NEW YORK — Small retailers stocking up for Black Friday are taking a hit as they struggle to get their hands on popular products, thanks to shipping rates and prices that have increased substantially since last year. After several months of back-and-forth escalation in tariffs on Chinese imports, many say they are caught between paying volatile duties and moving to more expensive suppliers — leaving behind thin shelves at the time of year when Black Friday receipts start to count the most for the year,” Nov. 26, 2025.
‘Trump tariffs’ crush the littlest guys first
At Loftie, a New York sleep-wellness brand founded by Matt Hassett, the year-end rush has long been frantic; now it’s crazy, he said. Since tariffs on Chinese-made lamps and alarm clocks surged, Hassett says his company has the “inventory for about 10% of what we need,” so he’s begun rationing products and had to turn away business in December. Other niche brands, from travel bag maker Lo & Sons to jewellery label Haus of Brilliance, were trying and often failing to evade rising costs by moving production out of China into India, Cambodia or Thailand, as the swings in Trump tariffs kept rewriting the math, and were also falling short, according to a recent analysis by Reuters. According to data from the business analytics firm RapidRatings, the operating margins of large retailers are in the neighbourhood of 5 per cent, while those of small businesses have gone down to roughly negative 20 per cent, with more than a third now placed at high risk; big-box chains like Walmart and Costco can better withstand such shocks.
Holiday shoppers are paying more for less.
Superficially, this holiday season still looks potent. Americans are on track to spend just a smidge more than $1 trillion this November and December, according to the National Retail Federation’s 2025 forecast, even as retailers behind the scenes are increasingly grappling with higher costs resulting from trade policy. But Tariffs Hurt the Heartland shows that tariffs on imported goods have raised retail prices by about 4.9 percentage points above pre-tariff levels, with imported goods suffering the most. For stores that already work on razor-thin margins, such Trump tariffs fall atop higher rent, wages and shipping bills, so the shop has less cash to hire seasonal workers or invest in future inventory.
A lengthy history of warnings on Trump tariffs
There have been retailers warning about this sort of holiday squeeze since Trump’s first term began. In a 2018 Washington Post story that profiled small business owners worried that U.S.–China duties would be “catastrophic” for their competitive ability to match big-box prices, and in a CBS News piece about midsize companies scrambling to pull forward shipments before the tariff hikes took effect. A year later, Reuters found that giants like Walmart and Amazon were holding many holiday prices flat even as tariffs nudged up electronics costs, presaging the current gulf between dominant chains and vulnerable independents. Today, no fewer than 97% of U.S. importers are small businesses — and more than 60% of small-business owners now list tariffs among their chief concerns, according to survey data cited by Retail Dive.
Tiny shops make do as courts weigh Trump’s tariffs.
They’re having to improvise small shops amid Trump tariffs. Many are trimming product lines, postponing hires and making smaller, more frequent orders rather than gambling months in advance with big ones; others rely on pre-orders so they take delivery only of what has already been sold or move a chunk of production to the United States or nations with lower tariffs — even if that means higher sticker prices. Policy uncertainty only adds to the strain: The National Retail Federation complains that emergency tariffs have, in effect, made it impossible for corporate planners, and they are standing by as the Supreme Court considers whether a president can use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to extend broad duties without more explicit approval from Congress, a battle recounted in a recent NRF blog post. For owners like Hassett, that debate has a sterile quality when he is in the business of filling online carats with goods running out of stock as holiday shoppers buy online on to the third week of December — “We probably could have made 50% more sales if we had enough inventory,” he said, emphasizing how issues as abstract and esoteric as trade battles become very real holiday losses.
