Elena Liao at Té Company on East 9th Street. (Credit: Judah Duke)
It was a busy Thursday afternoon at Té Company, a Taiwanese tea room on East 9th Street, as customers filtered in ahead of the Mid-Autumn Festival, when families gather over tea and mooncakes. Tiffany Chen strolled in and slid onto a stool at the bar where her friend was waiting, and the two were soon sipping oolong while chatting.
Chen has been coming to tea tastings since 2019, back when the business held private sessions at its West Village location. No other shop in New York City, Chen said, serves tea “at the same caliber of quality she offers.”
But even as customers like Chen keep coming back, co-owner Elena Liao worries how much longer she can serve them. She estimates her shop has only enough Taiwanese tea left to last about three months.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in August scrapping America’s longstanding rule exempting international packages valued at less than $800 from tariffs. Té Company, which has imported directly from small Taiwanese farmers for more than a decade, has been scrambling since the country’s Chunghwa Post halted all such shipments to the U.S. in response to the Trump administration’s end of the “de minimis” exemption.
Taiwanese farmers pick tea in the district of Pinglin, near Taipei. (Courtesy image: Elena Liao)
“To say that this is going to wipe us out, I don’t think that’s accurate. Does it put a giant time bomb in your house? Yeah,” Liao said.
At least 88 postal carriers around the world have stopped shipping small parcels to the U.S., according to the Universal Postal Union, a United Nations agency, leaving an untold number of foreign sellers and American importers in limbo. The day the exemption ended, Aug. 29, the union logged an 81% nosedive in international postal traffic to the U.S. compared to the Friday before. Most of those post offices have yet to restart service.
The exemption, put in place by Congress in 1938, was meant to reduce the administrative burden of processing low-value imports. It was first applied to shipments valued under $1 and was gradually bumped up to its most recent $800 value in 2016.
Liao didn’t always sell tea. She was leading a merchandise-planning team at Victoria’s Secret when she and her husband, Frederico Ribeiro, a sous chef for the luxe restaurant Per Se, pooled their savings and founded Té Company in 2012. They started in the West Village, then opened their second location in the East Village last October. The store offers a variety of loose tea leaves as well as snacks to customers and to slow-sippers who, in the weekend peak hours, often arrive early to get a seat at the tasting bar.
Premium delivery services are still transporting goods from overseas, so Liao is thinking of switching to FedEx to source tea from the farmers she built a rapport with over many years. But such a change would raise new problems.
For one, it would be much more expensive. Shipping a 45-pound box of tea from Taiwan using the postal service used to cost around $160, and as long as the value was under $800, there was no tariff. But if she uses FedEx, the shipping charge would increase to $750, and she would also have to pay a tariff of around $150.
And switching to a service like FedEx would be no simple task for growers. Many tend plots deep in the mountains, and it isn’t clear if FedEx trucks can navigate the steep passes and rural roads, she said. Still other farmers don’t have the wherewithal to facilitate the switch. One grower, confronted with setting up a FedEx delivery, simply gave Liao his login information to set it up for him.
“A lot of people just won’t do it,” Liao said. “They’ll give up. They said, ‘I’d rather not sell it.’”
Té Co. employees navigate an afternoon rush ahead of the Mid-Autumn Festival. (Credit: Judah Duke)
A FedEx spokesperson told Columbia News Service that the company “continues to accept and transport U.S.-bound shipments from all countries we serve.”
The decision to end the exemption came about four months after the Trump administration removed de minimis status for China and Hong Kong. It lies at the intersection of two of Trump’s top priorities: a crackdown on the fentanyl trade and a broad protectionist tariff strategy.
Taiwanese tea farmers aren’t the only ones losing business.
Regret-soaked announcements on Etsy show the complaints of many small-time sellers around the world. Some are retooling, trying out new ways to retain U.S. customers. A jeweler from Ottawa, Canada, for example, recently started a special tariff-free section of its store page dedicated to Americans.
From her workshop in Tilburg in the Netherlands, Annet Nijmeijer used to ship buttons, clasps and cloaks to U.S. hobbyists every week. Then Deutsche Post, the German carrier she uses, stopped accepting parcels bound for America. Until she finds a way to pre-charge tariffs at checkout, her biggest market is cut off.
“I could ship with FedEx, but because I’m such a small fish, that will mean a lot of administrative stuff on my side,” Nijmeijer said. It’d more than double the shipping expense — at least $25 for a parcel that used to cost about $11.75 — that U.S. customers would have to pay, she said.
Some specialty shops are also feeling the squeeze.
At Roni-Sue’s Chocolates on Forsyth Street, owner Rhonda Kave said she stocked up ahead of the cutoffs for ingredients like the sakura flowers from Japan used in her Sakura Saké truffle. The country’s carrier, Japan Post, stopped shipping most packages to the U.S. more than six weeks ago. Even with her cushion, she’s watching cocoa butter, nibs and finished chocolate double in price under the new tariffs. Kave said other sources of income, like weekly confectionary classes, are helping cover the costs.
At Myers of Keswick, a British grocery shop in the West Village, owner Jennifer Myers-Pulidore said chocolate prices have crept up unevenly over the past year. Biscuits that once sold for $5.95 now go for $6.25, while bags of chocolate that sold for the same price have risen to $6.50.
The only formal U.S. tariff on U.K. goods that would apply is a 10 percent baseline duty imposed in April, but additional surcharges — combined with rising cocoa costs and shipping uncertainty — have magnified the effect. The U.K.’s Royal Mail was the first foreign shipper to roll out a prepaid-duty program tailored for U.S. customers, modeled on a system it already uses for the European Union.
On the Upper West Side, Zachary Chin, owner of Knitty City, gestured to a wall featuring yarns from at least five countries.
“Everything we get comes from somewhere else,” he said. Chin buys from distributors, which have absorbed much of the tariff expense, he said. But he’s still seen prices for the yarns increase twice in the last six months.
Cassandra Thoreson winds yarn while a Knitty City customer looks on. (Credit: Judah Duke)
Back at Té Co., there’s no middleman to cushion the impact. Every tariff and shipping surcharge cuts straight into the shop’s bottom line.
“I’m not taking up the prices 50% to reflect my cost,” Liao said. And even if the postal situation is sorted, the shop will still have to foot a 20% duty imposed on Taiwanese goods. “The back and forth decision-making by this administration is extremely difficult for us to be able to project or know, because we don’t know what the cost is really going to be.”
About the author(s)
Judah Duke is a Stabile Investigative Fellow at the Columbia Journalism School with experience in business, environmental and political reporting.