“Pop Up” Garden to Open at Oxford Valley Mall

A Georgia-based southern fried chicken franchise will open its first-ever restaurant in Pennsylvania next Monday.

Lower Bucks Source visited the site of Zaxbys located at 8333 Bristol Pike in Tullytown, Wednesday afternoon.  The restaurant will open for business on Monday, March 23 a manager said.

Management appeared to be conducting interviews with potential employees while LBS was on site taking photographs for this story. Help wanted signs were displayed on every window of the newly constructed bu.

It is owned and operated by George Abdelmessieh.

Zaxby’s offers an extensive menu of bold flavors, including the company’s Chicken Fingerz™, wings, Zalads® and 12 signature sauces.

Credit: Jeff Bohen, Lower Bucks Source

The Levittown restaurant will offer delivery services through Uber Eats, DoorDash, and GrubHub and offers a double laned drive- thru experience for quicker service.

To celebrate this opening, Zaxby’s says they will host a ribbon cutting ceremony next month, featuring prizes and giveaways.

Zaxby’s is headquartered in Atlanta, and was founded back in 1990. Today the company boasts over 950 locations in 17 states, according to its website.

” I used to fill my SUV up for a little more than $30. On Monday, it cost me $40 f**cking!” the woman pumping gas at the Red Lion Gas Station in Bristol Borough said.

Her frustration is resonating here, there and everywhere, so to speak.

The skyrocketing prices have been brought on by U.S.-Israeli joint missile strikes on Iran, causing spikes throughout the country.

According to AAA, the price for a gallon of regular in the Philadelphia 5-County region stood at $3.64 last Friday. That’s up $0.34/g in just the last week, and more than $0.60 since February.

On Monday, driving through Lower Bucks County gas prices approached the $4.00 per gallon mark for unleaded gas. There were two Wawa gas stations in Levittown right at a price of $3.99 per gallon.

Credit: Jeff Bohen, Lower Bucks Source

The rising prices, says Mike Bannon, Director Bucks County’s Consumer Protection and Weights and Measures, have led to a ton of calls from consumers.

Bannon told CBS News Philadelphia that’s when the weights and measures team gets rolling to ensure consumers get the correct value for their money

“Every time gas prices rise, we get a lot more calls from residents that they have concerns that they’re not getting what they pay for at the gas pump,” Bannon, said in the report.

Weights and Measures has a three-man team out all year long, inspecting every gas pump in the county at least once a year.

The crew makes unannounced stops at gas stations across Bucks County, checking every line at every pump at the station they are inspecting.

According to the report, crews pump five gallons of each gasoline blend into tanks attached to a truck, mainly to see if five gallons is actually what comes out. Officials say the tolerance they allow is just about two tablespoons per gallon. It may seem like a small amount, but when prices are high, it adds up quickly.

County officials say that each year, around 4% to 5% of the pumps they inspect fail the test. But more often than not, they’re not finding fraud or predatory practices.

The weights and measures team can’t bring the price of gas down. It can however, ensure consumers get what they paid for.

If you have a question or want to file a consumer complaint of any kind please visit this link. 

Credit: Jeff Bohen, Lower Bucks Source

The following story is republished under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. and was originally posted by the Pennsylvania Capital-Star written by Ashley Murray

WASHINGTON — Arizona coffee roaster Gabe Hagen is wondering if he’ll ever recoup the tens of thousands of dollars he paid in tariffs to import beans from the world’s major coffee-growing regions in South America, Africa and the Indo-Pacific.

Weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s emergency tariffs as illegal, Hagen is among an army of small business owners who are unsure if they’ll be made whole after a year of increasing costs and uncertainty.

“I’m in the process right now trying to consolidate all of my invoices … because I need the money back — if they’re going to give it back,” Hagen told States Newsroom in an interview.

“A pallet of coffee would cost us 5 to 6 to $7,000 if we had a bag or two of really high-grade in there. Post tariffs, our cheapest pallet was around $8,000, and it went anywhere from 8 to $10,000 or $11,000 per pallet of coffee,” he said.

How the government will refund the roughly $166 billion in tariffs Trump triggered under a 1970s emergency economic powers statute is slowly coming to light in court documents.

Credit: Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States

Nearly 2,000 companies filed suit for tariff refunds in the U.S. Court of International Trade, with many lining up even before the highly anticipated 6-3 Supreme Court decision.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s four-step refund process for businesses is anywhere from 40% to 80% complete, depending on the step, according to a court-mandated update filed March 12 with the Court of International Trade.

Justices leave it to the lower courts

The justices, not giving guidance on refunds, left the matter to the lower courts in their Feb. 20 ruling that invalidated the sweeping tariffs Trump unilaterally imposed under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA.

The president declared various emergencies under the statute during his first year in office.

From fentanyl smuggling, to trade imbalances, to political disputes, he used each declared crisis to impose steep taxes on imports.

Shifting sometimes day to day, tariffs reached as high as 50% on Brazilian and Indian goods after Trump declared emergencies over the prosecution of a political ally and over the use of Russian oil, respectively.

U.S. importers saw tariffs spike as high as 145% on Chinese goods during a tit-for-tat trade war sparked by Trump’s declaration of a trade imbalance emergency. The duties largely settled at a roughly 50% effective rate on several products after the trade war and negotiations with the world’s second-largest economy.

The Trump administration has since sought different pathways to collect tariffs, including almost immediately instituting temporary import taxes under a different 1970s trade statute.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has also commenced widespread investigations into dozens of the largest U.S. trading partners that could trigger new tariffs, depending on findings.

‘Survived, but barely’

The rollercoaster ride was enough to almost bring down Busy Baby, a Minnesota-based baby product company that manufactures several patented designs in China.

Busy Baby owner Beth Benike, who shared her experience with States Newsroom in February, is now suing U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott and U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to recoup money lost.

Matthew Platkin, former New Jersey attorney general and Benike’s lawyer, said Benike’s business “survived, but barely.”

“She had to keep merchandise overseas because she couldn’t afford to pay to bring them here. And when she didn’t get product, she wasn’t getting paid, she wasn’t making money,” Platkin said in an interview with States Newsroom.

“She had opportunities lined up for expansion. She was going to hire new folks. That didn’t happen, and that was because of one thing: the president’s illegal tariffs,” he said.

Benike’s complaint does not specify a dollar amount, but Platkin said, “It’s substantial, especially for a business of her size.”

“We’re still going through and assessing the full impact of the tariffs on her, but rest assured, even for a small business, it’s tens of thousands of dollars at a minimum,” Platkin said.

“The federal government should just refund these folks their money with interest, period. Like, this shouldn’t even require litigation. They were caught taking illegal tariffs from millions of businesses,” he said.

$166 billion collected

Federal Judge Richard Eaton, who sits on the bench for the Court of International Trade, ordered administration customs officials in early March to stop collecting the tariffs deemed illegal under IEEPA, and to recalculate any past duties that included them.

Eaton granted the March 5 order in the tariff refund lawsuit brought by Atmus Filtration, a Nashville, Tennessee-based company.

The judge, however, outlined that orders in the Court of International Trade are “universal” for all tariff refunds owed — meaning the trade cases are not subject to the Supreme Court’s 2025 finding in a separate immigration case that universal rulings are impermissible.

Businesses the size of Busy Baby to behemoths like Costco and FedEx have paid tariffs to the U.S. government. Many, but not all, have sued.

Customs officials, in a March 6 court filing, declared any refund process would take at least 45 days to be functional. According to the filing, as of early March the agency had collected approximately $166 billion in IEEPA tariffs from 330,000 American importers.