Remember those universal price spikes everyone predicted when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariff package in early April?
Yeah, about those: Not only do we not see across-the-board numbers that prove this is happening, we have yet more specific examples of companies not moving to jack up prices.
According to CNBC, Home Depot says it won’t be raising prices due to tariffs and is standing by its 2025 sales forecast during a Tuesday interview.
“Because of our scale, the great partnerships we have with our suppliers and productivity that we continue to drive in our business, we intend to generally maintain our current pricing levels across our portfolio,” said Richard McPhail, chief financial officer for the home improvement retailer.
Part of this is because of the fact that Home Depot has been preparing for this for some time, the report noted:
More than half of what the company sells comes from the U.S., he said. McPhail added that Home Depot and its suppliers have worked to diversify the source of the company’s imports over the past several years, including by decreasing the share of purchases that come from China. By this time next year, no single country outside of the U.S. will represent more than 10% of the company’s purchases, he said.
McPhail also told investors on an earnings call that the company’s scale helps it manage whatever fallout it sees from the tariffs and that keeping prices where they are could help with competition.
“It’s a great opportunity for us to take share, and it’s a great opportunity for our suppliers to take share as well,” he said.
Granted, as CNBC noted, the company has a reason to want customers back in its stores; Home Depot, it reported “missed Wall Street’s first-quarter earnings expectations for the first time since May 2020, but beat sales estimates.”
Will Trump’s plan for the economy ultimately improve life for middle class Americans?
“The retailer is still waiting for dynamics that could drive stronger spending and bigger purchases,” the report added. Home Depot CEO Ted Decker blamed “stubbornly high” interest and mortgage rates for that issue.
“People are painting again and working in their yards and doing smaller projects, but just have not engaged in the larger projects,” he said.
Furthermore, even with the prospect of looming tariffs, two of the three full months of the Trump presidency has seen year-over-year sales growth for Home Depot.
Sales declined by 3.3 percent in February, which McPhail said was due to poor weather. In March, they rose 1.3 percent, and in April, they rose 1.8 percent.
“We clawed our way back through the remainder of the quarter and had a great April, and we’ve seen the level of customer engagement that we saw in April continue into the first few weeks of May,” he said.
This is critical because, as CNBC noted, spring is basically “the Christmas of the home improvement world — as homeowners and contractors typically tackle more projects because of warmer and dryer weather.”
And it comes as Americans aren’t seeing the kind of inflation they saw during the first few years of the Biden presidency, as well.
The Department of Labor reported that the Consumer Price Index rose 2.3 percent year-over-year in April, a smaller inflation number than predicted by economists. The report was the first since the April 2 tariff announcement; it was the lowest inflation number since February of 2021 and down from 3.7 percent in the same month last year.
The number was low enough that you could basically see Wolf Blitzer swallowing his own tonsils on CNN while reporting the breaking news:
🚨Even CNN couldn’t ignore that inflation just hit its LOWEST point since 2021.
“It’s an unexpected and very welcome development that’s defying economists’ expectations…” pic.twitter.com/ywW4WYXGME
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) May 13, 2025
Now, this isn’t to deny that there won’t be speed bumps in Trump’s tariff plans; of course there will be. Trump himself has acknowledged this. The key term is “speed bumps,” not “car crash” — which is what the tariff suite was portrayed as when it was introduced.
Yes, part of that is the temporary halt on most of the tariffs not involving China, but that still means a massive renegotiation and reorganization of the current global trade order and how countries reap benefits from access to the U.S. market without commensurate benefits for the average American.
The point is, the hyperventilation is over now that reality has set in: The gambit is working.
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