Last summer, in the last week of July, I saw the first box of Christmas lights near the front of the truck.
In accordance with tradition at our store, this box is not placed on the conveyor belt along with the rest of the freight. It is instead carried — held high and reverently like baby Simba — and walked out of the truck by someone (usually me) loudly singing Mariah Carey’s greatest hit.
This is met, as always, with cries of exasperation — “No way! Already?” — as a half-dozen people sweating in shorts and T-shirts shake their heads in disgust and disbelief that the Christmas [stuff] is arriving in the middle of summer. Then we just lean into the absurdity and switch over to a Christmas music playlist for the rest of the unload.
We do this every year.
Or, at least, we did this every year. But thanks to World War T and to Hawley Smoot 2: Electric Boogaloo, it might not happen this summer. Or this fall. Or even this December.
Might be a good year to sell your used Grand Duchess on eBay.
Chinese producers of plastic Christmas trees and other festive decorations say orders from U.S. clients, which are crucial for their business, should have started to come in by now. But because of surging import tariffs, they haven’t.
… U.S. retailers are almost completely reliant on China for Christmas decorations, where they source 87% of such goods – worth roughly $4 billion. Chinese factories are also heavily dependent on the U.S. market, where they sell half of what they make.
If Americans want new Christmas decorations this year, they will have to pay a lot more for them – if they can find them on the shelves at all.
“So far this year, none of my American customers have placed any orders,” said Qun Ying, who runs an artificial Christmas tree factory in the eastern city of Jinhua.
“Of course it’s about the tariffs. By mid-April all the orders are normally finalized, but right now … it’s hard to know if any orders are coming. Maybe American customers won’t buy anything this year.”
So that could mean a big change in business-as-usual at the Big Box this summer and fall.
That’s on top of another big change that’s already happening in retail — a relentless overstocking of inventory in preparation for the kind of supply-chain disruption that piece describes, not just for Christmas decorations, but for nearly everything.
Retailers in the first months of 2025 are trying to do now what they would have done in the first months of 2020 if they had known that a pandemic was coming ahead of time.
That’s prudent. It’s also exhausting. (And it raises the increasingly urgent question of where are we going to put all of this stuff?)
David Dayen discusses the supply-chain threat to U.S. retail as part of what he calls “The Permanent Tariff Damage.”
Many importers are trying to find other manufacturing sources or cutting costs elsewhere. But some are just putting a stop to everything, while waiting to see if deals can be struck. That sudden stop puts enormous pressure on shipping, trucking, warehouses, and everything else that makes the economy function. Those companies don’t have unlimited reserves to avoid bankruptcy while Trump dithers.
But the real impact would be visible not just to trucking and shipping CEOs, but every consumer trying to buy things this summer. It’s not possible to backfill the volume of canceled orders from China and elsewhere in such a short period of time. That means empty shelves. It’s not surprising that this latest turnaround came right after Trump met with top executives at Walmart and Target. Apparently in that meeting, Trump was told that shortages would occur without some action taken. As Walmart’s rise to market dominance has been powered for many decades by its cultivation of and reliance on Chinese imports, this should not have come as a surprise.
The effective embargo would create other shortages in critical components, such as parts for transformers and air conditioners. But Trump thinks in terms of visuals, and the big one is a Walmart with nothing for sale, or a run on thrift stores as new goods are absent. That would be deadly to his approval rating and he knows it. …
But let’s say that everything “works,” that enough concessions are granted so companies feel comfortable trading with the U.S. again. As Flexport’s Ryan Petersen points out, a mass rebooking from the current low level could strain the available resources on the ocean, send shipping rates soaring, create crises with ships and containers in the wrong place at the wrong time, and lead to the exact same dynamics we saw with the supply chain crunches of 2022 and 2023. And that’s a strong possibility under the best-case scenario.
Even if the trade war ends and trade peace breaks out tomorrow, the supply disruptions and shortages are already baked in.
For me and my crew, this recalls Pharaoh’s dream from the story of that rat-bastard Joseph, with the seven “fat” years of plenty to be followed by seven “lean” years of famine. In our case it may be more like the seven weeks of six-trucks-in-five-nights followed by seven weeks of — well, of maybe a lot less than that. We’ll find out soon enough.
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