By Brad Brooks and Rich McKay
Boulder, Colorado (Reuters) – a manager of toy stores hit with daily price increases. The lip balm maker predicts a $ 5 million jump in the price of goods. The Impresario concert site, which saw a surprising increase in the price of $ 140,000 to install new places in the implementation room.
They are among a dozen business owners and managers who talked to Reuters about the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariff regime, giving an early idea of what a lot more Americans can expect, even as import taxes – paid by US companies and often switched to consumers – they were partly pause.
Businessmen expressed concern about long -term economic turbulence. While announcing a 90-day tariff pause for dozens of countries, Trump has strengthened Chinese import tariffs by raising them to 145%effectively when the previously imposed earlier this year is reported. He retained the import tariffs from most other countries at 10% for 90 days after taking advantage of trade taxes in the last week. The tariffs for Canada and Mexico remain 25% for goods that are not covered by the existing trade transaction in the region.
“We are constantly dealing with the uncertainty of the future and our future supply chains,” says Steve Schrever, founder and CEO of Eco Lips, Cedar Rapids, based in Iowa company that makes biological products for health and beauty with ingredients derived from more than 50 countries and is sold in 40,000 stores. It has annual sales of about $ 30 million.
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On Wednesday, on the day Trump announced the break, Shriver sent a letter to 300 customers, for whom Eco Lips produces products for his own labels, allowing them to understand that prices would rise and these timeframes would be pushed.
“I don’t believe it. It’s a 90-day pause. It can change again in 10 days,” Schrever said. “There is still a 10% tariffs throughout the board and this is an essential addition to our prices.”
Schreiver predicts that its 12-month price of goods can be raised by $ 5 million, at the top of its typical $ 10 million annual cost, among other things, ingredients that cannot be raised in the US such as vanilla, coconut oil and cocoa.
Other businessmen said they had canceled purchase orders, stopped expanding plans and delayed hiring.
Schrever and others said they had received notifications to raise prices from suppliers and had already raised their own prices since Trump first began to announce the rates last month to deal with what he said were unfair commercial imbalances. Trump also imposed tariffs in pursuit of goals that include preserving migrants and illegal drugs and promoting domestic production.
Paul Consler in the Wind is a favorite Boulder, Colorado, Kite and Toys Store that has existed for 45 years and has about $ 2.5 million in annual sales. Most of the goods Kusler sells are manufactured in China.
“The tariffs for China are simply incapacitated, this is a serious threat to our business,” says Kusler, standing in a sea of flower kite, frishes, puppets, stuffed animals and any other toy that can be presented. “We pay bills a week. These price increases are happening now for items I already have in the door.”
Caster said the increased prices he was watching were between 7% and 10% – but these reflects the short period in which the tariffs for China were 34% after the announcement of the “Liberation Day” of trade taxes on April 2.
Caster believes he can bear about 3% of increased costs. He added that he had already seen and would continue to be suppressed by consumers’ consumption against the background of economic turbulence.
“People will not buy toys if they are worried about the prices that rise about food and other brackets,” he said.
Emily Lei, the owner of Simplecifed, a Pensacola -based company, based in Florida, which specializes in an office planning office for women, said after Trump announced tariffs for Chinese goods in 2017, she paid over $ 1 million in taxes on the government’s trade taxes in the government taxes.
She predicts that at the new level of tariffs for China will almost coincide with that $ 1 million in the next 12 months.
Lei said he has been trying to produce his goods in the United States for years, but he can’t find a way to make it and still make a profit.
“It could encourage us, let us go out of business,” she said. “We are currently struggling with what to do.”
One thing Lee is doing: to judge the US government by substantiating taxes, they unconstitutionally rely on the statutes that have nothing to do with tariffs.
In Denver, Colorado, Aisha Ahmad – Post, CEO of the Newman Center for Performing Arts at the University of Denver, spent more than a year in managing major overhaul – replacing all 971 chairs in the June Room Gates concert hall.
The Newman Center examined chairs of two US suppliers and one in Canada. One of the US manufacturers was far beyond their budget, and the other’s chairs required the use of raw dry cleaning solvents as a maintenance. At the beginning of 2024, Ahmad-Post ordered chairs from Montreal-based Dimitarme for just over $ 560,000 and thinned a six-week hosting period for installation broadcasts in mid-July.
On March 5, Ahmad-Post received a letter from Ducharme that it is required to comply with Trump’s new trade taxes and “apply the relevant tariffs to your project”.
At that time, these tariffs for Canada were by 25% – an increase of $ 140,000 for the Newman Center seat project, an unwanted development of an institution that was still trying to restore its rainy day fund, which was exhausted by the Covid -19 pandemic.
“The chairs are already in production, it’s not just like we come back,” Ahmad-Post said. “Now we are left to try to understand how we will pay for it.”
(Report from Brad Brooks in Boulder, Colorado and Rich McCay in Atlanta, Georgia; Edit by Dona Bryson and Matthew Lewis)
