Wired reports:

Dallas-based small business owner Allen Walton says he just sold out of one of his products, a surveillance camera used by law enforcement and private detectives. That would normally be great news for Walton’s electronics company, SpyGuy, which specializes in gadgets like GPS trackers and hidden camera detectors. But thanks to the Trump administration’s ever-shifting tariff policies, Walton says he doesn’t know if he should replenish his stock. His products are mostly manufactured in southern China, and the new additional 145 percent tariff on Chinese imports will completely change the economics of his business.

Like almost every other electronic device on the market today, what Walton is selling isn’t typically manufactured in the United States, and all he can do is to wait for the tariff situation to hopefully change again soon. “It took me five years to finally rank the number one keyword on Google. That’s why we ran out of stock. Now, I don’t know if it’s worth it to have my hit products, so that’s really frustrating,” he says.

As Trump has played a game of a tariff peek-a-boo in recent weeks, repeatedly announcing new rates and then calling them off, business owners have struggled to contend with the whiplash and plan for the future of their companies. WIRED spoke to over a dozen US business owners, including mom-and-pop shops, fashion brands that have over $100 million in annual revenue, a tattoo supply vendor in Philadelphia, and a mattress maker in Ohio, who all said the same thing: Chinese manufacturing is still the gold standard of the world and moving production to a new region would be extremely difficult, regardless of how high tariffs are. [Continue reading…]