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Tarrif Price Hike or Excuse?

Texas_Signmaker

Very Active Signmaker
Got a request for 200 real-state signs and I know I've been paying nglantz around $10 per frame. Wanted to see if I could get a qty discount and noticed online they were $17. I called and they said they could drop it to $15 but that they went up because of the tarrifs and their supplier raised the price. I didn't know it would cause a 50-70% increase...The excuse doesn't sound right to me.
 

Billct2

Active Member
Both, a real cost increase and an excuse. Like the fuel surcharge, everyone added it when fuel spiked, don't think anyone deleted it when fuel got back to normal.
 

Gino

Premium Subscriber
I haven't seen those frames for $10 in over a decade or two.

We have 4 or 5 suppliers for these frames and no ones has gone up, yet.
 

Christian @ 2CT Media

Active Member
All the sign suppliers are making "adjustments" to account for the new tariffs even-though none of their current products are affected by them yet. The Tariffs are for RAW goods.
 

unclebun

Active Member
Both, a real cost increase and an excuse. Like the fuel surcharge, everyone added it when fuel spiked, don't think anyone deleted it when fuel got back to normal.

Yep, this. UPS has used fuel surcharges to almost triple the charges to rural addresses for us in the last 4-5 years, despite the fact that prices went down and have only partially gone back up. Every time the price of oil on the futures market moves upwards we get a new download to update fuel surcharges. But, for example, last month when the price went sharply down, there were no downloads to lower fuel surcharges, no reduction in the price of shipping.

When the tariffs were first announced on metals, the talk was how much beer drinkers would be paying for it. So I weighed a beer can and determined how much more a 25% tariff would add to the price of the aluminum in that can. It was something just less than one cent or something minuscule like that. But the number being batted about in the news was that it would add dollars to the price of a six-pack of beer.

If everyone in the sign business would react to price increases on raw materials that way, maybe we'd all be rich and not working so hard.....
 

equippaint

Active Member
Tariffs never work even when intentions are good. The US guys complain that some import price is unfair and their higher prices dont compete but as soon as a tariff is placed on the imported goods to make the sale prices even, the US manufacturers just go and raise their prices. This happened with tires, say the US was around 400/tire for a truck, Chinese at 200, tariffs raise the chinese price to 400 so the US mfg just up theirs to 700 rather than keeping it where they are competitive like they originally complained about.
The only loser in all of this is the consumer, the big corps make out.
 
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