Welcome to the 2025 Christmas shopping season – in May – brought to you by Donald J. Trump’s tariffs.
If you haven’t scrolled all the way down the page on your favorite news website lately, you could have missed the fact that the American supply chain has been snapped in half by Trump’s manufactured trade wars, specifically with China, and experts from one end of the political spectrum to the other end of the economic spectrum are issuing dire warnings.
Empty shelves. Layoffs. Decreased hours for truckers, longshoremen and anyone who works in the American shipping and receiving industry. Higher prices. And COVID-like shortages.
These are not hand-wringing, fear-mongering libs making these predictions, either. They’re executives at foreign logistics companies, some of which track and report international shipping trends, and the men and women who operate some of America’s largest ports.
The executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, Gene Soroka, told his harbor commissioners to expect a 35-percent decline in arrivals because “essentially all shipments out of China for major retailers and manufacturers” had been stopped.
In the Port of Mobile, one of Alabama’s key economic engines, arrivals are also down, according to NBC-15, which reviewed bills of lading and shipping receipts and spoke to several officials. Port officials are hopeful that its “diverse cargo mix” will help offset some of the tariff interruptions, but that’s unlikely to be the case. The CEO of a Mobile logistics company told the TV station that some importers had already paid an additional $30-$40 million because of the tariffs in the first month, and expecting that to continue was unrealistic.
Most ports, Mobile’s included, are expecting to see somewhere between 25-35 percent reductions in shipments in the coming weeks, and then those numbers will fluctuate wildly depending on the trade war.
To put that in perspective: That’s a larger reduction, at least initially, than during COVID.
Remember those empty shelves and waiting in lines to buy common products? Fun times. Remind me, who was president then?
One of the most significant measures, though, of the coming consumer pain is “blank sailings” – a shipping industry term used to describe the cancellation of a shipping route routinely made each week. This past week, “blank sailings” to ports on the U.S.’s West Coast ports were up 13 percent, according to the research firm Sea-Intelligence.
Next week, they’re expected to be at 28 percent.
That’s a huge problem, no matter what happens next. And it’s why the president keeps talking about cutting back on dolls and pencils.
Because no matter what happens from this point – even if Trump decides to arbitrarily (as if he has any other way of doing things) to suspend the tariffs on all countries – there is now a major disruption within the supply chain for certain good. Specifically, we’re talking about things like toys, furniture, back-to-school supplies and clothing.
Those will be hit first, leading to scarce availability and much, much higher prices. (I mean, they have to be higher if we’re going from 30 dolls to 2.)
Shipping experts predict that within the next month, and as early as next week, consumers will start to find it harder to get certain items. And then the scarcity will spread.
That’s also the way this single-insufferable-man-made catastrophe will unfold in regards to thousands of jobs. As shipments slow, so will work for those who work on the boats, those who work the docks and those who deliver the products from docks to stores.
The intricate and expansive American shipping industry is about to get rocked.
“The longer tariffs last, the greater the pain for truckers as well as the families and businesses we serve,” said Chris Spear, president and CEO of American Trucking Associations.
At least three trucking companies announced layoffs this week, as freight declined roughly 5 percent and further drops were expected. Truckers have seen routes and rates slashed and some of them have started refusing to make West Coast hauls because they know it’s unlikely they’ll be able to find cargo to haul on a return trip.
You’ll be not surprised at all to learn that economists now expect the U.S. economy, because of the effects of the Trump tariffs, to be in a recession by the summer, and for consumers to feel the pain of sharply higher prices and product scarcity for the remainder of the year and possibly beyond.
So, yeah, now is probably the best time – and maybe even the only possible time – to get that Christmas shopping handled.
