New York – Economy Candy Candy shelves full of sweets around the world: Gomites from Germany, Spain lollipops, chocolates from Japan and a diving of sweets from all over the United States
Standing in the middle of everything, bright jelly columns to his left and exotic kit kats to his right, the owner Mitchell Cohen is fast with his evaluation of how many of this More than 2,000 stores in the store They are affected by the Historical Round of Rate Announced by President Donald Trump.
“I think all of them,” says Cohen in his store at the Lower East Side in New York.
Few corners of The American economy They are intact, directly or indirectly, for the radical tariffs imposed by Trump. Even a small store like Candy Candy.
Cohen had just begun to feel a barrage of inflation -driven price increases of suppliers Facilitate when tariff threats arrived. For a business with a name like Candy Economy Candy, he wants to remain affordable, but he fears how high they can have to raise some prices in the coming months.
“I think it will be another round of this hyperinflation in some articles,” says Cohen, 39. “If we are putting rates everywhere, it will rise.”
Entering the economy of sweets feels like a deformation of time. Its name is stamped on a sign on a vintage red script, and that crosses below its green and white striped awning, beyond the smarties, butterscotches containers and lemon heads in the front window, an indecipherable sweetness fills the air, the music of Oldies Surs Overhead and the customers face around Cands, which still existed.
It represents only an error in the sweet industry of $ 54 billion in the country. But I was already feeling the weight of the waves in cocoa prices and other ingredients before the tariffs were placed.
The prices of sweets and gums rise approximately 34% of five years and 89% since 2005, according to the consumer price index data. The price, according to the National Confections Association, has become the The main factor in the purchase of consumer sweets decisions, overcoming the mood of a buyer.
Around a third of Economy Candy’s products are imported, crowded on shelves and tables near the back of the store. There is only “more German varieties from Haribo than the Haribo store in Germany,” as Cohen states, but that the Gommies manufactured in France, Austria and Great Britain.
They have each milk bar that you can find in Switzerland, all types of hard lioness sweets that Italy is agitated and as many exotic kits in Japan as they can fit.
In products like these, tariff toll is obvious.
Snickers pistachio bars are from India, now subject to 26% tariffs, while mousse giggles of the fruit passion are from Portugal, now under the levies of the European Union of 20%.
But even a giggle made by the United States is not immune.
While bars can deploy conveyors in Texas, Trust ingredients around the world. Sourcemap, which tracks supply chains, says that snickers are made with Guyana chocolate, Argentina’s peanut and sugar from Brazil, wrapped in Canada packaging. All are now subject to different rates.
“There are many ingredients there that have to come from other countries,” says Andreas Waldkirch, economy professor at Colby College who teaches a class on international trade. “Unless they are talking about something very simple in the market of its local farmers, almost all products are based on other places ingredients. Those indirect costs are really what prices will increase.”
The story is repeated with the American sweets throughout the store: the Nerds boxes and sugar -babies and intelligent rolls are inextricably linked to the global supply chain.
A table full of these domestic delicacies occupies the center of the stage near the entrance of Candy’s economy. Cohen took care of their parents’ store, who took care of their parents before. He obtained his first haircut in the store. I was behind the record when I was a child. He took his wife at his first date.
When I was a child, everything at the central table of the American candy store costs 59 cents. By 2020, the price was $ 1.29, but customers who bought a full box paid a discount rate of $ 1 per piece.
Now, Cohen can’t even get them wholesale at that price.
Today, sells the articles on the table for $ 1.59. Cohen calls the selection a “loss leader”, but believes that it is important to show the affordability of its store. Once tariffs are completely implemented, it is not sure to postpone price increases.
“When your margins are going down and your dollar doesn’t go so far at the end of the day, you really start feeling it,” he says. “But I don’t want anyone to enter economic sweets and don’t think it’s economical.”
It is understandable that the implications of larger tickets of the tariff tariff win the most attention: the thousands of dollars can grow the price of a car, the tens of thousands that disappear from a retirement account in one day. But here, between root beer barrels and licorice threads, you are reminded that small items are also affected, and there are also the families that sell them.
At his birth, Cohen’s business grandfather began to focus on shoe and hat repairs. But following the great depression, when few in a neighborhood of full housing had money for such solutions, the business turned.
Candy, once relegated to a car on the front, took over the store.
In the 88 years since then, businesses have not always been laughs and zagnuts. September 11 attacks kept tourists away and had a fall in sales and the pandemic closed the store and forced it to pivot online sales.
If the tariffs volcan things, Cohen is not sure how it could adapt again. It sells products that are not made in the United States and sells American products made with ingredients around the world. He had just advanced in international sales sales, but the network of rates rules can make it impossible.
The United States average rate could increase to almost 25% if the import taxes that Trump put in the goods of dozens of countries is completely implemented on Wednesday. That would be the highest rate in more than a century, including widely blamed rates for worsening the great depression.
Trump said imposing tariffs ascended A “day of liberation” For a country that has been “looted, looted, raped and looted” by friends and enemies, insisting that it was “very, very good news” for the United States.
Cohen is not sure how that can be true for a business like his.
“I can understand to bring manufacturing and bring things back to the United States, but you know, we trust raw materials that are simply not native to our country,” he says. “And it’s not that I can get a Japanese green tea kit from an American company.”
While Cohen was standing at mounds of strawberry sweets in bright wraps and small caramel cubes in Celofán, the first word of the concrete impact of the rate on it came. A French supplier sent an email saying that he was immediately imposing a 5% surcharge due to tariffs, expressing regret for the move and hope that “the situation will be resolved quickly.”
Cohen wore a smile anyway. He wants this to be a happy place for visitors.
“You travel back to a moment when nothing mattered,” says Cohen, “when you didn’t worry about anything.”
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You can contact Matt Sedensky at mSeDensky@ap.org and https://x.com/sedensky.
