Marketplace - Businesses brace for tariff déjà vu

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

The White House has proposed new tariffs on 60 countries that allegedly aren’t doing enough to ban forced labor. Domestic businesses, already burned from last year’s trade war, are bracing for more hurt. In this episode, companies weigh early orders against rising costs. Plus: Recent positive inflation data could convince the Fed to hold interest rates steady, Kroger buys Giant Eagle in ongoing effort to unseat Walmart as the supermarket market-share king, and parents sacrifice to put their kids through youth sports.Every story has an economic angle. Want some in your inbox? Subscribe to our daily or weekly newsletter.Marketplace is more than a radio show. Check out our original reporting and financial literacy content at marketplace.org — and consider making an investment in our future.Read the stories from today’s episode: Retailers map out tariff strategiesThe Fed digests an optimistic week for economic dataTraditional supermarkets are struggling. Kroger hopes its Giant Eagle merger will helpBusiness Botox: What it takes to sell a luxury homeYouth sports have turned into a five-figure-a-year commitment for many parents

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organizations worldwide. GEP combines agentic AI with three decades of procurement and supply chain data and expertise. Learn more at gEP.com. If you're keeping track, I think I've only said economic data like three times this week. From American public media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Colin Risdahl. It is Thursday today, the 16th of July. Good as always to have you along, everybody. Retail sales are where we begin today.

We are still buying stuff. Thank you, American consumer. But not as much as we had been buying. Thank you, inflation underlying uneaseless. and, oh yeah, don't forget, tariffs, which have fallen out of the headlines but are still very much a thing and might be becoming more of a thing real soon. The White House announced new 25 percent tariffs on Brazil today, and there are more coming to replace the president's tariff-palooza import taxes.

The Supreme Court said we're illegal. They're coming soon, a couple of months, maybe. So as we brace for tariffs, I guess it's 3.0 now, marketplace the Supreme Beneshaw gets us going with how businesses are coping this. time round. Even in the flower business, tariffs will find you. Flowers for Dreams is headquartered in Chicago and does flower delivery and events across the Midwest. CEO Stephen Dime has been bracing for changes to the tariff situation. Yeah, we're starting to work on our winter menu, our Valentine's preparation. We know we're going to be hit hard with tighter margins and some pricing pressure.

Then we're preparing for that because it happened last year. Dime actually prefers to get his flowers from the Midwest. But you know, not everything grows there. So he's got to do some importing. And he's trying to place those orders early. But that is not really how flowers work. Every person up and down the supply chain reserves that right to make changes due to the delicate nature, the fragile nature of flowers. So prices are up and so are substitutions. And people ordering flowers for like their weddings don't love that. No client loves that. A lot of businesses have tried like they did last year to front load. their imports ahead of new batches of tariffs. The National Retail Federation estimates port volumes

surged 19% year over year in June. Jonathan Gold is vice president of supply chain and customs policy there. You're seeing higher freight rates as a result of some of this. You've got higher costs for inventory because you're going to hold the inventory longer than you typically would. Active Style is a company that sells Scandinavian Activeware. Nate Axvig is the CEO. He orders early when he can, but it means paying for everything early to. You're out money and a good chunk of it before you even get the product on your website or on the sales floor. He's had to take out loans. Some businesses are armed with know-how from last year's tariffs, how to navigate and litigate the technicalities of tariff rules.

Or they have sophisticated pricing plans, raise prices on one good to pay for the tariffs on the other. But more than anything, says Randall Sargent, partner at Oliver Wyman, they're just over it. You know, there's so much uncertainty around it. And then it's like the wargaming and, you know, I think a lot of retailers that I talk to are kind of like, are we really doing this again? Yep. Yep, we are in New York. I'm Sabrina Benishore for Marketplace. Yes, we are. If you remember back to Monday, I said, I thought I would say economic data 15 times this economic data heavy week. Not so, I suppose. Wall Street today, AI is bad again. It's bad, bad, bad, bad. we'll have the details when we do the numbers. Even though it's just Thursday and one never knows what tomorrow is going to bring us in this economy of hours. This week so far has been pretty good.

We got the June consumer price index on Tuesday, which showed inflation slowing for households. We got the June producer price index on Wednesday, which showed inflation slowing for businesses. We got June retail sales today, as I said, up two tenths percent from May. Now, one month's data does not a trend make. Fed Sherman Warsh reiterated that truth on Capitol Hill this week. But all of the above are things that the Fed wants, slowing inflation, a resilient but not too spendy consumer. So is that enough to make the central bank feel at least a little bit better about things? Here's Marketplace's Kristen Schwab. Sometimes we talk about the Fed like it's one person or something, but the FOMC has 12 voting members and their views on where.

the economy stands? Yeah, I guess it depends which Fed official you ask, right? Stephanie Kelton, an economist at Stony Brook University, says we've gotten mixed messages from Fed officials this week about the future of interest rates. But for now, that's okay, because Randy Krosner, a former Federal Reserve governor, says this stint of good data creates a buffer. That takes pressure off the Fed from having to raise rates. I think the Fed is going to be on hold for a bit. On hold, no rate hikes or cuts to suss out the situation. A little hard to do when the situation is changing. Mark Zandi is chief economist at Moody's Analytics. All eyes on the Ronde war. I mean, I think that's key critical. If oil prices keep going north, we've got a problem.

Zandi says energy prices influence Americans' long-run expectations of inflation. So far, those expectations have stayed steady. But who knows? how consumers will feel now that gas prices are inching up again. If inflation expectations do start to pick up, then we will see those rate hikes. Another run of high gas prices could also affect how business owners see the economy and their bottom lines. Stephanie Kelton at Stony Brook says historically, gas prices take a while to work their way through the supply chain. You don't feel the impact all at once. It seeps through the system slowly and things like packaging and insurance and transportation costs.

So, yeah, the Fed has more time to mull things over. But after their next meeting at the end of July, who knows? I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace. Everybody's got their favorite grocery store, right? The one where you know where everything is, you know what they have, what they don't, when it's crowded, when it's not. Sometimes it's one of the big chains. Sometimes it's something more local. If you live in Ohio or western Pennsylvania, you probably know Giant Eagle. It's a regional chain, has been around for 90 years, has 200 some odd stores. It struggled over the past couple of decades, though, and was just recently bought by Kroger, a national brand about 10 times its size.

Groceries are a challenging business, but Kroger's hoping bigger really is better, as Marketplace's Kelly Wells reports. For decades, Giant Eagle was the most popular. supermarket in Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Just kind of your standard grocery store. Strawberries and blueberries. Buy one, get one free. Has a bakery and a meat section, has a pharmacy and a gas rewards program, and a pretty loyal customer base. We Clevelanders call it Giggle.

In Pittsburgh, where the chain comes from. My mother-in-law calls it Giant Tiggle. That's Pittsburghies. Becky Toth is a giant eagle shopper who actually began her life in the same Western Pennsylvania Township where the chain is headquartered. She's gotten her groceries there her whole life. I've always had good experiences there, and they've always been really close to my house. While Toth has stayed loyal, other folks have left, and not just Giant Eagle, but that whole genre of grocery store, Safeway, Albertsons, Publix, Kroger.

That's a format that has been losing ground for quite some time in the food retail landscape in the U.S. and at a pretty dramatic rate. Ricky Volpe teaches agribusiness at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He says today it's mostly baby boomers who shop at these old school supermarkets. Volpe says they went from commanding about 80% of the market in the U.S. in the 1990s to about half today and still falling. Case in point, Giant Eagle is now the second largest chain in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, seating the top grocer title to Walmart, because Walmart's cheaper. My dot of iced coffee that I started buying like four years ago was $5 when I started buying it. And now at my Giant Eagle, it is $7.

It's stunning. And what's even more stunning is that if I get it at Walmart, it's still $5. Becky Toth will shell out the extra $2 because Walmart is a half hour away. I just don't want to spend my one wild and precious life driving to Walmart. And Giant Eagle is down the street. But she says if they were side by side... I probably would go for the cheaper option. I mean, it's 2026, and I teach musical theater for a living.

So I'm not rolling in it. The traditional supermarket is losing ground with two groups, the price-sensitive shoppers of Walmart and Aldi, and the quality-conscious folks who go to Whole Foods and Sprouts. So Ricky Volpe of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo says if the old school grocery stores want to survive. The only avenue towards growth in that sector has been through mergers and acquisitions. The idea here being, if Kroger approaches a production facility and wants to negotiate lower prices, The facility is more willing to give a break to a company with 2,000 stores than one with 200 stores. Some of those reduced costs from larger volume are from bargaining power.

William Masters is a professor of food policy and economics at Tufts University. He says as Kroger buys more stores, it gains more bargaining power, which lets Kroger sell stuff cheaper than Giant Eagle ever could. So I got curious, and I did a side-by-side shopping basket, and it is appreciably cheaper at Kroger. simply because Kroger's store brands are consistently less expensive. The other benefit is that Kroger's got more fulfillment centers and more trucks going more places that can get filled more efficiently and drive shorter distances. And so the cost per unit of stuff is just a lot lower. So there are genuine scale economies.

That's the bet Kroger's making, and it's a bet Becky Toth wants to see pay off. I think everyone in Pittsburgh is really hoping that this merger means that just day-to-day costs of operating the giant Eagle company are going to go down and then maybe food prices will go down a little bit. And any Econ 101 student will say that that makes sense, says Ricky Volpe with Cal Poly. Only problem is Walmart has already mastered that game. That is why they have been the number one grocery store in the United States since 2000. But where Kroger can compete with Walmart. It's in terms of product quality, customer experience, cleanliness in the stores, all that fresh produce.

All nice things that can make food prices go up. I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace. A quick detour now into brand and image and social media and reality TV. It comes in the form of a story I saw in Business Insider the other day about real estate brokers in the red hot and thus ridiculously expensive San Francisco housing market. Alcena Lloyd wrote it. Welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me. When we say luxury real estate agents, what are we?

talking about here. Give me a sense of what these folks are doing. They are working with multi-million dollar homes. So think of luxury properties in Los Angeles or Manhattan. They are working with clients that are sometimes a part of the 1%. And you have to kind of look the part, which is the gist of this story. Oh, definitely. You definitely have to look the part. You have to make these clients go comfortable to interact with you. And that's what a lot of these agents are trying to do with their appearance. $100,000, thousands of dollars, clothes, Botox, all of that. All of that. that. I mean, it really depends on what agent you're speaking with. Some are spending hundreds and some are spending thousands, like you said. One California agent that I spoke to estimates that she spent

as much as $100,000 last year loan on clothing. $100,000, just a lot of money, well above median household income, as we know. So this is not in the realm of reality for a lot of people. But in the same way that sort of oak courture trickles down to, you know, target and all the rest of them. this is a brand play it's a content creation play it's it's all the stuff that we see now in a huge part of the rest of the economy definitely i think luxury real estate is obviously an extreme example but i do think it reflects like a broader shift in today's culture where personal brand being aesthetics and online visibility are becoming a key part of the job yeah keep going on that because this is that to the extreme right oh definitely i think it's especially so with

luxury real estate because we've seen so many reality TV shows pop up over the last couple years. Shows like selling sunset, selling the OC, owning Manhattan. They kind of turned agents into quasi-celebrities. I think that glamorized aesthetic bleeds and declined expectations, even for people that aren't on television. Yeah. What is obliged to mention here, as with anything that has sort of a cultural moment tint to it, social media, right?

Oh, definitely. Social media is a huge, huge. part of it. I think it's definitely raised the bar. I think agents used to rely heavily on networks and referrals. Now, many are expected to be constantly visible online. They're making listing videos and personal branded content. One stuff, Florida agent that I spoke to says she gets about 90% of her business from Instagram and TikTok. And she spends about $1,000 a month on clothing for her videos. Wow. I mean, that's a lot. That's a lot in referrals and that's a lot of money on clothing. Here comes the subjective question, which I am obliged by my own conscience to ask.

When you were reporting this story, did you not look at it and say, really? Is that what we're doing now? I think a big question people have is, is this just vanity? But the agents I spoke to do not see it that way. I mean, they really do see it as a serious means of building confidence and establishing credibility in this industry. They're working with people that want to work with people that look like them. And I think this is honestly about selling an aspirational lifestyle. Right. Alcina Lloyd at Business Insider. Alcena, thanks so much for your time.

I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Coming up. I'm in shocked that parents are actually paying that much money. Oh, trust me, they are just as shocked as you are. First, though, sure, why not? Let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial's down 105 points today.

About two-tenths percent. Finished at 52,000 to 552. That's a lot of fives and twos. The NASDAX sank 387 points. 1 and a half percent, 25,81. The S&P 500 down 38 points, about a half percent, 75, 33. Kroger rang up 3 and 6 tenths percent. Today we were talking about them. Albertsons, which owns Safeway and Julesosco and Shaw's, expanded 3.2 percent. Walmart added about two and two-tenths of one percent on the day. And sure, United Health Group increased one and two tenths of one percent.

Cigna gave back about four and seven tenths percent. Bond prices fell. The yield on the 10-year T-note rose 4.5. 6%, you're listening to Marketplace. This Marketplace podcast is presented by Tomorrow's Cure. If our health care coverage leaves you wanting to learn more about the innovations shaping medicine, tomorrow's cure is for you. It's the chart-topping 2025 Ambi Award finalist podcast from Mayo Clinic. Back for a brand new season with new host award-winning journalist Lindsay Sievert, tomorrow's cure explores the innovations changing the health care landscape.

Featuring conversations with leading physicians, researchers, and medical experts, The new season examines everything from AI-powered diagnostics and cutting-edge cancer therapies to surgical technologies in proving patient care today. Not sure where to start? Listen to the season premiere featuring MD Anderson Radiation Physicist Dr. Page Taylor and Mayo Clinic Radiation Oncologist Dr. Adam Holtzman. They discuss why carbon ion therapy is generating excitement in the medical community and what it could mean for the future of precision cancer treatment. So go ahead. Follow tomorrow's cure on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Marketplace. I'm Kai Rizdahl. We got an update on business inventories this week,

how much stuff there is on store shelves and in the back room. Up just attaches the headline, which in translation means we are still buying stuff at a pretty good clip. Inventories tend to pile up when we're not. We have been talking to our regulars this week to hear what they are seeing out there as they run their small businesses. Allie, Trila owns a skate shop called the bruised boutique in Nashville, New Hampshire. Business is a little strange right now. I think people have been very anxious. So roller skates and skateboarding and stuff like that tends to be a secondary thing to groceries and, you know, daycare program, stuff like that. But we're still seeing some steady people coming in. So we're holding on.

The costs of the items are staying flat. Some are even going down a little bit. However, the cost of shipping goods has been rising. As soon as a vendor puts out a new price list, we've been trying to dynamically keep up with our pricing. It caused a lot of influx and work for us to do, like busy work for us to do. We've had to hire a few part-time employees to kind of keep up. We're not making more money, but yet we're spending more money. My biggest challenge right now is planning for the future. I think about closing the store.

more often than I think about its future. And this is the first time in this 18 years that we've been in business that I've ever had those thoughts. I don't think we're close to that. But those are the thoughts that have never entered, entered my mind before. It's always been the future just keeps getting brighter and brighter. And this one is, it's a little mentally challenging. I ended up saying to myself, I need to find that joy again.

And so I took 15 minutes every day and I skated. To be honest. The first 15 minutes was probably more like 10. And then something magic happened, and I saw my employees start doing that on their lunch breaks. I think that joy is contagious, and I think that it helps everybody remember why they love to be in your shop. What I'm hoping to see in the next few months is people start to realize that things are going to be okay, that the economic situations will stabilize. If things were more predictable,

we could start thinking about moving into a bigger space or we could think about having more inventory. We could just start moving forward again with our business. Moving forward is good. Allie Trilla at the Bruce Boutique in Nashville, New Hampshire. Even if you're not a diehard soccer fan, you've watched at least some of the World Cup, right? And maybe you marveled at the athleticism on the field

and the spectacle off it. And also, maybe if you're wired a certain way, you said to yourself, this is a big, big business. Fact check, true to the tune of billions of dollars. But even way farther on down the athletic food chain, sports are expensive, even for parents whose kids harbor no illusions at all about going pro.

From New York, James Bennett II reports. When Peg Eon was younger, she was an athlete, played softball, basketball, rugby, and soccer. Today, she's a single mom with three high school-aged sons who played a beautiful game here at a soccer academy upstate. She says sports give her kids something important. One thing I wanted for my kids was consistency. And then I wanted to make sure that they were going to have excellent role models. And she says it's working.

I've seen my kids turn into great students, great friends, leaders on their team. But the expenses, $70 tournament fees, $500 uniforms, goldie gloves that run up to $120 bucks a pair and only last for three or four months. And then there's the travel. Sometimes it's a drive to Virginia or a flight to Missouri or even Portugal. A hotel can cost up to $250 per night. It's always been a struggle for me. When I look back, they might be all out of my home. They might all be in college, and I might be working seven days a week to pay off my debts.

You know, so that's kind of scary. The days of cheap and affordable sports, even at the level of local recreational leagues, are largely behind us. Public spending has declined for local programs, parks and rec. The community-based sports have seen a decline in funding. That's Linda Flanagan, who studies the commercialization of youth sports. She says that as public funding declined, private equity investors noticed something about sports like baseball, soccer, and basketball. There's money to be made in youth sports because, in large measure, parents will not skimp on their kids' development, especially athletics. One group backed by private equity charges up to $440 per year for parents just to access footage of their kids.

its hockey games. Another has run youth leagues and has been buying up flagged football fields and baseball facilities, including one in Cooperstown, New York, the spiritual home of baseball. By consolidating leagues and the necessary infrastructure to play, these companies can easily raise participation and tournament fees. And as private equity is professionalized youth sports, younger and younger kids have been getting elite coaching. The privatization has the effect of shutting out kids on the public school teams, too. You're not going to be able to join as a ninth grader. The competition is just too stiff.

And when it looks like pay to play is the only way, and you don't want to go into debt, you have to think outside the box. Today, Jane Ayrvan is a single mother to three kids. Two daughters play tennis. Her son plays basketball. She played the game herself at Iowa and Fordham. In the 80s and 90s, she says,

her biggest sports expenses were new shoes. Today, things are different. I'm in shock that parents are actually paying that much money. Basketball for her son costs more than $10,000 a year, plus roughly $2,000 for travel. She's found ways to trade her time for discounts by pouring into the youth sporting community. She's formed league parent associations. She organizes fundraisers and workshops and sometimes steps in to coach the kids herself. She's helping one of her son's leagues transition to nonprofit status, and she's hoping,

hoping to bring a technique over from one of her daughter's tennis organizations. Families could go to the program director and say, listen, I'm going to be short a couple of hundred dollars. How can you help me with this burden and how can I still keep my kid in this program? And more often than not, the league gives parents financial relief. And that couple hundred bucks in this morning world, it can make a noticeable difference. I'm James Bennett the second for Marketplace. This final note on the way out today, data from Bain that I saw on CNBC, an addendum of sorts to Kaylee's piece on grocery stores. Grocery units, which is basically the way that industry counts individual items sold, fell 1.8% in June from a year earlier.

That is down from basically break-even when they measured it last year. If you are blaming inflation for that? Well, yeah. Our daily production team includes Andy Corbyn, Mika Ellison, Maria. Holland Horst, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry, and Sophia Terenzi. A Willstorie is the Supervising Senior Producer. And I'm Kai Rizzdahl. We Will. See you tomorrow, everybody. This is APF. The economy never stops shifting. Markets move, global trade gets disrupted, and policies shift.

And all these factors have a tremendous influence on the ways we live and work. I'm Kimberly Adams, host of Marketplace Morning Report, a daily 10-minute podcast where a team of award-winning reporters helps you make sense of our evolving economy. Listen to Marketplace Morning Report on your favorite podcast app.