| It was a conversation about costs driving increases in sales prices. No need to twist my words. I mentioned price in the next quoted sentence even. It's public because they are publicly traded. How about you venture a guess at how many non-investor customers had any knowledge about that call. Maybe some number caught a news article, but it wouldn't have been an appreciable number. > false covenant Seriously? Even if it was a "false covenant", it was to *INVESTORS*! For an investor, it's happy days if they recoup those costs because that's a net increase in revenue. The company set the price for the good based on their costs. Customers bought the good based on the price advertised. The fact that the company might be able to reclaim some of those costs has ZERO bearing on the price customers paid. That's as far as you need to look. Trying to contort the situation to conflate it with fraud is disingenuous. They didn't lie or defraud anyone. > Political bias There's no political bias in discussing the core aspect. Sure, the situation leading to it is politically charged, but the core of the issue is the company made a pricing decision based on their costs, the customers bought the products, and in the future the company might be able to recoup some of their costs. On your last paragraph, a few things. First, tariffs were paid and have not been refunded. They are still trying to affect that change. Second, they made no promise to customers regarding tariffs. Third, you happened to use the PERFECT word here to explain why your entire argument is flawed. You said "collected in payment of a tariff" with "collected" being the operative word here. Costco did no such thing. If they had, you'd have had a line item stating so, like the one for taxes. Costco is obligated to collect and remit taxes. The importer of record is obligated to pay the tariff (or ensure it has been paid). They didn't say they were increasing prices by adding and collecting tariffs. The raised prices to offset the cost of them having to pay the tariff or to cover the higher cost of purchasing goods from parties that imported the goods and paid the tariff. This entire lawsuit is flawed at it's core as is this entire line of argument. |
Thus the whole disingenuine "gotcha" where we say " ha ha ha, it's not on the receipt" is just a fraud to pretend the customers weren't explicitly itemized out in the investor call that they were partially paying a non-zero amount for what turns out to be a zero tariff.
Of course, we reveal your whole 'receipt' nonsense as a fraud -- the investor call came before many of these purchases while a receipt comes after the purchase yet you anachronously flip things expecting the receipt to be used to know about something that is only issued after the transaction. So you're receipt argument is flawed it its core and safely dissmissed.