The Supreme Court struck down a sweeping set of federal tariffs, triggering a massive government payout to businesses that had paid into the system — but whether that money makes it back to consumers depends largely on where you shop.
The government collected an estimated $166 billion under the tariffs before the Supreme Court struck them down. Walmart has received the largest refund so far at $2.9 billion. Apple has received $2.2 billion, while Target and Nike have each gotten back nearly $1 billion.
The Tax Foundation estimates tariffs cost the average household about $1,000 over the last year.
Walmart says it is rolling its refund into price cuts — more than 11,000 so far this quarter. Target says it will do the same.
But Jonathan Ernst, a professor of economics at Case Western Reserve University, says those price cuts may not benefit the same shoppers who originally paid the tariffs.
"If you paid those tariffs last summer buying a swimming pool at Walmart, and now they lower the prices of either that item or a different item that someone else then benefits from purchasing, you're not really getting that money back in that sense," Ernst said.
FedEx and UPS are going further, sending refund checks directly to the customers who paid the tariffs. Amazon says it largely absorbed the tariff costs itself, so there is not much to hand back to consumers.
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The process is more complicated for small businesses seeking refunds. Sara Albrecht, chairman and CEO of the Liberty Justice Center — which has challenged the Trump administration's sweeping tariffs in court — says small businesses were effectively lending their working capital to the government.
"They basically loaned all of their working capital to the government for the past year," Albrecht said.
Albrecht says even with refunds coming in, small businesses may never be fully made whole.
"There's so many opportunities, costs that came along with this. They couldn't hire people, they couldn't buy machinery, they couldn't invest in new products or new supply chains. Getting back their money and passing it on to customers in a perfect world would be great, but it's not really a straight pass through for small businesses," Albrecht said.
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Tens of billions of dollars in refunds remain outstanding. The legal fight is not over, either. The government has rolled out a new set of tariffs to replace the ones that were struck down, and the next court battle over those is set to begin at the end of September.
For now, how much money shoppers may see depends on which businesses they shopped with.
