DENVER — Business owners in Colorado are bracing for the impact of President Donald Trump's tariffs on goods and services from Canada, Mexico, and China, which went into effect on Tuesday.
The president placed a 25% tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% tariff on imported goods from China.
For about a month now, Colorado business owners said they've been hoping the tariffs wouldn't go into effect.
"The past month's been difficult," said Jeremy Peterson, who owns Identity Pet Nutrition. "Probably the biggest difficulty is the uncertainty in the general business environment. No one knows what to expect."
Peterson's pet food is produced in Canada, imported into the United States, and sold nationwide. He says he can't change that process for all of his products.
"We import our products from Canada because of the prevalence of factory farming in America," he said.
Peterson told Denver7 that customers of his product will likely see higher prices due to tariffs.
"We make a product that's subject to finished good tariffs and aluminum tariffs, so that's effectively a 50% tariff," he said. "We have a product that the suggested retail is $4.79 to $4.99 right now. In the future, it's looking at a $6.49 retail price point, which is a drastic price increase."
Peterson is just one of the many small business owners who may have to face the possibility of increasing the price of goods because of the tariffs.
"We do carry things like avocados. A lot of our mushroom products are going to be affected with that because a lot of our produce are from Mexico," said Jolie Noguchi, the owner of Pacific Mercantile Company, a Japanese grocery store in the Lower Downtown neighborhood.
Noguchi's family has owned the Pacific Mercantile Company for 80 years. She told Denver7 that produce tends to fly off the shelves on chilly March days, so news of tariffs isn't what she wanted to hear.
"We want to try to keep our prices low, but being a small business, we know that those tariffs are going to affect us in a big way," Noguchi said
Zac Rogers, an associate professor of supply chain management at Colorado State University, predicts that produce and energy costs will increase.
"The places that that folks in Colorado are really going to feel those will be in produce, especially things like tomatoes, strawberries, avocados, bananas," he said. "On the Canadian side, gasoline—a lot of our oil comes down from Canada, including a lot of oil that goes into Colorado refineries. It'll be very difficult for them to be able to switch over from Canadian oil to something else, because they're so finely tuned."
Rogers said he could only speculate what grocery stores would do next.
"I think grocery stores are going to try very hard to keep prices down for as long as they can because of the rate of grocery inflation we've already seen," he said. "I think they know that customers are tired."
Rogers isn't surprised by the retaliatory tariffs now in place from Canada, Mexico, and China.
"A tariff is like going up and pushing somebody. You don't walk up and push somebody and think, 'OK, well, the interaction is over, way to go,'" he said. "What happens is they push you back."
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