With spring comes wedding season, when Cara Rank begins to rent table settings for Jackson Hole occasions with hundreds of guests. She plans ahead, placing orders six to nine months in advance. President Donald Trump’s now-paused tariffs would have slapped a $40,000 import tax on her roughly $200,000 shipment of hand-painted porcelain dinnerware, cutlery and glassware — all coming from Europe in May.

Preparing to absorb that cost on Wednesday morning and fearing a recession, Rank decided not to hire a new full-time position, at a salary of $70,000 with benefits, even though she had a finalist for the job. 

“Do they want me to put people to work and pay them a living wage or do they want me to pay tariffs?” Rank told WyoFile on Wednesday. “Because that’s the decision in my mind.”

But then Trump soon reversed course, announcing a 90-day pause on all “reciprocal” tariffs that went into effect at midnight, except for China, which is now facing a triple-digit tariff. (Trump did maintain a 10% tariff rate on most countries.)

“I think the message that was sent to Donald Trump was very clear that the world will not accept these tariffs. What you saw yesterday was him reacting to that,” Rank said. “It’s a roller coaster, you don’t know how to plan for your business because he is so erratic.”

Small businesses from Jackson to Casper are being whipsawed by the Trump administration’s on-again, off-again tariffs on one side and a global trading system that they depend upon to run their businesses on the other. Small businesses accounted for 129,426, or 65.1%, of Wyoming employees, according to a 2024 report by the U.S. Small Business Administration. 

Rank owns two Jackson businesses, Objet West by XoWyo, which does event rentals, and XoWyo Paper and Press, which also relies on imported materials to print high-end wedding invitations and other custom stationery. She has 11 employees right now, and that number will jump to 25 during the height of weddings and other summer events.

Rank’s pessimism about the economy Wednesday turned to cautious optimism by Thursday. For now, facing 10% baseline tariffs Trump imposed April 5 on nearly all countries, she might still hire that position and grow her company, she said. 

Wyoming businesses are at the mercy of a global trading system that has been decades in the making. One Casper storefront, and its mannequins, has stood watch through the many changes. Dawn Stevenson took ownership of the Mode O’ Day clothing store franchise in downtown Casper in 1974. That same year, Congress passed the Trade Act of 1974, giving the president more authority to negotiate trade deals.

At that time, Casper’s store was one of 840 franchises around the country. In a 2019 interview with Oil City News, Stevenson said the company eventually rebranded to Fashion Crossroads to stay relevant with changing trends, but went bankrupt in the 1990s. Stevenson bought the brand and kept operating the store. 

Kyleen Stevenson-Braxton bought the store from her mother, and Fashion Crossroads remains a steady presence today, celebrating its 50th anniversary last year. But Stevenson-Braxton now runs a business woven together by global relationships. America’s textile manufacturing industry is almost nonexistent, so stocking a store with American-made goods affordably and consistently isn’t an option. 

Instead, Stevenson-Braxton orders a lot of her premium items from Canadian producers, comparing their textile industry to what America’s once offered as far as quality. With her current stock pre-booked with vendors last year, prices are locked in through the fall season. 

“I won’t see price changes until I go to market in August when I’m looking at the spring 2026 season,” she said. 

Her store’s less expensive merchandise comes mainly from China, India and Mexico, and she expects to see those prices rising soon. Although the Trump administration paused higher tariffs for countries like India, the president doubled down on China.

“Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, effective immediately,” Trump posted Wednesday on Truth Social. “At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the U.S.A., and other Countries, is no longer sustainable or acceptable.” (The cumulative U.S. rate for Chinese imports is now 145%.)

Closer to home, Stevenson-Braxton is afraid she might have to drop vendors she’s used for decades if they’re forced to price themselves out of the market, particularly those based in Canada. 

“It’s very scary to me honestly as a business owner,” she said. “Not just the tariffs, but I’m afraid that our economy’s going to get broken.” 

All the turmoil and uncertainty follows what has already been a tough time for clothing retailers. 

“Small businesses in general – and clothing in particular – we never really recovered from COVID because supply chains were affected and all of the elements that go into making clothing went up [in price]. So thread, buttons, zippers, cloth, all of these commodities went up in price.” 

She said wholesale and operating costs such as rent and energy have risen as well. “You have a choice: You can either pass it on or you can try and eat it, but we can’t pass on all of these increases, and we can’t just eat all of it.”

There’s only so much her store can absorb before she has to pass costs on to her customers, she said, “and then the customer has a threshold of what they’re willing to spend because they’re dealing with all of the same things.”

Another Casper business, Wyoming Camera Outfitters, carries consumer and professional imaging gear from Canon, Nikon and Sony. They also have extensive offerings of aftermarket lens makers, such as Tamron. 

It’s been chaotic behind the scenes, store manager Chris Luse said Tuesday before Trump reversed course on hefty tariffs for countries like Japan. Most of the equipment the store offers is manufactured in Japan and the Philippines, with some imports from China and other Asian countries. 

“We’re getting emails left and right from all of the manufacturers,” he said. He said the first thing they’ll likely see is quick elimination of rebates and incentives. 

Luse thinks the manufacturers will have something of a longer term outlook by the end of this week. “Most of the manufacturers should start having better game plans by then.” 

The store has heard from numerous regular customers who are worried about price increases, and they’ve seen a bit of “panic buying” already. 

Rank herself was contemplating rushing purchases on electronics for her business to get ahead of tariff-induced price hikes. While somewhat reassured by Trump’s pause, Rank is still adding up what the 10% baseline tariff will mean for her bottom line. Her business also typically buys packing materials, bags, foam, ink, tape and glue from China.

“What’s going to happen with China? Should I stock up?” Rank pondered Thursday. “Do I want to spend $10,000 on computers today rather than spacing it out over three to four months?”

The post Shock of Trump tariffs has Wyoming businesses worried appeared first on WyoFile .

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. 

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.

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When Chris Wages talks about the free press, government transparency and the role of local media, the Wyoming attorney brings multiple perspectives to bear. 

He was once a part owner of a small newspaper. After earning a law degree from the University of Wyoming in 1998, he has been covered by the media as a Sweetwater County deputy prosecutor; Buffalo Municipal Court judge; Kaycee town judge; and 4th Judicial District magistrate and commissioner. He’s also been an elected official, serving two terms as Johnson County attorney starting in 2003. 

He’s encountered the media while working on civil cases or defending clients. In private practice since 2001, he opened his own firm in Sheridan and Buffalo in 2015. 

For the past two years, the Wyoming Press Association has retained Wages, who overlapped with and then replaced longtime WPA attorney Bruce Moats, who retired in 2023.

“The WPA provides our members a free legal hotline which gives all 39 newspaper members access to Chris for questions and advice regarding open meetings, open records and public notice issues,” explained Darcie Hoffland, WPA’s executive director. (WyoFile is an associate member of the WPA, but has never been represented or advised by Wages.)

“Chris has been called on often to provide counsel to the WPA and our members who work to uphold Wyoming’s sunshine laws for our communities,” she said in an email.

WyoFile asked Wages to shed some sunshine on the current state of affairs for Wyoming newspapers when it comes to open meetings and public records. The following Q&A has been edited for clarity.  

WyoFile: You’ve been an elected official, a partner in a newspaper and prosecuted and defended cases in court. You’ve personally been scrutinized by the press while running for office and had records examined. What does that experience tell you about the need for sunshine laws? 

Chris Wages: I understand from the other side, having been an elected official, that [transparency] can be the least efficient way to do things. But democracy is not efficient. It’s just democratic. 

WF: What is a public record? 

CW: I have a broad definition that I think is fair. You start with the overarching philosophy that anything the government does should be open to the public. From there, the Legislature has carved out a few exceptions. Let’s not make it unfair for government to conduct business, like purchasing real estate or being involved in a lawsuit. We can’t put them at a disadvantage, making them disclose everything that their competition wouldn’t have to disclose. So there are a few common sense exceptions that should be narrowly applied to public records and public meetings. But basically, the public’s business should be conducted in the bright light of day, and any documents or communications that our government is using should be available to the public.

WF: How strong are Wyoming laws when it comes to public records?

CW: Not strong enough. I definitely think that’s clear. One problem that we always have is the cost of getting public records and the vagueness of the right to get public records without exorbitant fees. Basically under current laws, they’re allowed to charge for hours spent researching, legal review and redaction of public documents. The fees are all over the map, and so we need more direction from the Legislature in that regard, and we need limits put on what fees can be charged. 

WF: What was it like being a partner in a newspaper, the Port Townsend Leader, in Washington? 

CW: Mainly my experience on that would be the administrative side rather than the press side. But it’s a pretty decent-sized paper, and it was a busy community. It did give me a perspective — from the local paper — of what kind of resources you have to be a watchdog for the public, advocating transparency and ensuring government officials and governments are held to account. It’s important for citizens to do their part too, to participate and be informed. Oftentimes, readers brought us information that we could follow up on because we didn’t have the resources to be at every single meeting. Like a lot of Wyoming communities, Port Townsend and Jefferson County had an active citizenry. So it was a vibrant paper with a lot of letters to the editor.

WF: What does your job as Wyoming Press Association attorney entail?

CW: The Wyoming Press Association is working to make sure these laws are being abided by around the state, and it’s a group of publications that has provided resources for just this purpose. I and my staff run what they call the hotline, and that’s when members of the association can call with problems as they come up. We represent members of the association or the association itself in actions to advocate for the free press and for opening public meetings and documents. 

WF: What else should the public know about sunshine laws?

CW: Sunshine laws are a living entity and change over time. The Legislature is often having to catch up to cutting-edge technology. Now our concern is about social media sites or texting or Slack chats. The press is acting as a watchdog to make sure that the public and government are aware and abiding by the laws. If we don’t exercise our right to access this information, those rights could be diminished or go away.

WF: What role do you see Wyoming newspapers playing in their communities? 

CW: My experience as a WPA attorney, getting to know a lot of journalists, editors and publishers around the state, has been an eye opener. I see people with a real zeal for unbiased journalism that brings facts to the public. I don’t know if people know how committed some of these local journalists are to getting the information out there to see right into what our government is doing. Then we can decide who we want to represent us and what we want them to be prioritizing. The press plays a critical role in getting that information out to the electorate.

CW: I’ve spent my whole adult life here, and I really believe Wyoming is kind of the last best place. A lot of our disputes that we have over public records requests or public meetings, we’ve negotiated and been able to reach a resolution. We’ve definitely had some problems that have become intractable. Oftentimes, that’s when the public meetings or public records act has been useful. 

WF: What kinds of violations have you encountered?

CW: You’re seeing, more often than not, [public officials] wanting to move more quickly than the law allows or to avoid attention if it’s an unpopular decision. When someone’s trying to hide something, and we’ve had to press harder, I think those are the outliers. 

In more than one instance, a board or council has sought to vote by secret ballot to fill a vacancy. Essentially, they don’t want someone to know that they voted against them to avoid embarrassment or awkwardness. That’s not legal. 

Sometimes, it’s a bummer being in government in a small town because you make decisions that you think are right and are not necessarily popular. But that’s an important decision where you’re appointing someone who is going to have authority and be doing the public’s work. That needs to be done in public.

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