Marketplace - Consumers might see some tariff refunds — in 2036

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

We’ve said from the get-go that consumers paid the bulk of President Trump’s tariffs. Now that most were ruled illegal, individual businesses will get to decide whether to pass those tariff refunds onto customers. And any litigation of those decisions could take a while. Also in this episode: What’s next for the airline industry sans Spirit, why GameStop wants to buy eBay, and how states could claw back some tax dollars.Every story has an economic angle. Want some in your inbox? Subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter.Marketplace is more than a radio show. Check out our original reporting and financial literacy content at marketplace.org — and consider making an investment in our future.

Storms, floods, and fires are ever more extreme. And yet, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is fighting for its life. I've never been a big fan of FEMA. FEMA's a disaster. FEMA's a dirty way. People are waking up in droves to the FEMA camps. Can the agency survive the stories that have been told about it? And can we survive without FEMA?

American Emergency, the Movement to Kill FEMA is a brand new series from WNYC's on the media. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. It's Charles Barkley with Wayfair. It's outdoor season, and my patio set up, that'll be ready to play. That's where Wayfair wins. Patio seating, umbrellas, and grills. All delivered, fast, and easy.

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In Los Angeles, I'm Kyle Rizzdahl. It is Monday today, the fourth day of May. It is always to have you along, everybody. I will tell you what, whatever this week brings by way of news out of the Middle East and the global economy, of which we have already had quite a bit. Thank you very much. And it is only Monday. One thing the next five days are not going to lack for is economic data.

The Labor Department's April jobs report upon us Friday morning is the biggie. There will be productivity numbers, also important, never sleep on productivity, data on new homes. sales as well. This morning, we were delivered by the Census Bureau some insights into the state of American manufacturing. To wit, new orders for manufactured goods were up one and a half percent last month from a month earlier. And the thing is about that data, it is no outlier. We've had some other news of late showing orders rose in April as well. And remember, that's despite all the uncertainty surrounding the war and energy costs and tariffs, which are still very much a thing. So while you ponder why the manufacturing sector has been so upbeat lately,

marketplace of Justin Ho is on it. One category where orders have been especially strong is electronics. That category includes computers, computer storage devices, peripheral equipment. That's Tim Quinlan, senior economist at Wells Fargo. He says orders of those kinds of goods are typical of business spending in general right now. Where everything that's kind of even tangentially related to this AI buildup, is seeing a bid in activity. Quinlan says electronics isn't the only source of strength in manufacturing.

There are a number of other categories from machinery to fabricated metals and wood products that all saw modest increases in this morning's report. That could be because manufacturers are catching up after the president's tariffs unleashed all of that uncertainty last year, says Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. I do think that some of this is delayed demand that might have been sitting on the table for a while, and I do think that there is a bit more certainty now. Paul says after the Supreme Court struck down some of the president's tariffs, businesses have at least a slightly clear picture of where tariff policy is headed. And otherwise, the fundamentals of the U.S. economy, setting aside, of course, energy prices and the situation with Iran look pretty good.

It's also possible that the situation in Iran caused new orders to pick up, says Kathy Bostjansik, chief economist nationwide. I think some companies tried to get ahead of potential price increases and disruption to supply chains and try to pull in as many goods as they can. On the other hand, Bostjansik says high energy prices, thanks to the war, could also be holding back demand. Because that means higher input costs. That is a headwind. Which means if the war were to end, demand for manufacturers, goods would rise even faster. I'm Justin Howe for Marketplace.

Wall Street today, I mean, given the aforementioned news out of the Middle East the past 18 or so hours, what do you think? Stocks down, oil up, bond traders, none too pleased with any of it. We will have the details when we do the numbers. The refund process for President Trump's illegal tariffs started a couple of weeks ago, as you have probably heard. Emphasis there on the process because as Marketplace's Kristen Schwab reports, oh, it is complicated. Ann Robinson hasn't gotten any tariff money back since supplying two weeks ago. The refund will probably take a couple months. Nothing's happened. Still a valid claim hasn't been rejected. I checked again this morning. Checking her claim has become part of her routine as the owner of

Scottish Gourmet USA, a specialty grocery in Greensboro, North Carolina. While she waits, she's been thinking about what she's going to do with the $30-something,000 refund. Some of it might go to her employees, who haven't gotten raises in over a year. Some might be used to stock up on inventory, and the rest might go to customers, people who've spent big on tariff-impacted goods. Like there was a man who bought 100 boxes of shortbread. That would be a $50 gift certificate. So that's a significant chunk of change.

People who spent less, maybe paid a couple of bucks, Luxon price increases, we'll get a discount code. Of course, Robinson doesn't have to do any of this. Why return any money at all? It's not about lining my pocket as much as it's about building that relationship with that customer who's going to be with me for the rest of their life. But there's something else on her mind. I'm also scared of plaintiff lawsuits. Consumers have filed class action lawsuits against companies, including Costco, Nintendo, and TAMU. The argument is big. businesses shouldn't profit from tariff refunds.

Christine Bartholomew, a law professor at the university at Buffalo, says these cases are going to be tough for plaintiffs to win. In-class actions, you have to be able to prove how the harm can be quantified across the class in a similar fashion. The thing is, the tariffs impacted imports from so many countries and had so many different rates, rates that constantly changed. Bartholomew says that makes it. harder to draw a straight line from tax increases to price increases. If you have to do a product-by-product

reports, that's a tremendously expensive undertaking. These kinds of trials can be tedious. Imagine modeling the input costs of every item a company sells, from dish soap to diapers, for a jury. And that process reveals a lot about how companies price their products, something they really do not want people to know. It's why Bartholomew thinks a lot of these cases will be settled. That can take as long as a decade. It means in the year 2036, you might get a postcard or email saying you're entitled to collect a refund on a set of sheets you bought more than 10 years ago. It might simply be that they get a credit for a dollar and they would have to spend 51 cents in a stamp to be able to get their dollar. Pretty unsatisfying. But Bartholomew says every dollar a person redeems the

company doesn't get to keep. Also, lawsuits put pressure on all businesses to respond to customers. Josh Dillon is a co-creator of Cards Against Humanity, a card game that's manufactured in China. Even though the company paid tariffs as high as 140%, it kept selling the game for $29. But retailers that sell its game raised prices. So Dylan made a website with a big, salty banner. The Cards Against Humanity gives you your... money back. Probably can't put that bit on the radio. Anyone who bought Cards Against Humanity from any store that increased prices after the tariff started can upload a receipt. They'll eventually get a refund on PayPal or Venmo.

Dylan says the company has been vocal about tariffs since day one. They even made a deck of cards with an anti-tariff theme. Years ago, I think it was to Chicago sometime, said we had the business sophistication of a lemonade stand. And I like that ethos. In the sense that, you know, it's not that complicated. You know, we're just trying to be nice to our customers and as respectful of them as we can. Dylan says that's what's great about being a small company. No shareholders, no board. They can do whatever they want.

I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace. Spirit Airlines is no more, as you know, done in by, yes, some preexisting challenges with its business model. But more approximately, the current global energy shock. Jet fuel in particular, which is also grounding tens of thousands of flights worldwide just as summer travel season gets going. Marketplaces Elizabeth Trowal has more on what might happen now. Around the world, concern is rising over the future of flying, says Rysstad Energy's Claudio Gallimberti. In the next few weeks, you will start to see the jet fuel shortages in quite a few places. Especially Southeast Asia, where he says cancellations could go from.

sporadic to systematic. Europe will likely feel it next. And there's also California. Because California imports quite a good chunk of its fuels from outside, specifically from Asia. But American travelers overall are in a much better spot than most because of how much crude oil the U.S. produces and refines, says Kareem Fawas with S&P Global Energy. Our jet fuel market is still relatively well-supplied. Jet fuel industry. inventories are still relatively high in the U.S. He estimates the world has lost some 40% of traded jet fuel supply since the start of the crisis. Much of it is refined in the Middle East.

So demand will have to follow. And unlike gasoline or diesel, jet fuel demand is more sensitive to rising prices. A lot of the jet fuel consumption that's not business related is largely discretionary to begin with. The question is how much of that can be substituted, reduced, curtailed, how elastic is it to higher prices? The higher ticket prices go, the more likely people will opt out of flying. So Avi Regendrin with Energy Intelligence says he does expect U.S. demand for jet fuel to come down this summer. I think you're going to see a slightly worse demand in the U.S. than expected at lower prices.

But you may not actually see that much of an impact on the gasoline side because of this substitution effect of people just choosing to drive instead of flying. Would-be Spirit Airlines flyers may opt to road trip instead, which would increase demand for gasoline at a time of already higher prices and lower global supply. I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace. We got another reminder this morning, as if we needed it, that much like politics, business can make for strange bedfellows to GameStop. The video game retailer, perhaps better known for its meme stock overtones, is offering. an unsolicited $50 billion to buy the e-commerce site eBay, a pairing that might strike one as odd given their very different businesses. And, oh, by the way, the reality that GameStop is trying to swallow a far larger company.

Marketplace's Carla Javier made some calls to find out what either company could gain or, you know, lose from the deal. GameStop CEO, Ryan Cohen, has been wanting to invest in something for a while, says Wedbush's Michael Pactor. I thought he'd buy something for $9 billion in cash, and instead he's trying to buy something for $50-plus billion in cash in stock. Kind of like a minnow attempting to eat a whale, says Eric Talley at Columbia Law. GameStop says its stores could give eBay a physical space for intake and fulfillment. Talley says there could be other reasons. Another one is just that they want to try to monetize the value of their stock,

which still has quite a bit of froth. bubbleness inside it before that bubble bursts. And, you know, that's not a terrible strategy to pursue. Though he adds, convincing the counterparty is another matter altogether, Poonam Goyle covers e-commerce for Bloomberg Intelligence. eBay has done remarkably well, especially over the last few years. Maybe Goyle says GameStop could help eBay with attracting younger customers. But while there is some synergy and collectibles and video game sales, when it comes to handbags, watches, autos. You know, some of the largest categories that eBay competes

and the GameStop just doesn't have those under its belt. In general, the less two companies are related to or complement each other, the lower the chance the acquisition will create value, says Professor Paul Neri at the Wharton School. Economies of scale and cost cuts, that doesn't do it for me. Maybe that's the case scenario that we'll be able to get a billion or two. eBay will get to consider if the offer is worth it. If this is an offer that can reasonably lead to creation of a lot of shareholder value

when we receive a high premium and close this deal. Then Neri says the board is obligated to at least give it serious consideration. I'm Carla Javier for Marketplace. Coming up. But then the other kind of hate we get is, I hate this. I want to sign up. The complicated feelings of being a wedding crasher. Kind of. First, though, let's do the number.

Now industrial is up 557 points today. One and a tenth percent finished at 48,941 did the blue chips. The NASDAQ subtracted 46 points, two-tenths percent. 25,067. The S&P 500 lost 29 points for tenths percent, seventy-two hundred on the nose. The price of a barrel of oil jumped again. Today, West Texas Intermediate bubbled up three and a quarter percent. Brent Crude increased five and four-tenth percent.

That helped push up shares in some of the refiners. They make the jet fuel. Elizabeth Troval was just telling us about. Marathon Petroleum rose 2.6 percent. Valero Energy added 1.9 percent. Wall Street's reaction to game stops unolicited offer to buy the much larger eBay. eBay, eBay, not Ibray. Not super enthusiastic either way, no matter how you pronounce it. The game retail return meme stock slipped 10 and a 10th percent. The online marketplace pocketed 5 percent you're listening to Marketplace. Storms, floods, and fires are ever more extreme. And yet, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is fighting for its life. I've never been a big fan of FEMA. FEMA's a disaster. Femes a dirty way. People are waking up in droves to the FEMA camps.

Can the agency survive the stories that have been told about it? And can we survive without FEMA? American Emergency, the Movement to Kill FEMA, is a brand new series from WNYC's On the Media. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're trying to grow your business, Intuit QuickBooks payroll is an essential. tool that completely integrates payroll, time tracking, HR, and your financials into one powerful platform. And now they're evolving into QuickBooks Workforce to help you lead your business with confidence and clarity. QuickBooks Workforce combines human intelligence and AI-powered tools,

so you get smart automation without ever losing control. Spend less time reconciling and more time deciding what to do next. And as your needs evolve, QuickBooks Workforce evolves with you, Bringing together the core HR capabilities businesses expect with a flexibility to adapt your specific needs. Your processes get streamlined and you get precious time and energy back to move forward proactively. Move from reactive to proactive with brand new tools by making the switch to QuickBooks Workforce today. Learn more at QuickBooks.com slash workforce. That's quickbooks.com slash workforce. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Riz.

don't. Most of us pay the taxes that we owe. We don't like it, but most of us do pay. The catch is some of us don't pay. That's a problem for the Internal Revenue Service at the federal level. It's a problem for states, too. But while the IRS does know how much it's not getting, states, generally speaking, don't. And that carries some costs. Josh Goodman studies state fiscal policy at the Pew Charitable Trusts. He wrote about this tax gap last month. Mr. Goodman, welcome to the program, so it's good to have you on. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Just so we all have the same terminology here and to make sure that I don't mess it up,

what is, in your mind, a tax gap? Yep, a tax gap is the difference between taxes owed and taxes paid. So if you imagine what everyone would pay if they paid every dollar they were supposed to, and then you subtract what they actually pay, that difference is the tax gap. Got it. And as you point out in this piece, the Internal Revenue Service at the federal level, has a reasonably good handle on what the tax gap is. States, though, are a different matter. And there's a lot to talk about there. But in a nutshell, why?

Well, the big reason is that states simply haven't asked this question, or at least haven't required sort of a public-facing analysis of this question. So as you said, the IRS estimates estimate at the federal level, their most recent estimates showed that the tax gap was over $600 billion. But states only very rarely have analyzed the tax gap. So states really don't know how big of a problem this is. Is analyzing a tax gap hard? It is hard, definitely. And the biggest reason it's hard is because the largest part of the problem isn't people who don't file at all. It isn't people who file correctly but then don't pay. Although both of those things are part of the problem. The biggest part of the problem is people who file, but under-reported.

their income. And so you can just think about it. It's hard to figure out if people are saying they made this amount, but they actually made that amount. Or, you know, maybe they're reporting things as business expenses that aren't business expenses, things like that. Getting a handle on it is difficult. That being said, the IRS and others have proven that you can do these estimates and that they are valuable. I wonder, though, if the IRS doesn't, in a way, have it easy. because mostly they're worried about an income tax, right? States, though, have state and local property taxes. They've got sales taxes.

They've got income. I mean, they've got a lot of different kinds of taxes. Absolutely. And so that is a big difference between the federal level and the state level is, you know, these other taxes. The IRS also has it easier in another way, which is that one way you get a handle on that underreporting is by doing lots and lots of audits, including random audits rather than, you know, once targeted to people.

And so the IRS has always historically had more capacity to do those audits than, say, a state tax department has. You say capacity, and I hear it's a labor force problem that there aren't a lot of people who are going to work for state tax agencies. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's a problem that seems like it's growing where it's an aging workforce. States have struggled to recruit for these roles. One thing that the research is really clear on is if you have more people doing good work for tax agencies, including processing returns, but also audits and other kinds of enforcement roles, then you collect more revenue. And so if states don't have enough capacity, enough staff in those roles, or if they don't have experienced staff, it could lead these tax gaps to get even bigger. Right. You say something really interesting near the end of this report that you put out. You point out that,

you know, if revenue in a given state suddenly fell by like 12 or 13 percent, which is sort of Connecticut did a study, and that's what it came up with. But if revenue was down 12 or 13 percent out of nowhere, lawmakers would be going crazy. And that's kind of the tax gap, right, in Connecticut. Absolutely. It's in Connecticut and in the federal estimates. So out of every $8 that should be paid, only seven are. And I think the size of those numbers really shows why this is a topic that deserves more attention than it has received. That governments are always making hard choices. Right now they have especially hard choices because, many states have budget shortfalls or long-term budget deficits, and they're talking about things like raising taxes or cutting services such as Medicaid. And if instead governments could collect more of what they're already owed, they'd have money to spend on their priorities. They could avoid some of those unpleasant choices. But the starting point of that is really figuring out how big of a problem it actually is. Can't manage what you don't measure, right? Absolutely.

Josh Goodman, he is a senior officer of state fiscal policy at the Pute Charitable Trust. Mr. Goodman, thanks for your time, sir. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Anytime. Spring has sprung. The calendar has turned, and peak wedding season is upon us once again. May through October are typically the high months. And according to the wedding planning site, the not, the average cost per wedding guest in 2026 is close to $300. Cue the standard warning here, by the way, about inflation possibly driving that number high. What if, though, you could offset some of that cost with paying guests?

Here's today's installment of our series, My Economy. My name is Jeff Besson. And my name is Karina Besson. We've been married for almost 20 years, and we're based in San Diego, California. And we're the co-founders of Not a Wedding Crusher. So we're always trying to do weekly date nights. We usually go to the movies, the beach, comedy, and we see. started running out of things to do.

Jeff Sajat was like, hey, I wish that we could go to a wedding. And I would reply with, well, we don't know anyone getting married, Jeff. And I said, wait a minute, what if there's a way, you could just go to a wedding, but you're not actually crashing it. You're intentionally invited.

Got a developer, and we formally launched not a wedding crasher in the middle of March. So couples that have extra seats at their wedding, put those, let's say it's 10 seats that are available on our platform. We have a whole pool of verified guests interested in attending a wedding and will pay for a unique experience. The couples get to choose what they feel their wedding is worth. We have about 300 guests already on the platform signed up waiting for weddings to pop up in their area.

I think we have five live weddings pretty spread out throughout the country right now. Some people are like this is this dumbest idea ever. But then the other kind of hate we get is, I hate this. I want to sign up. Yeah. Right, which is a little, you have a little whiplash. But it's been overwhelmingly positive the feedback that we've gotten. Of the people that have already signed up, a number of them are couples that want to get a wedding inspiration. Or it's a group of ladies that want to have a girls night out.

We've also had a decent amount of people from the wedding industry sign up. They are often working during weddings and they never get to actually appreciate them and have a good time. I have a finance. I've been mostly a corporate finance person for my career. I'm doing this on my spare time like at 3 a.m. in the morning or 11 o'clock at night. And Karina is doing a lot during the daytime. And we get together in the mornings and the evenings and discuss what has happened throughout the day to figure out what emails do we need to answer. So we're juggling that.

We have three kids. So it's a busy household, to say the least. I was just going to say that sometimes helping each other out with the business looks like taking over the kids so one of us could take a phone call. Yeah, it's definitely a new dynamic. And in a lot of ways, it's actually helped us get closer. It was actually very comical in the beginning when we first started this. And I would walk down the stairs and I'd see Jeff in his office. And he'd just be scrolling wedding content and like Pinterest.

And I'm like, geez, my husband has become a bride. That is a true story. It's very funny. Jeff and Karina Besson, they are in San Diego, California. Tell us about your economy, would you? Maybe, I don't know, how much your date nights are costing you? You can do it at Marketplace.org. This final note on the way out today, which I'm going to preface with this statement of fact, despite the lies that President Trump tells about it, there is zero, zero evidence that American economic statistics are being manipulated to make him look bad.

You'll remember he fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics last August. in service of that lie. That's point number one. Point number two comes from a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. The operative phrase here is, the marginal value of public trust in official statistics. The NBER estimates that preserving trust in government data generates economic benefits of about $25 for every $1 spent on the BLS's budget.

Amir Babawi, Caitlin Esh, John Gordon, Neuer-Kar, Steve Mullis, and Stephanie C, are the marketplace editing staff. Kelly Silvera is the news director. I'm Kyle Risdon. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM. Business and the ways we do it are changing in ways that are both more subtle and more radical than you realize. Welcome to compound interest from Samafour Business. I'm Liz Hoffman. And I'm Rohan Goswamy. We've been covering the forces behind this revolution, but now we want to talk directly to the people driving that change. Each week, we'll talk to the operators, the experts, and the innovators to go beyond the headlines. We'll dig into everything from hospitality companies that no longer own hotels to companies that will finance your sushi order.

We'll unpack the transformation of how business and consumers engage with our economy and figure out what lies ahead. Listen to compound interest from 7 and4 business wherever you get your podcasts.