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Tariffs have been dominating headlines lately - the tax on auto parts earlier this month, the flat 145% customs fee on anything from China - so we wondered, how have people been navigating the ones already in effect and those on the horizon? We asked listeners to share their shopping bills with us, and as NPR's Emily Feng reports, Americans are bearing a lot of the costs.
EMILY FENG, BYLINE: Sandy Alonso really needed a new wheelchair.
SANDY ALONSO: It's 10 years old, and, you know, pieces are starting to break and what have you.
FENG: Alonso likes a specific model that's light enough for her to load into her car herself, but no one in North America sells the model anymore. It's made in China, so she placed an order in March.
ALONSO: At that time, the China tariff was 20%, which is, you know, certainly workable - not great, but you know. So it took a while for them to process the order, and by the time it gets to the forwarder and crosses the border, we have 145% tariffs.
FENG: By the time it arrived in Tampa, where she lives, it was too late to send it back. She ended up paying nearly $6,000, $3,500 in tariffs alone.
ALONSO: I'm just sitting here going, wow. I can't believe I've just paid this much for this chair (laughter).
FENG: NPR asked Americans to share their shopping bills to see how the tariffs were hitting them, and they sent in dozens of receipts. And it wasn't just shoppers. Small businesses also sent in screenshots of their new prices. One Colorado business called HiveTech Solutions makes cold storage boxes for farmers to keep their harvests fresh. These are large refrigerated containers that start at nearly $18,000 a storage box. That's before tariffs. Now they are more than $30,000 each. Their CEO, Kimberly Drennan, decided to put those numbers on the company website for customers, most of whom are farmers.
KIMBERLY DRENNAN: They really thought that, oh, China is going to pay this. We were, like, no, that's not how tariffs work. It's really a tax on us.
FENG: Listing those prices was a choice, and it can be a political one. The Trump administration criticized Amazon when it was reported that one division at the e-commerce giant was considering listing the cost of tariffs. Amazon has since said it will not list those costs. But Drennan says she wanted to be transparent about her startup's profit margins.
DRENNAN: You know, we are a small company that has gotten to where we are by people's investing in us, trusting in us.
FENG: In fact, protecting small companies is, in part, why the Trump administration argues tariffs are needed - to offset foreign-made goods that are uncompetitively cheap and incentivize manufacturers to set up shop inside the U.S. But some business owners say the constant tariff changes have hurt their profit margins. One of them is Marc Bowker, who runs a comic book company in Ohio.
MARC BOWKER: So my profit went from 30% to 16% in a matter of days.
FENG: His Chinese supplier, who helps him make his collector figurines, is eating most of the price of U.S. tariffs. But Bowker himself still is facing 14% higher costs and has chosen to absorb most of that cost. Bowker's looked at U.S. alternatives but says suppliers cannot relocate that quickly. And like most small businesses, he cannot wait that long. He's already thinking about pre-ordering inventory for Christmas.
BOWKER: It's almost time for us to start ordering for the holiday season, and I have no idea how to do that this year. I don't want to end up paying significantly more. I don't want to have too much product on my shelves.
FENG: He says, he doesn't even know which of his suppliers might still be in business by the end of the year.
Emily Feng, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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