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by bradac56 348 days ago
No they do not. They buy from local or state distributors who are national sized companies. They may or may not buy from China and Mexico.

But no small business is buying napkins and straws directly from China.

4 comments

> They buy from local or state distributors who are national sized companies. They may or may not buy from China and Mexico.

And as a result of tariffs their costs go up (or they see supply disruption, delaying orders due to uncertainty), and so they _charge more_. Like, this isn't difficult.

Small businesses are sometimes more vulnerable to this sort of disruption than large businesses, precisely because they do _not_ have much control over their supply chain; if their distributor said "we don't know if we're going to have to pay $0 or $1000 or $50,000 tax on that container of widgets when it arrives in a month, and we currently sell it for $50,000, so we're just not going to order it", then the small business is potentially kinda out of luck; even if _they_ would have been willing to take the risk on paying more for the thousandth of a container they normally buy, the distributor may not be willing to take the risk on the whole container.

>They buy from local or state distributors who are national sized companies.

Why do you believe they're not affected by tariffs? Do you know what a tariff even is?

So your claim is that only the first hop of a supply chain is affected by tariffs?
Maybe not restaurants, but other small businesses import directly from China. Ever heard of Alibaba?