I don’t typically consider myself to be a political person. For the most part I don’t get involved with what happens in government, however as a store owner I find that I have to watch the tariff situation closely because that will affect us in a big way. We order items that come in from all over the world mostly because they are from the culture of the country that they come from. We don’t want a Hindu product from someone in a factory in Hoboken New Jersey. We want real stuff.

And the turbulence that is caused by all the ups and downs with the tariffs has caused some real issues for us, or at least it would if we didn’t watch real carefully. I wish it would all settle down so that we can get back to our usual lives. We don’t know what we can order, or when we have to order it to avoid raising our prices to cover. So far, we have been lucky.

During the pandemic, we had a similar issue, except then our distributors were running out of items because the whole supply chain shut down. This time around the distributors are still selling from their warehouses so the price didn’t go up, and they held off from buying new items, so they are running out of certain pieces just like in 2020.

We have been working with our importers and distributors to keep things on our shelves and doing a lot of switching from one importer to another when one runs out. In some cases, we just don’t get what we have had before and find new products to fit in our mix. It’s all a lot more work than it used to be. Plus, we have to be concerned with other new costs.

I don’t like what is happening. I know they talk about fentanyl and stuff but why don’t they just charge a tariff on that? (That was a joke!). I know it’s also is supposed to be about trade deficits, but I think it’s just that the current president wants to throw his weight around. I really hope that we come out of this unscathed but it’s looking less and less likely.

So far we are holding our costs down, but who knows how long that will last. It’s driving me crazy.