Trump's tariff policies hurt local businesses like this West Palm Beach team

Yahoo

15-04-2025

President Donald Trump's imposition of triple-digit tariffs on imported goods from China has had global implications. But it is also throwing local businesses in existential turmoil.
Take, for example, Michael and Shirah Benarde, a West Palm Beach brother and sister who turned a novel idea into an international business.
The Benardes, ages 27 and 22, respectively, came up with a relatively inexpensive safety item that women can use to prevent their drinks in bars from being spiked with date-rape drugs that contain the tranquilizer Rohypnol, commonly called 'roofies.'
The item is a hair scrunchie that can also be worn as a wristband. Inside it is a compartment holding a nylon-spandex circular piece of fabric that can be removed. It fits snugly over the top of a glass or cup, and includes a slit for a drinking straw.
The Benardes called their invention the 'NightCap' and pitched it successfully four years ago on the ABC TV show Shark Tank.
'I love this,' Lori Greiner, one of the show's entrepreneurs, told them on the show. 'I don't ever think I've seen a product that came to the Shark Tank that resonated more deeply to me in a social mission way than this."
She offered to invest $60,000, and the NightCap took off, with sales reaching $2.1 million in the year after the show aired. It has continued to grow with the NightCap being promoted at colleges and universities across the U.S. and sold in 40 countries.
'I am worried constantly for young women, when women are getting their drinks drugged, they're getting assaulted,' Greiner continued. 'It's a horrible thing and it's super common and I think this is genius.'
The future looked bright for the Benardes until Trump began announcing escalating tariffs on Chinese goods during the past couple of weeks.
When the Benardes first came up with their product, they found a company in Texas that would make the NightCaps for them.
But the price was prohibitive: The U.S. company charged about $4 per scrunchie, which was just about the wholesale price for the item.
'We found out there really isn't a textile manufacturing option in the United States,' Michael Benarde said. 'The labor and materials are too high here.'
So, they found a third party who linked them to a factory in China that could make their product at a fraction of the cost.
'The Chinese product was a higher quality too,' Benarde said.
Things were going so good that Shirah Bernarde, who had been enrolled as a student at the University of Tampa, quit college to devote more time to their growing business.
But today their business is suddenly in limbo as Trump keeps threatening China by imposing tariffs of 7 percent, then 27 percent, then 104 percent, then 125 percent, then 145 percent on exports to the United States. What next?
The daily uncertainty of these mercurial, subjective and escalating tariffs have paralyzed the Benardes' thriving business.
The way tariffs work is that the importers pay the rate that's in effect the day the product arrives at a U.S. port, not when it's ordered.
For the Benardes, that means the product they ordered when, say a 7 percent tariff was in effect, could actually be billed at something like 145 percent when it arrives on the dock.
To put that in dollar terms, a $50,000 order now comes off the ship with a tariff surcharge of $77,000 instead of $3,500. For a small business, that's a margin killer.
The timing of these improvised tariff announcements further stokes the uncertainty. It takes the Chinese manufacturer a couple of weeks to fulfill the NightCap order, and then another matter of weeks for the product to be packaged and shipped by sea on a freighter to a U.S. port in either California or Texas.
With the tariffs — both projected and real — changing daily, the Benardes have no way to estimate the future costs of their operation. Every order is a roll of the dice, subject to Trump's latest social media impulse.
'It should be illegal to add tariffs without a 90-day notice to give businesses a chance to know the costs,' Benarde said.
The way things stand now, the Benardes could make a bulk purchase that anticipates a tariff that will be long out of date by the time the product actually gets to the United States.
'Logistically, we can't really do anything,' Benarde said. 'They're doubling the cost of goods — but even with that, it's still cheaper having them made in China.'
So, is China paying for the higher cost of the Bernardes successful product? No, the Benardes are paying for it, and depending on how high the tariffs get, so will their customers.
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'I wouldn't be surprised if the tariff gets higher,' Benarde said.
That may lead him and his sister to look for a manufacturer in another country, like Vietnam. Although there's still no guarantee what will happen to tariffs there once the current moratorium on tariff changes in that country is lifted.
Whatever happens, these things are true: There's not going to be a textile manufacturing renaissance in the United States that pops up in time to rescue the Benardes' small business. And even with high tariffs on Chinese-made products, it's still cheaper for the Benardes to import the product from there than to manufacture it in the United States.
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So, who's really being hurt here?
Trump's wild tariff policy — the product of personal whim more than careful analysis — is more an act of uninformed retribution against a foreign company that creates heavy collateral damage to U.S. companies and their customers.
'At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the U.S.A., and other countries, is no longer sustainable or acceptable,' Trump posted on social media last week.
But it sure looks like the people being 'ripped off' are those like the Benardes and a whole lot of American women who've been slipped an economic roofie by Trump and told to just 'be cool' about it.
Frank Cerabino is a news columnist with The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA Today Network-Florida. He can be reached at [e-mail].
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: West Palm Beach business is collateral in Trump tariff war | Opinion