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Shein and Temu lost a duty break, and their $5 tops took the biggest hit

Washington ended the tax break on cheap orders from overseas. Families in the poorest neighborhoods now give up the biggest share of their income

Imen Ben Youssef / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images

Amanda Norris, a Tampa accountant, put two dog harnesses in her Temu cart in the spring of 2025 and forgot to check out. When she came back a few weeks later, the order cost more than twice as much. "The total for the two dog harnesses came to like $33, but then the import charges were an additional $46 and change, so it brought the whole total for the two dog harnesses up to 80-something dollars," she told NPR. Norris never completed the order. She tends to "thrift almost everything," she said, and she'll shop somewhere other than Temu now.

The charges in Norris's cart appeared because a rule called de minimis ended. Under it, packages worth up to $800 could come into the U.S. without paying tariffs, fees, and taxes, according to the Congressional Research Service. It ended for packages from China and Hong Kong on May 2, 2025. That July, President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending it for every other country. The order said shippers had used false invoices and deceptive packaging to hide drugs in cheap packages.

Shein's prospectus for its Hong Kong stock listing claimed that a substantial majority of what Americans bought from Shein used to come in under the $800 limit, and most of it shipped from China. That let it charge $10 for a shirt or $30 for a dresser. Shein built its low prices partly on that rule, and when Washington ended it, Shein raised its U.S. prices, hitting the lower-income Americans who relied on duty-free shipping the hardest.

Package duties that cost poorer........

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