Your Pulse On America: Live And Unfiltered
Owngarden | Moment | Getty Images Five years ago, when the pandemic pushed e-commerce to new highs, the industrial warehouse space became the biggest commercial real estate play around. It began to slow in 2022, but now economic uncertainty brought on by constantly changing tariff policy and persistently high inflation is taking a greater toll…
Automakers are worried that President Trump’s tariffs on imported cars and auto parts will soon increase their costs and start eating into profits. But at least one business in the auto industry thinks the tariffs could give it a lift. That company is Carvana, an online retailer of used cars that has gained fame for…
Amid a steady stream of new trade policies in President Trump’s first three months in office, there is one that Andy Musliner, who owns a small toy business in Maryland, can get behind. That’s the ending of a duty-free loophole for cheap goods from China. Mr. Trump this month scrapped a provision that had allowed…
On Sunday morning, as Holly LaFavers was preparing to go to church, a delivery worker dropped off a 25-pound box of lollipops in front of her apartment building in Lexington, Ky. And another. And then another. Soon, 22 boxes of 50,600 lollipops were stacked five boxes high in two walls of Dum-Dums. That was when…
Liu Miao has sold clothing on Amazon to wholesale buyers in the United States for the past five years. That trade has come to an abrupt stop. Mr. Liu owns a small factory in Guangzhou, long the center of China’s highly competitive garment industry. He and other factory managers, already dealing with tight profit margins,…
The expansion of the loophole for tariff-free shipments of goods nearly a decade ago gave rise to Temu, Shein and other low-cost online retailers offering items straight from Chinese factories at unfathomable discounts. It also unleashed something else — a cascade of billions of dollars of digital advertising that provided a windfall for Meta, Alphabet…
When Congress raised the threshold for imported goods to enter the United States tax-free to $800 from $200 nearly a decade ago, it threw open the door to the American consumer market. Chinese companies rushed in. First on platforms like eBay and Amazon, and then on apps like Shein and Temu, exporters funneled the products…
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images Chinese bargain retailer Temu changed its business model in the U.S. as the Trump administration’s new rules on low-value shipments took effect Friday. In recent days, Temu has abruptly shifted its website and app to only display listings for products shipped from U.S.-based warehouses. Items shipped directly from China,…
The Trump administration on Friday officially eliminated a loophole that had allowed American shoppers to buy cheap goods from China without paying tariffs. The move will help U.S. manufacturers that have struggled to compete with a wave of low-cost Chinese products, but it has already resulted in higher prices for Americans who shop online. The…
As much as Amazon may have wanted to dodge the spotlight in President Trump’s trade war, there was no avoiding it for America’s largest online retailer. First, the e-commerce company was entangled in the fleeting spat Tuesday with the White House over a faulty report that Amazon was going to show shoppers the costs of…