Are Trump’s Tariffs Going to Make Shopping More Expensive?

She adds that the Canada and Mexico tariffs especially could raise prices on those goods dramatically.

“A 25% increase is pretty high,” she says. “Especially in this market where everyone’s looking for a deal, everyone’s looking for sales. Retailers will have difficulty marking down products as much if they have to absorb tariff increases to this extent.”

If some of your favorite brands like Lululemon and Aritzia are Canadian, does this mean they’re going to be 25% more expensive?

Not necessarily. Last month, Lululemon’s CEO Calvin McDonald told CNBC that less than 5% of his company’s goods were produced in Canada, Mexico, and mainland China (according to the Wall Street Journal, the company makes its goods in Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and other Asian countries).

So, although Lululemon is a Canadian company (headquartered in Vancouver), it’s not producing most of its clothing there. Aritizia, similarly, has manufacturing facilities in a variety of places including Cambodia, China, India, Peru, Portugal, Romania, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam.

Most major retailers have this kind of varied supply chain to avoid this exact scenario of tariffs tanking their entire business.

So what is the impact going to be?

Extremely unclear. The experts who spoke with Glamour say one of the challenging things about these orders from Trump is that a lot of the details are opaque and changing rapidly.

And, Santos notes, it’s unclear if more tariffs are on the way.

“There have been tariff threats on nearly every country,” she says. “It makes it much more difficult for companies to plan and shift production or make those huge investments in shifting production or creating manufacturing operations in another country and training employees when there’s unpredictability about whether tariffs will be imposed on those countries.”

It’s going to take retailers looking through their systems and calculating exactly where and how they will be impacted—and in what areas—before we have a clearer picture of what the effect on consumers will be.

One of the tasks Santos has is working with retailers to figure out how to minimize these costs, she explains.

“We try to find creative ways to at least lower the overall tariff liability, and hopefully that means lower overall impact to consumers,” she says.

What about China? Will the possible repeal of the de minimus exemption—plus the 10% tariff— make shopping at online retailers like Shein and Temu more expensive?

Right, so the de minimus exemption repeal is a whole other issue that could be costly for online shopping. This tax exemption basically means your online shopping hauls from places like Temu and Shein come to you more quickly and more affordably.

But as part of the tariff executive order, Trump also got rid of this exception, which according to The New York Times sowed immediate “confusion and chaos” at the US Postal Service. Some women on TikTok reported that they saw a swift impact from the loss of the exemption, with one saying she saw a duty fee of more than $100 on an order.