US retailers have long prided themselves on their ability to offer a large array of consumer products. Trump’s tariffs could stop that.
If the past half century of American consumer life has had one defining feature, it’s that the average shopper has a vast number of different product choices available.
Donald Trump’s trade war could upend that.
Nearly 36 years ago, when Russian politician Boris Yeltsin toured a Texas grocery store, he famously thought the display was some sort of setup.
« When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people », he later wrote.
Since then, American retail stores have only gotten larger and more varied, and major retailers often tout the breadth of their assortment — measured in stock-keeping units, or SKUs — as a key measure of ability to give US shoppers new and exciting reasons to buy.
The typical Walmart Supercenter has some 120,000 SKUs, while Amazon boasts of its ability to deliver tens of millions of unique items in two days or less. The two giants represent only a fraction of US retail.
Many of these products are already sourced domestically, but the variety consumers have come to expect relies on an extensive global supply chain that delivers food and merchandise around the globe at astonishingly low prices.
Now, Trump’s tariffs on goods from other countries are starting to squeeze America’s once-endless supplies of stuff.
