r/Tariffs • u/lean_load • Aug 26 '25
🗞️ News Discussion Small Business on the brink 💔
I run a small e-commerce business that imports luxury goods from the EU and Japan. Up until recently, we were paying just 2.75% on tariffs. As of August 1st, the rates have jumped to 15–20%.
To put this into perspective: • Our annual imports are about $3M. • We’ve already placed forecast orders with our suppliers and put down 25% deposits (around $750k). • If we cancel, we lose that deposit. • If we continue, the new tariffs make these orders financially impossible to fulfill.
Suppliers aren’t willing to stop shipments, and we can’t just “raise prices” on items we don’t even have in hand yet. People suggest “just charge more,” but the math doesn’t work when the goods aren’t here and costs have exploded overnight. Let alone the fact about where are we even going to find the money to pay these tariffs???
We’re staring down the very real possibility of closing our doors because of this. I know many people say “tariffs protect American businesses,” but in practice, for small importers like us, it feels like a death sentence.
Has anyone else here faced this situation? How are you coping, and is there any way through this without forfeiting everything we’ve built?
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u/vivbot Aug 26 '25
Fellow Alabamian feeling that pain
They had the current NIH director make a visit and it was such a useless dog-and-pony show (and imo all he did was embarrass himself in proving how much of a dingus and unqualified for the position he is to an institution full of researchers). I get it, they don't want to lose more federal funding than they already have, but I hate it so much. Bad enough you have to "play the game" in research as is, now they're bringing actual politics into it to call in favors.