A tattoo equipment supplier in Pennsylvania is worried they won’t make it to summer. A three-person team making optical scanners in San Diego saw their bills double overnight. A coffee shop in New Orleans may be forced to raise its prices.
Donald Trump has defended his sweeping tariffs by claiming to be a president “who stands up for Main Street, not Wall Street,” but it is small businesses that are already bearing the brunt of his economic gamble.
“I don’t know if we’re going to make it past July,” said Jeff Logan, 54, who runs a tattoo supply business near Philadelphia with his wife.
Like many other small businesses in a globalized economy, Logan imports products that are made cheaply abroad and sells them to buyers in the United States.
Almost all modern tattoo needles are made in China, so he buys large quantities to sell to artists and studios here. With Trump’s successive rounds of tariffs on imports from China, reaching a staggering 125 percent on Wednesday, his costs have more than doubled overnight. His business, which was founded in 1992, is now at risk of closing.
“The end result is real small businesses, mom and pop shops, we’re the ones that get put under,” he told The Independent.
“Amazon doesn’t feel the hurt, Walmart doesn’t feel it. We do,” he added.
President Trump backed down from the most extreme version of his policy Wednesday by pausing sweeping tariffs on most of the country’s biggest trading partners for 90 days, while retaining a blanket 10 percent tariff on all imports.
But he increased his levy on imports from China to 125 percent, which leaves many small businesses with skyrocketing bills for goods they have imported for years.
Ido Tuchman, 54, owns a three-employee company in San Diego that makes optical scanning equipment.
He ordered a shipment of specially made aluminum parts from China two months ago. When it finally arrived this week, it came with a tariff bill totaling 73 percent — the product cost $3380, and the tariff fees had skyrocketed to $2483.
“I looked at the bill and thought, oh, there must have been some mistake,” he said. “It was grossly larger than the 20 or 25 percent tariff that we keep hearing about.”
After some investigation, Tuchman realized his bill was the total of four cumulative tariffs Trump had imposed since taking office — a mini timeline of the trade war so far.
Tuchman said he would prefer to source materials domestically wherever possible, even if it meant higher prices, but often the products aren’t available in the U.S. or are at a price that makes it not financially viable.
A plastic injection molded part he recently tried to order in the U.S. was quoted at $7,000 or 99 cents per part, while the overseas manufacturer was $3,000, or 14 cents a part.
“That’s a huge difference for a small business,” he said.
Tuchman is also unsure that his business would survive a long trade war.
“Small businesses like mine are the tip of the spear with this trade war, and we typically have less inventory and thinner profit margins than large companies. It makes it a lot more difficult to absorb even a few months of retaliatory tariffs,” he said.
Even small businesses that don’t import from China are being impacted by the tariffs. Trump’s blanket 10 percent tax on all imports to the U.S. is likely to rise prices at Hey Coffee Co, the two coffee shops Greg Rodrigue owns in New Orleans. The price of coffee beans was already high due to lower crop yields, and Rodrigue expects the tariffs will make things worse.
“We might try to hedge our bet on reducing prices as little as we can. But in general, when our raw coffee prices go up, we increase prices by that amount to continue to try to ensure a profit margin,” he said.
Both Logan and Tuchman said they believed the administration’s tariff policy was not properly thought through.
“They did this thing completely backwards,” said Logan, the tattoo supply business owner. “They should have stimulated some kind of startups over here for production so that we could at least start limping on production, then hit China with all the tariffs.”
Tuchman called on the government to “invest in manufacturing technologies or provide low-interest loans to help create factories or fund worker training programs.”
“Tariffs just push the costs onto businesses and ultimately the consumers, and it doesn’t solve the underlying competitive challenges,” he added.
