Trump tariffs expected to hit Wyoming consumers, small businesses

Bakery owner Ben Ellis spent more than two years researching the ideal machine to mix and separate 400 pounds of dough before ordering heavy-duty equipment in November from the Czech Republic.

“This design works incredibly well with our bakery, it’s tight and efficient in a way that we haven’t been able to find anything close from a U.S. company,” said Ellis, who also looked at options in Japan, Denmark, Germany and France, which all have a tradition of making artisan bread.

If the mixer and specialized lift arrived today, Ellis would pay the original price. But since it’s in the final stages of manufacturing and scheduled to ship the second week of April, he’s now facing an unexpected 20% tariff. 

President Donald Trump announced sweeping new tariffs Wednesday. A baseline tariff of 10% on most imported goods starts at midnight tonight, with more punishing tariffs on roughly 60 countries, including the European Union where Ellis’ order is being made, set to kick in Wednesday.  

Ellis is locked into the purchase and now facing an unexpected import tax of roughly $30,000 — a shock to a Driggs, Idaho-based business that doesn’t take such capital investments lightly.

“For a little company, that’s a big risk,” said Ellis, whose 460 Bread sells in Wyoming stores in Thayne, Afton and Jackson as well as across eastern Idaho. “You have to plan it ahead. You have to get your capital right. You have to finance it correctly.”

Now Ellis is looking at all of his ingredients, including sugar, yeast, wheat, flax seed, salt, eggs and olives, to see what else might rise in cost. His small business can’t absorb all of those increases, which will get passed on to grocery shoppers, he said. 

“I don’t think anybody’s immune,” Ellis said. “I don’t think anybody can be distant from this. Everybody will experience higher costs.” 

The economics of tariffs

Until Trump, tariffs had been an academic backwater topic generating little interest, said Sasha Skiba, an associate professor of economics in the University of Wyoming’s College of Business. Not anymore. What struck Skiba about Trump’s tariffs rolled out this week is how vast they are.

“We haven’t seen anything like this before,” said Skiba, who has been studying trade barriers, including tariffs, for decades. 

During his first term, Trump imposed targeted tariffs on steel and aluminum, which allowed researchers to see how tariffs play out in a globally connected economy. 

“In 2018, we have actually observed a broad tariff applied in the modern economy,” Skiba said, which is useful since prior examples come from a period when national economies were more isolated. 

Due to COVID-19, researchers only had two years to see how the tariffs played out before the shock of a global pandemic kicked in. Data from that period shows foreign producers kept their prices the same, Skiba said. Since those exporters didn’t discount their goods to account for the tariffs, the added cost of those tariffs were passed on to American companies and consumers, he said. And there’s another phenomenon that economists often observe — when prices go up on foreign goods, domestic producers follow suit. 

“The domestic producers will also increase the prices,” Skiba said, “or they would be leaving money on the table.” 

That’s because tariffs distort the market, said Jason Shogren, a professor at UW’s College of Business. 

“You raise the price of an import, you lower the competition and the whole free market works with competition,” Shogren said. When you restrict competition, he added, “now you have fewer sellers and they have a little more market power over the consumer.”

It’s hard to say how soon consumers will encounter higher prices since some retailers might initially absorb the costs, said Wenlin Liu, chief economist for Wyoming’s Economic Analysis Division. 

Liu pointed out that many countries have higher tariffs than the U.S., but he stressed that doesn’t mean Americans are being ripped off. Imposing lower tariffs has meant lower prices for American consumers — and businesses like 460 Bread — on everything from machinery to clothing to electronics. While the U.S. has lost some manufacturing jobs, Liu said, “some 300 million consumers benefited.” The U.S. could produce more products, like textiles, but at a cost. 

“We can make it here,” Liu said. “The cost is absolutely higher given workers’ wages.”

Shogren agrees that American consumers have benefited from free trade. He recalled how buying a television once required a month’s salary. 

“Now it’s a day,” Shogren said. “We’ve outsourced a lot of this production because, typically, labor costs are less.”

Moving that production back to the U.S. could subject manufacturing to stronger labor laws and environmental protections, which could have social benefits, Shogren said.

“But they all come at a cost,” he said. “There’s no free lunch.”

Bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. sounds good, but if that manufacturing does not end up in places where skilled workers already live, those jobs could be hard to fill, Skiba said. Researchers have looked closely at retraining and relocation programs and found that workers are generally averse to uprooting their lives to follow manufacturing jobs, he said. 

Uncertainty and questions 

At Teton Motors’ Subaru dealership in Jackson, the Trump administration’s tariffs on auto manufacturers have yet to provoke a rush of purchases for fear of higher prices that’s been documented elsewhere. Shogren and Skiba see car prices as especially vulnerable to tariffs because auto parts cross multiple borders, multiple times as a car is being assembled, which layers on import taxes. 

“I’d say we’re getting one to three people a day who are inquiring about how the tariffs may affect the price of cars going forward,” autosalesman Jon Pinardi told WyoFile on Thursday. “They’re trying to figure out if it needs to be a stimulant [to buy now], but I haven’t [had] anybody say, ‘Oh, I’m going to buy today because of tariffs tomorrow.’” 

Pinardi’s response to the inquiries has been consistent so far. 

“We don’t have the foggiest idea,” he’s been telling prospective buyers. “We don’t know how it’s going to affect the pricing of vehicles going forward.” 

To date, General Motors and Subaru — the two manufacturers that Teton Motors sells — have not provided any guidance to dealers, he said. 

Agricultural producers also could be in the crosshairs as a global trade war escalates. But Theron Anderson is willing to accept some risk. A fourth-generation farmer in the Albin area, northeast of Cheyenne, Anderson grows dryland wheat, corn and millet. 

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Anderson wants to see manufacturing return to the U.S. Having to order farm machinery and fertilizer from overseas — particularly from Russia and China — puts farmers at a disadvantage, he said, describing long waits for replacement parts. He also sees trade with Canada as unfair when it comes to importing wheat and dairy.

As for selling his own crops, Anderson isn’t sure it could get worse than it already is. His dad sold wheat for $5 a bushel in the 1970s when he could buy a new tractor for $25,000, Anderson said. Today, the cash price for wheat is $4.44 a bushel, he told WyoFile on Thursday, and a new tractor costs over half a million dollars. 

“You still go out after a bad habit until a banker tells you [that] you can’t do it anymore,” he said about continuing to farm. “The prices are so depressed, I don’t know that they’ll see a lot of damage coming from the tariffs at this point in time.”

Meanwhile, Ellis doesn’t expect the U.S. to start manufacturing artisan bread-making machines anytime soon. He has bought pans and a bagging machine from U.S. companies but other parts are hard to find. If Trump had given businesses more time to adapt to tariffs, it would have caused less turmoil, Ellis said.  

Ellis had been planning to invest in a part from Japan to make his operation run more smoothly. 

“Instead of having a piece of equipment that makes our products better and more efficient, we’re just not going to do it,” he said. “We’re just going to be less efficient.”

—WyoFile Staff writer Mike Koshmrl contributed to this story.