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Eat Your Own Tariffs
“Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, ‘EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”
Trump has lost his mind on tariffs. There is no way you can impose a tax on imports ranging from 10% to 145% and not expect prices to go up. I shopped a couple of days ago in Wichita, and prices have gone up on a number of things. Coffee was the most notable, but there were other items as well. I see it on Amazon and when buying auto parts.
After imposing a tax on Walmart for imports, Trump has the gall to tell them to eat the tariffs. He’s the cause of it. Eat your own tariffs. Then, just like the brain-dead Joe Biden during Bidenflation, he blames Walmart for profiteering and price gouging.
And just when he is ready to accept an unconstitutional and unconscionable $400 million, golden palace-in-the-sky bribe from terrorist-supporting Qatar, he tells us to cut back for Christmas. “Just buy fewer dolls.” When do you plan to implement your own personal austerity plan, like the one you are forcing on the rest of us, Mr. President?
Published in Economy
Antidote to the OP fulminations:
“The former CEO of Walmart US called out current company executives and their directive to spike shelf prices due to the trade war.
Simon criticized the move, arguing that Walmart had a solid enough financial foundation to address the tariff situation without raising prices, he told CNBC.
“If you look down deep and dig into the details of their earnings release today, you know this quarter they grew their gross profit margin in the US business 25 basis points. So, they’re expanding their margin,” the former Walmart executive said on Thursday after the company’s first quarter earnings call.
“They also reported their general merchandise categories were flattish because they had mid-single digit price deflation.
“That sort of gives them room in my view to manage any tariff impact that they would have.”
Simon – now a member on the Darden Restaurants board and the chairman at Hanesbrands – has no doubt that consumers will be able to manage price increases, pointing to a steady job market and more affordable fuel prices in 2025.
However, the retail expert believes that such troubling commentary from business executives could be harming consumer confidence.
“All the doom and gloom we hear about price increases and tariffs like we heard from my friends at Walmart today – I think it scares them some,” he said.”
Link: https://www.the-sun.com/money/14256644/ex-walmart-ceo-blasts-retailer-price-hike-announcement-tariffs/
I very much doubt that Mr. Simon has lost his mind.
You didn’t address the point of my “fulminations,” namely that Trump is corruptly accepting a present from terrorist supporters while urging all of us to suck it up due to the economic pain he is inflicting on us.
Bill Simons has a net worth of $90m, a Navy pension, and a sweet directorship at Darden Restaurants; so the tariffs won’t hurt him. That’s why he can admonish us that we consumers “will be able to manage the price increases.” Plus, he was forced to resign as CEO of Walmart US in 2014 due to poor performance, so he may have an axe to grind with Walmart.
Mr. Simons may not mind paying the Trump tariffs on coffee, but it hurts me.
No corruption involved. The plane in question (plans for the acceptance of which were initiated a year or so ago, i.e. by the Biden administration) would be used by the current President as AF1 until his term ends. Then it would be used by the next President (even if he’s a Democrat) until Boeing finally manages to deliver the one it’s been working on (estimated delivery: around 2030, last I saw reported). At that point, and only at that point, the “gift” plane would be decommissioned and parked on the grounds of the Trump Presidential Library, wherever that may be. The price of tickets to take a tour of it is yet to be determined.
And for coffee, the price has risen over the last year because of low production in coffee producing areas including Brazil and Viet Nam because of local weather conditions in both places. Seconded with greater demand from, believe it or not, China. I can certainly understand the Chinese starting to prefer coffee to tea since I do myself. Have the tariff’s increased the price of coffee? Yes but that increase is minor compared to those other developments.
But of course those with their own agendas will claim it’s all an only due to tariffs.
The stated primary reason for these tariffs is to make imports less attractive, so customers will buy more domestically-produced products. If retailers do not pass on the cost of the tariffs, why would end customers be incited to choose other products? This is like when Democrats pass taxes or regulations to discourage something, then point the finger at wholesalers and retailers when customers start to complain. Do you want to fiscally punish people for buying imports or not? You cannot have it both ways.
It’s not Walmart’s fault if the people in the Trump administration did not even make an exception for products that cannot be grown here, like coffee and bananas. If the idea is to wean people off of these products and substitute American-made products, how is that to be achieved without price increases? Should Walmart just stop carrying bananas?
You are forgetting that now, thanks to these brilliant tariffs, Minnesota banana farms can now supply American-grown bananas!
During the high inflation of the Biden years, one of the progressives in my little town would regularly post memes that probably came straight from the DNC, which blamed the increase in prices on greedy corporations making obscene profits.
Trump’s doing the same now. Republicans used to know that central planning and the micro-managing of the economy, picking winners and losers, was a bad idea with a substantial history of failure. Now we have Trump telling us that we will have fewer but more expensive Christmas toys for kids. We have him trying to revive Obama’s deal with the Iranians. How is this different than the Democrats’ approach to the economy or foreign policy? This stinks.
They actually could utilizing technologies like greenhouses available for hundreds of years but wouldn’t be able to match the imported price which went up a whopping 3¢ per pound recently. You might want to use a different example than bananas or coffee…one really hasn’t changed and the other changed significantly due to other much more significant market influences than the tariffs. I know that doesn’t help take some weird political poke at Trump but there you go.
It’s… well, bananas… to think that anything that gets a tariff, whoever imports and resells them needs to make a profit on the tariff as well. It’s like, if something is $5 retail and that represents a 50% profit margin, and there’s a 10% sales tax, the store is going to charge you 20% tax because they want a 50% margin on that too.
OK, then. Forget about bananas, if you think that is a poor example. Forgive me for saying it again, but you apparently missed this the first time. The whole point of the tariff scheme is to drive up the price of imports, so Americans will buy fewer imported products and buy more domestically-produced products, right? So, how is this incentive to substitute one product for the other supposed to work if the customer doesn’t see any difference in price? This is like putting a high tax on cigarettes, gasoline, or alcohol to discourage sales of those products, then pretending to sympathize with the people angry about the increased prices.
Do you know what the profit margin is on groceries? I worked for SpartanNash for two years. SpartanNash owns several chains of grocery stores and sells wholesale groceries to several smaller grocery stores. When I worked there, I looked up what their net profit was and the amount of sales they had for the time period. A simple calculation showed that they had to sell (between retail and wholesale) over $80 of product to clear one dollar of profit. If you are making less than a 2% profit and some of your products now go up 10% in price, you must raise your prices, or you will be selling at a loss. I grant you that the 10% tariff is only on the imported merchandise, not on insurance, utilities, wages, and everything else. So it isn’t that all of their costs go up, but still, asking the wholesalers or retailers to just eat that ten percent is unrealistic in an industry that has famously low profit margins.
Besides, don’t you want the prices on those imported products to go up substantially, to discourage consumption? Wasn’t that the point?
It wasn’t really about grocery stores, of course, since sales tax as I mentioned, rarely applies to groceries.
And there was another post/thread where someone mentioned companies that do a markup well above 50%. But I’m unaware of any company that thinks they need to make a profit on the sales tax which they collect from their customers. And yet at least one person “arguing” that thread, stated outright that if the wholesale cost of that they import is faced with a 400% tariff, that justifies them multiplying their retail price by 5 even if the COST of the item is actually already a small fraction of their retail price.
Any product that we pick will be a bad example, according to the Trumpkins. The tariffs are intended to increase the price of imports and have increased the price of imports. But any increase in retail prices is due to other factors, such as greedy retailers or bad weather, according to the Trumpkins. BS
Remember Burisma and Rosemont Seneca and the Biden crime family, back when it was not OK to accept gifts from foreigners for doing nothing? And you admit that Trump’s presidential library will end up owning the plane. At least the Biden crime family didn’t accept gifts from terrorist supporters.
And we haven’t even mentioned the Qatari crypto investments in the Trump family funds.
I’m really disappointed because Trump has done so much good and has so many critical projects underway to reform the Deep State and federal employment, among many other things. But I fear that his administration will collapse into a morass of corruption, tariff-driven inflation, and tariff-driven economic inefficiency. You can’t impose higher tariffs than even Central African Republic, Gabon, Chad, and Equatorial Guinea and expect to keep the most dynamic economy in the world.
So you are okay with passing the financial burden onto the American companies and/or consumers. This is not what I voted for with Trump. This is economic central planning, edging towards Communism and away from Capitalism.
Then I guess the 27 Million Dollars raked-in by the Biden family from China, Ukraine, and Romania, while Joe was Vice President, involved no corruption either. Besides, it was only 1/15th the amount of value that Trump is getting with the airplane. I don’t know why republicans even brought the Hunter Biden thing up, it was all completely legal.
See #14. A 400% tariff DOES NOT REQUIRE jacking up the retail price by 400%.
And of course you will claim that tariffs have absolutely nothing to do with price hikes, no?
See #19, which refers back to #14.
I don’t care if it jacks the price up 1%. It is totally unnecessary to tax the American people with tariffs.
That’s not much of an answer. I’ll ask you flat out – Do you think that raising tariffs on foreign goods entering our country will cause the price to rise on those products? Or not?
It may some, depending on things such as if some companies want to still make a 70% or more profit margin on things produced with slave/prison/child labor, or if they might be satisfied with 40% or 50% or perhaps 30%…
Meanwhile, ibid.
What does illegal aliens doing farmwork or other type of work have to do with tariffs?
It was an example. Workers aren’t only exploited within the US.
An example having nothing to do with tariffs??
The point was about exploitation. You seem to be announcing your acceptance of exploiting child/prison/slave labor, as long as it’s not within eyesight. Or heck, maybe even if it is.
So that is what we are doing when we buy foreign products? I had no idea……..