Another product on the Walmart site that spiked in price was a left-handed fishing reel. It rose from $57.37 to $83.26 from April to May, a jump of 45 percent, with a post on Reddit showing the two price stickers. Aisle Gopher’s price history says that the price of the reel was $51.12 on March 14.
Another Reddit post showed an increase in the price of cocoa powder from $3.44 in May 2024 to $6.18 in April 2025.
As best I can tell from Trump administration statements, their strategy for mitigating their political damage has been to publicly demand that WalMart and other companies just take losses as he increases their input costs.
That’s not going to happen, but I suppose that it doesn’t matter, if enough people believe that it could.
What I find darkly fascinating about this “eat the cost” strategy is that if you were to dare suggest taxing Walmart more, Trump’s fans would call you a commie librul socialist who just wants handouts. But when Trump demands that they subsidize his agenda suddenly they’re all for it.
Because taxes can be traced to services that should be provided to people. No one knows where the money from tariffs are going. (The rich)
I’m no longer all that fascinated by the fact that they will follow “their guy” in circles and then straight off a cliff. It’s just gross.
It’s honestly a little poetic in a way, given how the that’s how Walmart’s treated its workers for generations. (ie, Walmart subsidizing their profits by paying workers so little they have to seek the social safety net.)
It never made any sense. Walmart famously keeps a profit margin under 3%. And Shitstain L’Orange tells them to eat a 25% tariff? How does that work? They just operate on a 22% loss???
Well the arithmetic isn’t that simple. Cost of purchasing goods is far from WMT’s only cost. So even if you assumed that particular expense increased 25% (reality being less), the impact to profit would be always less. Maybe WMT technically could eat the cost, their executives have probably ordered projections. But market forces and the will of the shareholders certainly makes it an unlikely proposition.