WA business owners detail higher costs since Trump tariffs

Pizza, coffee, ice cream, baby clothes, laser beams.

The array of Washington products and businesses feeling the effects of President Donald Trump’s scattershot, whiplash tariff policy runs the gamut from everyday to esoteric.

Pizzerias are paying more because they only use Italian ingredients. Coffee roasters are paying more because, well, the U.S. can’t grow coffee beans. Ice cream shops that tout their all-local ingredients can’t escape: Their plastic spoons come from China. A Seattle baby apparel company will likely run out of product in 60 days as it can no longer afford to import its already-made and packed products from China. And an Everett laser company is paying more to import specialty parts even as its customers (97% of whom are international) are calling to pause their purchases.

“Americans think that Chinese companies or the Chinese government are paying for these tariffs,” said Jeff Damir, who, with his wife Lynette, runs SwaddleDesigns, a Seattle-based baby supplies company. “I want to assure that they are not. We are paying these tariffs.”

Damir and a handful of other local business owners spoke Wednesday with U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell at the Port of Seattle, which could see drastic decreases in traffic as Trump whipsaws from new tariffs to tariff delays and back again.

Trump has put tariffs of 10% on all U.S. imports. He’s put tariffs of 25% on imports of cars, steel, aluminum and many products from Canada and Mexico. And he’s put tariffs of 145% on imports from China. He abruptly withdrew even higher tariffs on imports from hundreds of countries earlier this month, after promising they would go into effect.

Damir said his company imported a shipping container with $200,000 worth of swaddles, blankets and related goods from China last month. New tariffs had just taken effect, so they paid an extra $20,000. Just this month, they brought in another shipping container. Tariffs had gone up again, so they paid an extra $40,000.

Damir said they now have a shipping container ready to ship, sitting in China, but with tariffs on Chinese imports now near 150%, it would cost an extra $300,000 to bring it here. So it’s going to stay in China.

“We have stopped all production,” Damir said. He figures they’ll start running out of some products in 30 days and pretty much everything in 60 days.

The U.S., Damir said, doesn’t have the fabric production or the specialized workforce to make what they sell at an affordable cost. In the meantime, he’s looking to see if he can move production to countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh, while mostly just hoping for a reprieve from the president.

Trump, he noted, recently exempted phones, computers and computer chips from new tariffs, saving Apple, the world’s richest company, billions of dollars.

Cantwell has introduced legislation — and garnered seven Republican co-sponsors — that would require congressional approval for any tariff lasting longer than 60 days.

“This kind of tariff policy disrupts an integrated economy, hurts small businesses, and basically disrupts what is an important opportunity for the United States to grow more jobs for the future,” Cantwell said Wednesday.

Joe Fugere founded and runs Tutta Bella, a Neapolitan pizzeria with seven locations in the Seattle region and a Sodo facility that makes frozen pizzas for hundreds of grocery stores.

The “holy trinity” of pizza, Fugere said, is tomatoes, cheese and flour. And because Tutta Bella is a member of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, all three must be from Italy. The company’s packaging — cardboard pizza boxes, plastic wrapping — comes from Canada and Vietnam.

Tariffs at their current rate will cost the company around $200,000 a year, Fugere said. At the previously announced higher rates, which Trump has said are delayed for 90 days, it’d be around $1 million, Fugere said.

“I never thought geopolitics would get in the way of making delicious pizza, yet here were are,” he said.

Blas Alfaro is partner and senior vice president at Fulcrum Coffee Roasters, which supplies beans to more than 400 cafes and coffee shops.

They buy green coffee beans from all over the world and are now paying tariffs of at least 10%. But some of the biggest-producing coffee countries also faced some of the highest tariffs under Trump’s previously announced plans. Vietnam, the world’s second-biggest coffee grower, faced tariffs of 46%. Indonesia, the third-largest grower, faced 32% tariffs.

“Our industry is under unprecedented pressure,” Alfaro said. “Those costs are unsustainable.”

Molly Moon Neitzel, who owns nine eponymous ice cream shops in the Seattle area, wasn’t much concerned about new tariffs. Milk, cream, sugar, fruit, most of her ingredients are domestic.

“I didn’t think I’d be impacted,” she said. Then she remembered spoons.

The disposable, compostable spoons that come with each cup of ice cream come from China. She estimates that tariffs on those spoons will cost her about $240,000 a year. That money either comes out of her bottom line, slicing a big chunk out of annual profits, or it gets passed on to customers in the form of higher prices.

“Even the businesses you think of as totally local are absolutely impacted by these tariffs,” she said.

That brings us to the laser beams.

Gordon Bluechel is the CEO of Access Laser, based in Everett, which makes specialized CO₂ lasers, used for research, surgeries, micro-optics, semiconductor manufacturing, spectroscopy.

While the lasers are made in Everett, they get specialized parts — custom made, not off the shelf — from all over the world. Their biggest supplier is in Canada. Third biggest is in China.

So, with 25% tariffs tacked on to imports from Canada and 145% tacked on to supplies from China, the lasers are costing more to produce.

But the vast majority of Access Laser’s customers are international, so at the same time, they’re losing business as clients slow down orders because of retaliatory tariffs their countries have placed on American goods.

A Chinese client just halted a $200,000 order, which they expect to be canceled. They do over $1 million in sales a year in China, all of which may be lost.

“That’s a big deal,” Bluechel said.