Last week, Walmart announced a plan to raise prices, setting off another round of criticism of President Trump’s tariff policy. In this case, the calculus seems particularly damning; Walmart serves middle- and lower-income Americans, who will be particularly affected by price hikes. And items imported from Mexico and Canada, such as avocados and raspberries, can be expected to cost more. “Consumers may not be psyched,” one Business Insider story begins, playing into the ever-popular narrative that Trump’s voters are already deserting him.
The scorners and the doomsayers, however, miss the soul of the matter — and also an opportunity.
Intentionally or not, tariffs appear to be making cheap imported stuff more expensive. At least, this is the consensus among the critics. The reciprocal tariff chart may have broken the commentariat with its crudeness as an expression of economic policy, but it had a certain rough elegance in terms of identifying stuff that’s too cheap and making it cost more. It has been weird to watch the resistance to this idea, since stemming the flood of made-for-landfill consumer goods has long been a popular talking point for the Leftists and environmentalists who oppose Trump.
It’s an article of faith for these people — and I’m one of them — that our limitless appetite for disposable consumer goods from China and the developing world shortchanges domestic workers, underwrites brutal labor regimes abroad, and is morally and environmentally reprehensible. A globalized food system is unsustainable and undesirable, and so on. It has been funny to see the about-face as we demand our low-cost Chinese goods and wintertime raspberries.
For example, Rue Saint Paul, a “sustainable collective” clothing boutique in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, near where I live, prides itself on sourcing its garments from brands with ethical labor standards. The “about us” section on the shop’s website claims that “guided by our sustainable values… our mission is to help reduce the fashion industry’s environmental footprint, promote ethical manufacturing, and drive responsible and circular consumption.”
Yet shortly after Liberation Day, Kelly Wang, the Rue Saint Paul owner, took to Instagram to lament the tariffs’ disastrous potential consequences for her business and to say, sarcastically: “But surely you can unwind decades old global supply chains in a week, new US factories will be opening tomorrow, millions of new jobs will be created instantaneously, prices of domestically made goods will be cheaper, and all of our paychecks will double. It will all be GREAT again.” Does Wang really think that the global supply chain is awesome, and that we should get everything we want “tomorrow” or “instantaneously,” or else it’s not worth it? The stance is at odds with the brand’s ethos.
Wang did not return my calls by deadline, but she spoke to the website Gothamist to further explain the negative effects the tariffs would have on her business. Surprisingly for a sustainable boutique in the white-hot “shop-local” center of Brooklyn, 70% of Rue Saint Paul’s merchandise comes from abroad, including its best-selling item, a pair of “two-toned, color blocked” trousers made in China, that currently sell for $200 and will have to be priced at closer to $400 once Wang has to restock them at a higher price. (This is assuming that the Chinese manufacturers won’t eat the price difference, as Trump promises).
Rue Saint Paul offers meaningful and original sustainability initiatives — it allows shoppers to “rent” clothing for short periods of time, and it offers “buybacks” on its wares once you’re done with them. Yet like almost all high-end, ethical businesses, these values mask its promotion of a fundamentally unchanged consumerism. The obvious most-sustainable option would be for Brooklyn women — not a demographic with small wardrobes — to buy fewer pairs of color-blocked pants. Making them cost $400 instead of $200 doesn’t seem like such a terrible idea.
This idea comes to mind frequently when reading about tariffs and the impossibility of manufacturing in America. The Smarter Scrubber grill brush guy explains his failed quest to entirely source and make a grill brush locally — he tried, and it can’t be done; we don’t have the manufacturing capacity for one of the parts. Elsewhere, a manufacturer explains that he can fabricate the plastic parts for his custom department-store coat hangers locally but can’t get the metal hooks.
One can’t help but think of the vast number of hangers and grill brushes already in existence, all destined for landfills due to the lack of secondary markets. We have enough grill brushes and hangers for 1,000 years, if only we could reuse the ones in existence. Second-hand dealers, incidentally, expect tariffs to be good for them. One such merchant I spoke with, Kevin Walla, co-owner with his father of A Perfect Piece consignment business in Manchester, Vermont, noted uncertainties about the market but was generally expecting an uptick in sales within a six- to 12-month timeframe. “From a green perspective,” he says “buying second hand means less carbon released from the production of new items.” During the 15-year run of his business, Walla has “consistently” seen greater supply of second-hand goods than demand for them. Imagine if that could change.
“Low-income people are also the ones disproportionately affected by our addiction to cheap, ill-made goods.”
Sustainability advocates have often made the austerity argument when it comes to animal proteins: meat is resource-intensive, and to produce it ethically is expensive, so the price should reflect reality, and we should eat meat sparingly. Another endangered business mentioned in the Gothamist story is Aqua Best Seafood, which “services 80% of the Michelin-star restaurants in New York City” with items like salmon from Norway, branzino from Turkey, dorade from Greece and red snapper from Japan. Will Michelin diners still be able to get their imported fish at a good price post-tariff? Well, should they be able to?
A cookbook I like very much, One Pot, Pan, Planet, by Anna Jones, instructs its readers to “consider food miles” when making our purchases, and to consider eating fresh, seasonal foods mostly when they’re in season. Higher prices on imported luxury fish would probably turn such products into what they ought to be in the first place: a splurge and an indulgence.
There are many obvious objections to this line of thinking, including that it’s not really what Trump says he’s trying to do, and that the massive recession from less consumption would be so devastating that we’d regret we tried it, no matter what our values. There’s also the argument that higher prices unfairly affect people with lower incomes, who spend a greater proportion of their money on basic goods, and can least afford the increases.
To this, it seems essential to point out that a large share of the Walmart demographic voted for Trump, and has shown considerable loyalty to him. They might — might — be open to undergoing economic pain for a perceived good cause down the road. Low-income people are also the ones disproportionately affected by our addiction to cheap, ill-made goods — they’re the ones with the awful Amazon delivery and DoorDash jobs; they’re the ones who suffer most when the made-in-China backpack breaks the first week.
The most reasonable consensus seems to be that the American “manufacturing jobs” the Trump voters long for won’t fix these problems — we’ll never beat the likes of China and Vietnam, and much of this labor will be done by robots now anyway. But it also might be true that Trump’s voters don’t really want “manufacturing jobs” in the sense that they have a burning need to mine coal or operate a robot arm. The term might stand in for stable, well-paid, meaningful work and goods that don’t suck. And these goals, actually, align with those of their cultural opponents. Surely this is an opportunity for significant reform of a universally hated system.
Katrina Caspelich, the CEO of Re/Make World, a nonprofit devoted to climate justice and fair pay in the clothing industry believes that tariffs will bring us further from these goals. She believes that large, fast-fashion brands — 100 billion new garments produced each year, most ending up in landfills within a few years — will be able to evade the tariffs by moving their production around quickly, and already-marginalized garment workers abroad will be the ones to bear the real costs. Small businesses like Wang’s, engaged in “thoughtful production and long-term supplier relationships,” won’t survive, Caspelich thinks, while fast fashion will.
Maybe, but Re/Make, among other initiatives, challenges its supporters to do a 90-day #NoNewClothes fast that will “reduce your carbon footprint,” “keep your money out of the pockets of exploitative companies,” and “limit waste you send to a landfill” — basically, just don’t shop for three months. Such initiatives are virtuous in theory, but obviously in practice haven’t changed consumer habits. Tariffs just might.
