(although honestly I wouldn't be surprised if such a push ended up with the profligate spendthrift in chief sending more paltry "stimulus" checks with his ugly-ass signature on it right before midterms)
Not every business the business relationship works that way, but it’s not unusual.
As for a surprise goes, I don’t know about surprised, but certainly it’s worth noting that after a massive illegal tax …. voters get no justice.
Prime example is Mercedes. The RRP for post-tariff Mercedes vehicles was identical to the pre-tariff RRP.
Food prices also rose significantly less than the tariff increases.
Importantly, journalists in media, classically inept at any economic analysis, implied that 10% tariff = 10% RRP rise. They never corrected themselves, nor for the economists who falsely claimed the economy would collapse.
When you pay $10 for a widget at the store, the cost price of that widget is likely $2. A 10% additional tariff (if passed along fully, it wasn't) would mean the widget goes from $10.00 to $10.20.
That wasn't the claim made. OP said:
>and businesses absorbed the vast majority of the blow through both stockpiling and taking the bullet.
Which so far as I can tell, is approximately correct, even if the "vast majority" part is suspect. A goldman sacs from last year estimated consumers will pay 55% of the tariffs by end of 2025. However that only includes the tariffs paid, whereas OP also included "stockpiling".
https://abcnews.com/Business/new-tariffs-effect-us-consumers...
It’s just the NYT. Let’s not demean the rest of the media for the faults of the NYT.
> Importantly, journalists in media, classically inept at any economic analysis, implied that 10% tariff = 10% RRP rise. They never corrected themselves, nor for the economists who falsely claimed the economy would collapse.
It's also pretty vague without any examples of what specifically deserves corrections.
Lovely strawman.
If your prime example is a luxury car with a ton of margin built in, you need a better example. Tariffed commodities absolutely had the costs passed on, and far more of those are sold than high margin luxury products where manufacturers had the option to compress margins vs passing on the cost.
Also, there are lots of products that go through multiple middle men, the tariffs were included and marked up at every stage. Very few things go from manufacturer to retailer with no middlemen.
I’d guess about 1/4 to 1/3rd of tariff costs were absorbed and the rest passed along to the eventual end consumer.
I suspect you work nowhere near the money at work, the closer you get to the money, the more you realize exactly what is built into a price.
If a business raised prices because of tariffs, and consumers paid the higher price, that was a successful test that consumers are willing to pay that higher price for the item. Once that’s been established, the business has little incentive to lower prices once the tariffs go away. Prices only go down if competition with other companies pushes them down, but every player in a market has little reason to do so when they’re enjoying the higher profits.
duxup•3h ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/us/politics/companies-con...