The €150 duty-free rule was never a consumer right. It was a clerical shortcut. Customs built the exemption so officers would not burn a full declaration on a gift worth less than the paperwork. That logic held when cheap parcels were noise. It collapsed when they became the traffic. In 2022 the EU took in 1.4 billion low-value e-commerce consignments. In 2025 the Commission counted about 5.8 to 5.9 billion items. A 26 percent jump in one year. Over 90 percent from one corridor: China. These parcels are roughly 97 percent of import volume and about 2 percent of import value. That ratio is the whole argument. You do not run a border on value. You run it on files. Every parcel still needs a declaration, a data check, a risk score, and — when the score lights up — a human. The T-shirt that cost four euros does not get a four-euro customs process. It gets the same stack as a bulk crate, just multiplied by millions of addresses. EU retailers already paid duty when the pallet hit the warehouse. The platform split the same goods into “personal” packets and paid zero. That is not free trade. That is a pricing bug with a flag on it. Brussels said this out loud. The legal text is not subtle. The de minimis relief existed to avoid a disproportionate administrative burden. In a digital customs system the data exists anyway, so the exemption no longer saves work. It just waives the bill. The Commission also estimates around 65 percent of small parcels were undervalued to stay under the line, and inspections keep finding large shares of low-value goods that fail EU safety rules. You cannot screen 16 million items a day with a rule that tells the system “ignore anything under €150.” So on 1 July 2026 the exemption died and a temporary €3 duty landed on each tariff line in a consignment worth €150 or less. Five identical shirts: €3. A shirt and a watch: €6. The seller or importer pays it. Until July 2028 this is a flat patch. After that, normal tariffs and the Customs Data Hub. A separate handling fee is still coming, aimed at the actual IT and labor cost of releasing the goods — the part people keep calling a “tax on shopping” when it is closer to a processing invoice. Ugly? Yes. Also the first price that matches the workload. Fairness here is not “protect the high street from cheap cotton.” Fairness is refusing to let a logistics model externalize its border costs onto 84,000 customs staff and then call the invoice protectionism. If your business only works when the destination country subsidizes the last mile of compliance, you did not invent a better shop. You invented a loophole. The drop in volumes after July was predictable. A four-euro gadget that suddenly carries a three-euro line duty was never a product. It was an arbitrage. Closing the arbitrage does not ban Temu. It stops pretending that six billion packets are a rounding error. If you want the cheap shirt, buy it. Pay the line. That is the adult version of a single market.