Duty Relief (Update)

We previously speculated on the impact of the proposed Customs Tariff Amendment that would drop duty rates on 21 essential items, including a variety of food and sanitary products. The Market Place recently started tagging items as “Duty Relief Value!” while displaying the savings being passed to customers. We can now directly measure the impact of the duty relief and will do so by comparing the current adjusted price of the product with the price of the same product in our March 2022 snapshot. If the current price is lower than the March retail price, we consider it a good deal. If the current price is higher than the March retail price, it’s a bad deal because the impact on customers is negligible. Results below

A few questions before looking at the raw data:

• Why does the duty relief only appear to be applied to a small selection of items?
• Why is duty relief listed as $0 on a few items
• Why does the listed duty relief not match the duty rate? For example, the duty rate on peanut butter was 5%, but Market Place is showing duty relief of $0.13 which is less than 1.5%

Many questions around what we are seeing but there does appear to be some impact from the new duty relief. In March these items would cost a total of $37.81. Six months later, with duty relief, the same items will cost you $37.56 for a total savings of $0.25.

Whether or not that impact is significant enough is another story.

Raw data: