A manager of toy stores has struck daily price notifications. A manufacturer of lip bum provides a leap of $ 5 million from the cost of goods. An impresario concertal place which saw an increase in surprise price of $ 140,000 to set up new seats in a performance hall.
They are part of a dozen owners of companies and managers who spoke with Reuters The impacts of President Donald Trump’s pricing regime, providing an early idea that many more Americans could expect, even as import taxes – paid by American companies and often transmitted to consumers – were partially interrupted for 90 days this week.
Businessmen have expressed their concern about continuous economic turbulence. While announcing the price of the 90 -day price on dozens of countries, Trump increased prices on Chinese imports, increasing them efficiently to 145% when the withdrawals imposed earlier this year are taken into account. He kept prices on imports from most other nations at 10% for 90 days, after whipping trade taxes for last week.
Prices in Canada and Mexico remain 25% for goods not covered by the existing trade agreement in the region.
“We are constantly dealing with the uncertainty of the future and our future supply chains,” said Steve Shriver, founder and CEO of Eco Lips, an IOWA -based company based on Iowa that manufactures organic health and beauty products with ingredients from more than 50 countries and sold in 40,000 stores on a national level. It has annual sales of approximately $ 30 million.
On Wednesday, the day Trump announced the break, Shriver sent a letter to 300 customers for whom Eco Lips manufactures products for their own labels, letting them know that prices will increase and that delivery times will be expelled.
“I don’t trust him. It’s a 90 -day break. It could change again in 10 days,” said Shriver. “There are still 10% prices at all levels, and it is a substantial addition to our prices.”
Shriver provides that its cost of goods in 12 months could increase by $ 5 million, at the top of its annual expenses typical of $ 10 million to, among other things, ingredients that cannot be cultivated in the United States, such as vanilla, coconut oil and cocoa.
Other businessmen said they had canceled the purchase orders, interrupted expansion plans and delayed hiring.
‘We get out of ourselves’
Shriver and others said they had received notifications for the price of suppliers and have already increased their own prices since Trump began to announce prices last month to respond to what he was unjust commercial imbalances. Trump has also imposed prices in pursuing objectives that include the maintenance of illegal migrants and drugs and encouraging domestic manufacturing.
Paul Kusler’s Into the Wind is a Boulder, Colorado, Kite and Toy Store store that has existed for 45 years and has approximately 2.5 million dollars in annual sales. Most of the goods that Kusler sells are made in China.
“The prices on China are simply impractical, it is a serious threat to our company,” said Kusler, standing in the middle of a sea of colored kite, frisbees, puppets, stuffed animals and any other imaginable toy. “We pay invoices every week. These price increases are now occurring for the items I already have in the door.”
Kusler said that the price increase he has seen was between 7% and 10% – but these reflect the brief period that the prices on China were 34% after the announcement of Trump’s “Liberation Day” of commercial taxes on April 2.
Kusler thinks that it can absorb about 3% of the cost increase. He added that he had already seen and will continue to feel the demand of consumers in the midst of economic turbulence.
“People will not buy toys if they are concerned about the rise in prices for food and other basic products,” he said.
Emily Ley, owner of Simplified, a company based in Pensacola, Florida, specializing in high -end office planners for women, said that since Trump announced prices on Chinese products in 2017 during her first mandate, she paid much more than a million dollars in the US government.
She planned that at the new price for China, she will match almost this million dollars in the next 12 months.
Ley said she had tried for years to have her products in the United States made, but could not find any way to do so and make profits.
“It could put us under, put us on bankruptcy,” she said. “We are rushing at the moment for what to do.”
One thing that does: to continue the American government, arguing that taxes rest unconstitutionally on statutes that have nothing to do with prices.
In Denver, Colorado, Aisha Ahmad -Post, executive director of the Newman Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Denver, spent more than a year managing a major renovation – the replacement of all 971 chairs inside the June Swaner Gates concert hall.
The Newman Center considered the chairs of two American suppliers and one in Canada. One of the American manufacturers was far from their budget and the chairs of the other required the use of hard -to -dry cleaning solvents as a maintenance. At the beginning of 2024, Ahmad-Post ordered chairs in Ducharme de Montréal for just over $ 560,000 and blacked a period of six weeks of accommodation for shows for installation in mid-July.
On March 5, Ahmad-Post received a letter from Ducharme that it was necessary to comply with the new Trump commercial taxes and “apply the prices corresponding to your project”.
At the time, these prices for Canada were 25% – an increase of $ 140,000 for the Newman Center’s seat project, unwanted development for an institution that is still trying to rebuild its rainfall funds that was exhausted by the COVVI -19 pandemic.
“The chairs are already in production, it is not as if we can simply rotate,” said Ahmad-Post. “Now we are stuck while trying to understand how we will pay for that.”