When UPS charged me a $684 tariff on $355 of vintage computer parts

Summary

I try not to write anything even vaguely political on this blog because we have a variety of views on a variety of subjects and no one is here for that. We can all enjoy our geriatric little silicon artifacts together regardless of your electoral persuasion. But I was hopping mad this week, and the reason is actually on-topic, because I got hit with US Customs tariffs close to double the cost of the vintage items I was ordering and more than the items were worth. This eventually got straightened out, but it wouldn't have happened without my complaint and some time on the phone. Although we make regular trips down under, your humble author is based in California and so is the Floodgap computer lab. For newly manufactured items and parts it has generally been my policy to buy parts from United States sellers even prior to the tariffs, mostly because that gets around various irregularities and it arrives more quickly. If they're going to drop-ship then it's their problem, not mine, because they advertised it was already here. Since such items are typically newly produced, the current tariffs would logically apply and this policy thus has the additional benefit of me not having to deal with that directly: any tariff should already have been paid to get them States-side. But for NOS and used parts, especially if you are a collector like I am for certain systems, you buy where you can find them. Coincidentally I wanted to buy a second Apple Network Server logic board since my ANS 700 is acting a little weird (don't say caps) and I still want a good spare for the ANS 500. These don't exactly grow on trees but, as it turns out, the seller I bought my current spare logic board from (pre-tariffs) had another in stock. The logic board doesn't come with the regular ANS AIX ROM SIMM nor cache, so we'll want one each of those just in case, and he also had an Apple BTO Twin Turbo video card (I believe originally for the Power Macintosh 9500) which might also be nice for one of the...