Seeing the trade war with China in aisle 12
during the past year, and prices for information technology hardware and services have fallen by 2.3 percent in that time.
But retail groups say a prolonged trade war could accelerate price increases on a wide range of consumer goods, giving Americans sticker shock.
“You keep adding tariffs upon tariffs,” said Alex Boian, vice president for government affairs at the Outdoor Industry Association, whose members include North Face and Patagonia, “and it really is difficult to see a way that this does not hit retail prices.”
The latest tariff list includes several mainstays of the outdoor industry, such as travel bags, backpacks and the knit fabric used in fleece vests. It also includes dog collars, sledgehammers, saw blades, baseball mitts, ski gloves, toilet paper, art supplies, windshield glass and antiques that are more than 100 years old.
More than 1,000 of the 6,000 items on the list are chemicals, according to an analysis by Panjiva. Nearly 1,000 more are food products, including vegetables such as cabbage, kale, carrots and beets and hundreds of types of fish. Many of those fish, such as Alaskan pollock, are caught elsewhere and processed in China.
In dollar terms, the items most likely to rattle U.S. consumers are computers and couches. The Panjiva analysis shows that $50 billion worth of goods subject to tariffs are electronics, including $17.4 billion in PC components and $5.2 billion in desktop computers. Nearly $30 billion worth of the products are furniture.
In addition, the administration will soon begin imposing 25 percent tariffs on more than $3 billion worth of semiconductors, potentially driving up computer prices even more.
Buying a PC or sofa is a major purchase for most Americans, and a 10 percent tariff could force many to seek out cheaper brands or delay the purchase.
It seems unlikely that stores will absorb the import taxes by accepting lower profit margins. But U.S. consumers might not have much choice: For nearly $100 billion of the products targeted, Panjiva estimates, China supplies more than half the imports that Americans buy.
As the tariffs expand to cover roughly half of all Chinese goods exported to the United States, consumers will start seeing price increases, said Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
“It is possible that they can scoot around some of the effect on consumers, but it gets increasingly difficult,” she said. “It also gets further and further away from the stated rationale of the tariffs, which is to hit high-tech products.”
The National Retail Federation said that the threat posed by tariffs to the U.S. economy “is less about a question of ‘if ’ and more about ‘when’ and ‘how bad.’ ”