I went to Costco on a tariff run, and did not stock up on anything.
It was tempting. Mark Cuban was on social media telling people it was not a “bad idea” to stock up on consumables as President Trump’s trade war unfolded. I love beating the system as much as the next person — it’s my literal beat in journalism.
But let’s really think this one through for a minute.
First of all, these tariffs may not persist at anything like the amounts currently in the headlines. For stocking up to make sense, you have to assume that price increases will be significant and last for at least a medium amount of time.
But let’s assume that both these things happen. Say you have a $1,000 grocery bill each month, and it somehow goes to $1,500 by Memorial Day. While predicting a 50 percent spike feels like a stretch, that extra $500 would be real money.
But you also need to have real money — extra real money — to lay a bunch of things away in your residence. Many people don’t, and going into debt to buy extras of everything will probably erase any savings.
Mr. Cuban, via email, said he had made buying shampoo, soap and razor blades in multiples work somehow, even when he wasn’t wealthy. “I started doing it in college when I read the book ‘The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need,’” he said. “When you can save money by buying more than one of something, that’s a guaranteed return.”
It can be, if you use it. Most of what we eat, however, is perishable. Many of us waste some of what we purchase. Buying more could mean wasting more food — and more money.
Then there’s the practical problem, where we need to invoke the deadpan comedian Steven Wright. “You can’t have everything,” he once said. “Where would you put it?” In an extra freezer maybe, but then you’re spending hundreds of dollars more.
As for larger goods, speeding up a car or furniture purchase if you are going to need either thing in a year or two feels risky, especially if you’re borrowing sooner than you might have or pulling money out of beaten-down stocks to do so.
That said, some opportunities to save money may present themselves unexpectedly. On Thursday, Ford dropped many prices, seeking headlines and competitive advantage. It could reverse those prices just as easily.
We do not know what is going to happen next, and neither does Mr. Trump or the people who surround him. You may be worried about the shortages that occurred in 2020. The supply chain is indeed vast and unpredictable, since toilet paper requires wood pulp and berries need packaging. It is also possible that niche manufacturers will choose not to produce or export if it is unprofitable to do so.
Mr. Trump’s advisers, however, are mostly thinking about the money. Peter Navarro, a senior trade adviser, is out in public making 10-year, $6 trillion tariff revenue projections, while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick believes the stock market will do “extremely well” over the medium and long terms.
You see what Mr. Lutnick did there, right? The short term might be bad. Or not, though so far it sure seems that way. He doesn’t want to make a short-term prediction, because he has no earthly idea what the markets will do tomorrow or next week, let alone what will happen to the prices consumers pay. What he does know is that in a year or three, most people will have forgotten what he said on Thursday.
The futility of forecasting (and the limited utility in listening to people who engage in projectile projections) comes in part because we don’t know how countries are going to react to the U.S. tariffs, or how much courage Mr. Trump will have in maintaining them. Remember, he backed down pretty quickly not long ago when President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico got tough in response to his attempt to rough up her country. On Thursday, she boasted of her “preferential treatment.”
At a Costco in Brooklyn, it was business as usual. I watched a few hundred carts exiting, none of which contained unusual amounts of toilet paper or anything else.
There was just one person I could find trying to get ahead of the tariffs. Mizan Rahman had a dolly filled with Ensure and PediaSure, which he was buying to resell at Fresh Halal Meat and Grocery a few miles away. He had already loaded up on basmati rice.
Unlike many Brooklyn residents, he has a basement below the store that he can use. He also has a credit card with zero percent interest for the rest of the year to pay for this bit of hedging.
“You have to do something,” he said. “Trump is getting crazy now.”
Maybe you have to do something if you’re a business owner and you have the basement and the credit. But in general, the first rule of unexpected news moments is this: Don’t just do something. Stand there.
So I stood there, watching, and found little hoarding. Then I sat there with the hordes at the store’s red benches and had one of Costco’s $1.50 hot dogs. The price has not risen in decades. Three years ago, an executive said it never would, either.
If it does, that might be a reason to panic.
Tara Siegel Bernard contributed reporting.
