariff. And then, you know, I'm like, ah, get out of there.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  But also, $100,000, that is a salary for someone at Panic.

• 21:56Speaker 05

  So on the one shoulder, I got the devil going, hey, maybe you should keep those. May, may, maybe the people won't even remembers. Okay, now that's too far.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  You may have gone a little too far.

• 22:06Speaker 05

  Won'ts?

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, won'ts is too far.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  After the break, our thrilling conclusion.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Is the devil in the best of us? And how the video game industry approach to tariff refunds may explain the entire mess we're about to get into. You won't want to miss it.

• 22:33Speaker 04

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• 23:47Speaker 02

  Amy Choi remembers it like it was yesterday, mostly because this was basically yesterday. It was a Tuesday. She was at work, kind of working.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm probably being distracted by my phone, but I probably saw the email, email on my phone.

• 24:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  The subject line says, "Playdate Tariff Update."

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Were you thinking like, oh, no, are they going to shake me down for more tariff money?

• 24:08Speaker 01

  No, I wasn't quite thinking that. I thought it was maybe just like a general announcement.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Amy opens the email.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Okay, so it says, "Hello, at some point, you ordered a Playdate from us. When you ordered from us, we charged you for the tariff that we were being charged by the US government for every Playdate manufactured. As you may know, since then, the tariffs have been ruled illegal by the United States Supreme Court as an overstepping of authority and inappropriate use of the IEEPA. Finally, those tariffs have just been refunded back to us. And so, we are refunding the tariff back to you. We have just automatically processed a refund for the tariff amount of $14.02 back to the original card you used when you ordered. There is nothing for you to do on your end. You should see it within a few business days. We remain grateful for your support of Panic and Playdate.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Best, Panic."

• 25:02Speaker 05

  And what do you think?

• 25:04Speaker 01

  You know, I, I was really touched.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  I, I'm not saying that to, to be silly or dramatic here on, on the air here. I, I really, like, it made me kind of do a double take. I was like, wow. I was not expecting that at all. I think, you know, as consumers, for, for a while now, we're, we're sort of being conditioned to expect less and less from, from companies and businesses, right? And, and a great example, by the way, is like, you take Sony and Microsoft's approach.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Oh, catching strays, Sony and Microsoft. But yes, okay, Sony and Microsoft also make gaming consoles, the PlayStation and the Xbox, respectively. And as a gamer, Amy has been carefully watching how these other game companies have been handling their customers during all of this tariff and tariff refund stuff. And as it's played out, these companies have given us, honestly, a perfect spread of options for what we as consumers are seeing and can expect when it comes to tariff refunds. So let's start with the best-case scenario, the Playdate with Panic. They are giving all the money back. And to be fair, it is relatively simple for them to do that as a direct-to-consumer company that had spitefully broken out tariff into its own line item, and then an employee

• 26:21Speaker 02

  named Kyle could write some code and make the tariff refunds happen. On the other end of the spectrum, though, you got Sony and Microsoft. They both raised prices during the tariffs, but it's not like it was broken out into an easy-to-trace line item. They sell consoles in all kinds of ways, through all kinds of intermediaries. And they said price increases were because of things like a challenging macroeconomic environment, which has improved to some degree, I would think, with presumably giant tariff refunds in their coffers. And yet.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  They've outright come and said, you know, we got those refunds, but we're, we're not going to be giving them back to, to the people who bought, you know, PlayStations or Xboxes.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  No, Sony and Microsoft have even said, like, look, we raised the price, consumers bought at that price, they agreed to our higher price, nothing shady here. And if I were a Sony shareholder, which I am not, I would probably agree with that decision. If I had bought a PlayStation during tariff times, however, which I also did not, I would probably say, but you made me pay extra, and now you got a bunch of money that I probably paid. And then I would probably throw my PlayStation controller across the room. But, you know, we can contain multitudes on this kind of thing.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Um, and then you also have companies like Nintendo, who sort of took like a, a middle approach, right? They're sort of in between Playdate and Panic and, and the other guys, where they were like, you know, we got the refunds and we're not going to pass them back to you for buying a Switch, but instead, here is this customer appreciation sale that we're going to have on our games.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Yes. Nintendo announced a 30% off sale for two weeks. And if you're just hearing about this, well, bad news, it's already over. You missed your chance for a refund by buying more Nintendo stuff. But again, how realistic would it have been to actually issue direct refunds when Nintendo Switches, for example, are sold through a million channels and come in like 20 different varieties? It's probably not realistic. So a 30% discount for two weeks? Like, that is much easier. This, though, is why Amy, and clearly other people in the Playdate video game world, felt real feelings when they got that email from Panic. And when she got that email, Amy immediately hopped onto the Playdate subreddit.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  I think people felt really touched, people felt really taken care of. It was a very overwhelmingly positive.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, for the same, well, let me ask you this. You paid a lot of tariffs over the last, whatever, year.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  How many other refunds did you receive?

• 28:59Speaker 01

  I think none.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Which makes this so singular and exceptional.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  And I, I guess, sorry, one other question, and I don't know if you know the answer to this or not, but like, is it just something that the team sort of decided collectively was the right thing to do? Or is it very much coming from, I forget what you said his name was, the, the CEO?

• 29:18Speaker 05

  Hey, maybe you should keep those.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, Panic CEO Cable Sasser. And he says the devil on his shoulder was very real. That refund money would have been a huge help.

• 29:28Speaker 05

  But on the other side, the angel, I guess, is actually just the company that I work for. It's all the great people that we work with, and we sat down and talked about it. And we knew that, that, that, uh, that's the right thing to do. You gotta, I'm not going to do an angel voice. What would that even sound like?

• 29:42Speaker 02

  But after much badgering, I did convince Cable to do an angel voice.

• 29:46Speaker 05

  Give them back to the customer.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  I loved it.

• 29:51Speaker 05

  But, yeah, it was, that was a decision that we made.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Have you talked to any other companies about this decision?

• 30:00Speaker 05

  So unfortunately, that was going to be one of my questions for you.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 05

  Which was, are we the only people that have done this?

• 30:11Speaker 02

  The answer is, I don't think we know. Like, no one's like, seems to be keeping track of this. But here's what I can say, like, we did a call out in one of our episodes, asking like, do you, have you received a tariff refund? The only example that we have gotten of someone getting money back from a company is you.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  And it was also the example we were aware of before we asked for the call out.

• 30:33Speaker 05

  Oh, man. Okay, well, I was afraid to ask that question.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Do you feel like a sucker?

• 30:42Speaker 05

  No, no, I don't feel like a sucker at all. I'm, I, I don't. I think, I think we did the right thing, and I think that we.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  The devil was right, by the way. No one, I don't think anyone would have noticed.

• 30:52Speaker 05

  I know.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  They wouldn't have noticed.

• 30:53Speaker 05

  I agree with you. But this is just how we roll. This is just who we are. So, yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Refunds, regrets, just more grains of sand in the hourglass that is the days of our tariffs. We should note, Microsoft and UPS are among NPR's financial supporters. If you find yourself living through a tariffs saga, maybe you are a foreign seller who dropped your prices to help out your American customers who are going to have to pay tariffs, but now those Americans are getting refunds through UPS and FedEx, and you are not. Oh, no, are we sometimes the ones getting the money we shouldn't get? It's possible. We know tariff incidence, as the nerds like to call it, can play out in many ways. So tell us about how it's playing out in your life, and you could be the next star

• 31:44Speaker 02

  of our occasional soap opera series here. Email us at planetmoney@npr dot O R G. Also, live show alert, if you live in Ireland, and I guess are not, waiting for tariff refunds, you can come see us live. Kenny is coming to Kill Kenny, the city. We're going to be performing at the Kill Economics, Economics and Comedy Festival in early November, a couple of shows, actually. It's going to be a really good time. We'll put a link to more details in the show notes for this episode. This episode was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kessler and James Snead. It was edited by our executive producer, Alex Goldmark. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and Sam. It was engineered by Jimmy Keely and Sina LaFredo. I'm Kenny Malone. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

• 32:35Speaker 00

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