With tariff news swirling, one small business in Litchfield, Connecticut, is prepared to pivot to serve its community.
WSHU’s Molly Ingram spoke with CT Mirror’s Jan Ellen Spiegel to discuss her article, “For CT small business, Trump’s tariffs call for another ‘pivot’,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Jan’s story here.
WSHU: For this piece, you spent some time in a unique small business in Litchfield. Who are they, and what do they sell?
JES: Well, it's called the Dutch Epicure shop. It has been around for a long, long, long time, since 1967, and they specialize in two things. The original owner of this shop was a baker, and his daughter now owns the shop. She is also a trained chef and specialty baker. But they also specialize in imported European products, mostly Dutch, and it got me thinking, Oh, my goodness, these guys might really get slammed with tariffs if it comes to that. Since just about 100% of what comes in as a package, good, or fresh, in the case of cheeses, is imported and is going to get nailed with tariffs.
WSHU: Wilma, who owns the store, says she's yet to see a huge impact from tariffs, but that could change soon. Can you give a little context on the tariff situation as it stands today for European goods?
JES: I can give you the status as of early in the week, but there have been a lot of different signals coming out of the White House as to whether the tariff situation may change or not. As many listeners know, there have been a lot of ups and downs. As of right now, there's a 10% tariff on EU goods and most goods around the world. Some countries have slightly higher. Then, there are some specific products that have tariffs on them. Recently, Wilma had not seen any tariffs come through in terms of price hikes that were being passed along to her; she has seen some additional fees related to shipping and whatnot, which may be more inflationary than anything else. It's a little hard to know, but she is ready to take them on. She has absolutely no intention of changing the products the store sells. Will she change the tactics she uses to handle certain things? Yeah, probably. But it wouldn't be the first time for her.
WSHU: She actually used the word pivot to describe how she, as a small business owner, has had to react to a lot of changes over the last few years. Can you talk a little bit about why small businesses have had to be so flexible, and how, for some, it's actually made them more resilient?
JES: Sure, and I think that's the real lesson coming from Wilma’s experience, because she's not afraid. She plunges in. And I had one business group say to me, Look, you really have to anticipate and get ahead of things and be ready, as opposed to figuring everything out after. And Wilma certainly has done that.
They used to place a fair amount of mail orders because they were the only shop of their kind in the area. But Amazon basically took the wind out of that, along with having twins a little bit unexpectedly, so the shipping had to stop. She has expanded a little into more cooked prepared products like soups or stews, in addition to all the baked goods. So that became a little bit more useful when COVID hit. That really pushed her to think a little bit differently. First of all, the move into more prepared goods worked very much to her benefit, because people who had moved out of New York, principally, and up to Litchfield County, were just overwhelming the store, and they were buying everything she could bring in. She said to me that she brings in many cheeses, mostly Gouda. People were coming in and buying half wheels of cheese, things like that. So that was sort of a fortuitous move for her, having already moved into a prepared food realm.
And she says if tariffs really hit hard, she may have to pivot a little again, maybe do more catering, or even serve food in the location she's in now. They moved about a year and a half ago, basically next door, so she's anticipating that things might change. But she also points to a lot of the packaged goods she sells. You know, the Dutch love licorice. She has probably four dozen different types of licorice in there, and she carries a lot of German goods, like German mustard. She carries a lot of Dutch chocolate-type things and biscuits. And she points out that these are small ticket items, and if people have to pay more, it's not like paying more for a car. It's paying more for a jar of mustard or a bag of licorice. Cheeses could be a little bit more problematic in that they're more expensive and they may well have more of a target on their backs.
The other thing she's also anticipating are some issues with products that she needs for her baking, and she's already seen some of that she was really faced with huge increases when the egg shortage hit due to bird flu, and while she was continued baking, she was definitely looking for recipes that had fewer eggs in them. She also uses a ton of chocolates, and she makes filled chocolates that you might see. Those prices have gone way up due to low production, and that's basically a climate issue where chocolate crops around the world are really suffering.
So she's looking ahead to all these kinds of things, and that becomes a lesson for other businesses. See what's going on in the world, figure out how it's going to impact you, and start to lay some groundwork ahead of time for what the future may hold, even as uncertain as it is right now, since the President has changed his mind multiple times on what tariffs will be and when they will be there, Could they be there this week? Yeah, maybe. But who knows? They've already been postponed a number of times.
WSHU: And as you talk to customers, did they seem willing to pay higher prices for these goods? Part of the reasoning behind the tariffs was that if prices for imported goods went up, people would buy American goods instead.
JES: A lot of what she sells, you just cannot get in the US in the same form that it's in. To that end, folks were willing to pay. I'll use the licorice example. The Dutch apparently love licorice, and it's sweet, salty, and a million different things. It's just not readily available in this country in that form. So it's a unique product that you're not going to be able to get anywhere else. To that end, people seem willing to pay. Is this a somewhat economically more advantaged part of the state? Yes. Will it be harder for others who can really feel the pinch of tariffs and the pinch of potential additional inflation or recession, if we do get to that point? Yeah, it'll probably impact people like that more, and those folks would be less willing to pay that price.
I've also heard from readers that it underscores the need to support small businesses. I'm not a business expert, but I do know that the bulk of the businesses in the US are small businesses. This is how people make their living, and any kind of impact on them is going to have a trickle-down effect on all aspects of the economy. So it's all tied together.
