After Punchbowl News reported yesterday that Amazon planned to display tariff surcharges at checkout, the folks at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue were so incensed with the e-commerce giant that it looked like they might start doing all their shopping at the mall.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt interpreted the reported plan to add tariff cost labels to products as finger-pointing over price hikes, deriding it as “a hostile and political act.” But after President Trump reportedly called Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the company said that it never intended to mention tariffs on its main site:

• Amazon explained that it had mulled the prospect of displaying tariff fees for items on its ultra-cheap goods marketplace, Amazon Haul, like its main competitor, the Chinese bargain purveyor Temu, recently started doing.
• But a spokesperson told NBC News that the idea “was never approved and is not going to happen.”

Whether companies tell customers explicitly or not, tariffs are a major hit to sites like Haul, Temu, and Shein, which function as storefronts for cheap goods shipped directly from Chinese warehouses. They’re bracing for impact from Trump’s recent order excluding China’s exports from the de minimis exemption that allows small shipments to cross the border without tariffs.

Tariff surcharges are in

Temu isn’t alone in trumpeting tariffs’ impacts on price tags:

• Sex toys sold by the online intimacy products store Dame now come with a $5 “Trump Tariff Surcharge.”
• Jolie Skin Co., which sells filtered water showerheads, is building dedicated software to tack a “Trump Liberation Tariff” fee onto its checkout totals.
• Electronics manufacturer Crestron will charge customers a 12% fee to offset tariff costs, a level of pricing transparency that allows the company to adjust the fee if the administration introduces further tariff changes, it said.

But…being so forthcoming with tariff surcharges might work best for niche brands with a limited product selection, as opposed to e-commerce emporiums where people load their carts, experts told Bloomberg.—SK

Trump eased tariffs on automakers. Another day, another new tariff policy. President Trump signed an executive order yesterday offering a reprieve to some car companies after they warned tariffs would hurt their businesses. Automakers subject to Trump’s 25% tariff on foreign cars will no longer also have to pay other levies, like the ones on steel and aluminum, the White House said. They’ll also be able to earn a reimbursement on a percentage of the tariffs they pay on parts from outside the US. Earlier on Tuesday, General Motors became the latest big automaker to pull its 2025 outlook due to uncertainty surrounding the tariffs.

Consumer confidence hit a five-year low. Not since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic have US consumers been so pessimistic about the economy. The consumer confidence index fell nearly eight points last month to its lowest reading since May 2020, the Conference Board said yesterday. Meanwhile, the expectations index, which measures how consumers see the next six months of the economy going, fell to its lowest mark in over 13 years. The Associated Press noted that April’s short-term expectations reading came in under 80, which typically augurs a recession.

UPS is cutting 20k jobs. The shipping giant said it plans to cut 20,000 jobs this year as a result of its decision to deliver fewer Amazon packages. In January, the company announced it wanted to cut Amazon deliveries by more than half over the following 18 months to boost profitability and save $3.5 billion in costs. The layoffs amount to ~4% of UPS’s 490,000 employees. While its cuts aren’t related to tariffs, the company did—like many others—suspend its 2025 guidance “given the current macroeconomic uncertainty.”—AE

Meta hopes so. The company launched a new app for its AI assistant yesterday that will leverage everything it already knows about you to try to compete with ChatGPT and make chatbot queries a social affair.

In the US and Canada, the platform can draw info from users’ Facebook and Instagram activity to personalize its responses like someone who has been stalking your social media. Meta expects that most of its AI interactions will keep coming from Instagram, where it says nearly 1 billion users have engaged with its chatbot since it launched in the DMs last year.

The Venmo feed walked so Meta AI Discover could run. The app’s other main feature is a social tab for whatever you weirdos are asking of Meta’s chatbot. You have to opt in on a query-by-query basis to post anything publicly, so don’t worry about accidentally flooding the feed with a dozen different cover letters.

Zoom out: OpenAI is also planning on adding social features to ChatGPT. The AI bot that started this whole race now lags behind Meta AI’s monthly active users, but boasts about 6x more daily interactions, according to recent Google estimates.—ML

Duolingo sent the owl out for a long lunch yesterday while CEO Luis von Ahn took over making bold proclamations. Von Ahn said in an all-hands email, which he also shared to LinkedIn, that Duolingo would be “AI-first.”

What does that mean? The biggest change is that the company will start to phase out contractors for work that can be handled by AI. Von Ahn said this was to overcome human limitations in creating the “massive amount of content” Duolingo needs to scale:

• The company will only allow new hires once teams prove they can’t automate the work. And candidates’ facility AI will be evaluated during the hiring process.
• The move follows Uber and Shopify, which both said AI will be integral to their companies.

Duolingo employees can also expect their AI use to be graded in their performance reviews.

Big picture: Duolingo has seen explosive user growth since it went public four years ago. Its paid subscriber count grew from just under 2 million in 2021 to over 8 million last year. Von Ahn told employees that despite AI not being perfect, the company would rather move quickly and “take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment.”—MM

The good news is you’re about to get your coffee quicker. The bad news is that means less time to stand idly in a state of near-ego death while the whir of the espresso machine blocks out an existential crisis.

Starbucks shaved two minutes off in-store wait times with the help of a new proprietary algorithm, the Wall Street Journal reported. In the past, baristas addressed orders on a first-come, first-served basis, but the algorithm sequences orders based on whatever makes the process go brrr.

The algorithm, which notably is not AI, was piloted at a handful of US locations and will now expand to hundreds more cafes. It’s part of new CEO Brian Niccol’s strategy to boost waning sales by making the in-store experience more chill for both baristas and customers.—AE