Tariffs in Toyland

Here’s a funny thing: my two main hobbies are collecting hobbies (Star Wars action figures and, to a far lesser degree, physical media). I betcha both hobbies, and the industries they derive from, are about to get fucked. up.

Preemptively: the good news about all of this (from my perspective anyway) is that these are hobbies. They bring me no small measure of joy and satisfaction, but if I needed to ditch and pick up something new tomorrow — the stamp art of the Yukon Territory? grow-your-own cave cheese? — I could. In the wider scale of what the Moron’s One-Man Trade War With Planet Earth is going to do to the net well-being of our species, this is all frivolous, small beer.

Star Wars Celebration (Japan!) is upcoming as of this post, though, so it’s on my mind. Those of us in the Star Wars collecting community have been idly wondering for the past few weeks if what was intended to be a 20-piece new product showcase on Hasbro’s part at the convention, for example, is going to be curbed into nothingness because no one at Hasbro knows if their product is going to be sustainably* manufacturable in, say, a month.

* here I’m using “sustainable” to mean financially sustainable. No plastic-based product industry is sustainable sustainable.

The entire HasLab model — a kind of crowd-funding scheme, wherein collectors pre-purchase unfeasibly large toys that are in the ideation stage — probably doesn’t math anymore at all, if it ever did. Star Wars toys are manufactured pretty much exclusively in China and Vietnam, the countries now subject to (incredibly, even for him) 125% tariff rates. Blu-rays and UHDs, most of the ones I buy anyway, are made or duplicated in Mexico, which has a far kinder (as of this writing) 25% hike on product. Supply chains are fucked in every direction. This would all be laughably nuts, if it weren’t about to tank the global economy.

Because I am in all things a Nostradamus (and because I hate paying duty on top of a currency exchange rate that already sucks), I actually did the work of phasing out my use of American retailers for both hobbies, last year. I buy Star Wars stuff exclusively through 4th Moon now (and I’m quite lucky in that regard, given they’re literally down the street from me), and discs through Bay Street Video (which largely means ignoring the ten trillion Criterion Collection sales that come through annually, but I digress).

As mentioned last week, I did burn down the remainder of my Criterion codes to order Anora, so I guess I’m gonna have to pay some duty on that one. I also have exactly one — count ’em, one! — open Star Wars pre-order remaining, through Sideshow Collectibles; and now I’m half-wondering if I’m going to get stuck with a “tariff surcharge” on ol’ Shin Hati if and when she makes her apperance this quarter.

What’s a tariff surcharge? Glad you asked: my old friends at Big Bad Toy Store (which, per the above, I no longer use, but to no fault of theirs) explain it nicely to their customers here.

Basically: small businesses that were in no way built to absorb the insanity the White House is foisting upon the world have no choice but to wait and see what these products actually end up costing them when they arrive… and then passing those costs on to the consumer as additional fees. (Bless BBTS for, as clearly as I’ve seen it done, explaining what tariffs actually are to their customers, given that I’d lay even money that better than half of their constituents had no idea what they were voting for, back in November.)

The convenience tipping point

Here’s a bigger question: how are you phasing Amazon out of your life?

We all probably should, right? We probably should have a long time ago, but like the frogs in the boiling pot that we are, Amazon just kept turning up the heat (heat, in this scenario, equating to ease, omnipresence, product depth, or any number of other things) on its delivery model until we stopped noticing that we were all shortly to become d-e-a-d.

I draw no moral line here. Like pretty much every person in the west, I used Amazon a decent amount. Maybe not as much as some — I do not impulse-buy an Amazon product every time I think of anything, like a bored retiree — but a good amount. There are a number of things that had become substantially easier, and I mean powers of ten easier, to get on Amazon than anywhere else.

And further, re: the moral line: I absolutely recognize that Amazon is in everything now. It’s in the fucking web servers that are delivering you these words, regardless of where you are reading them, along with half or more of the entire internet. Cutting Amazon out of one’s life is a bit like putting a lot of effort into separating your recycling: it affects the heat-death of our planet not a jot. It’s just a means for us all to feel busy and useful when we are, in fact, only busy.

But also — and it’s a big but also — fuckkkkkk Amazon. They won’t miss my couple hundred dollars a month, but I will feel so much better not having given it to them.

Getting back into the world to track down products that used to be easy online purchases is, on the face of it, not as bad as I expected. There’s good cookware on the Danforth. I’ve found booksellers that will pre-order mass-market stuff for me (surprisingly tricky at the smaller niche stores). That “deluxe” Kraft Dinner that I use as comfort food four times a year… well, fuck, I dunno where you find that, but I probably shouldn’t have been eating it anyway.

I think of all this because I think globally, we passed a tipping point at some point in this century, where the convenience of everything simply became too convenient. Unsustainably convenient, here using that word properly.

And it’s easy to understand how it happened: across pretty much the history of civilization, increased convenience was pretty much always a net good over time. Things used to be harder and take longer; and then someone would invent something or learn something or whatever, and suddenly, the thing would be less hard, and less time-consuming, freeing up the human animal to diversify in ways that get us all the way to right now.

Except, slightly before “right now,” we didn’t notice the moment when convenience crossed the line into too convenient. “This is actually bad for you” convenient. “You are about to become the helpless peopleblobs from WALL-E” convenient.

I bet it happened in this century; actually, I think it happened whenever Amazon (and its ilk) decided to stop offering you the option to bundle your purchases together if some things were available later than other things. As soon as we, as a collective, decided that it didn’t matter how many brown boxes we were sending ourselves in the mail every day, we walked firmly over the borderline between “wow, neat, convenient!” and “we are just lazy fucking peopleblobs, actually.”

Worse: we got used to absolutely frictionless convenience in all consumer experiences… and then we began to feel entitled to it. The convenience became normal, no matter how it was derived; and whenever it couldn’t be found, lunatic Karens started hucking burrito bowls at high school students. That entitlement is now the weird short-circuit in our inability to apprehend the scale of our own problem: once you have a populace fattened up on the premise of point-and-click instatanaeity, how do you negotiate with them to toughen back up and take on a bit of the effort themselves?

Look at the voting results: you don’t.

Postscript

For another time: there’s an interesting parallel track to all of the above, which lies in how the self-soothing convenience economy actually kinda might need to exist, given how manifestly harder we’ve made everything else: stuff like our jobs, raising our kids, and living healthy lives.

We might be fucked in both directions.

Anyhoo…

New by me

Speaking of Star Wars figures, a couple videos of the past while:

• Unboxing Lieutenant Callahan (Ahsoka)
• A blast from the past: the Geonosian War Room figure packs from 2003

And speaking of Criterion 4Ks, I had a great time writing about Claude Berri’s Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring — new to the Criterion Collection next week — on Screen Anarchy. Do, please, read and enjoy!