They were a non profit who connected special needs kids with wheelchairs and specialized bikes, they expanded to the specialized bikes market mainly after a good supplier with the exact product they needed was found. Supplier is in China of course. It's a great cause and it's a living for my BIL, his brother, and their couple employees. They're preparing to close, they're going to try to eke it out until the Summer, but the numbers don't add up anymore and the market won't bear the price hikes they would need to make to stay in business.

Health insurance absorbs some of the cost for people, so the amount leftover was doable for most people, changing that from a couple hundred bucks to $1500 is just not doable, they simply don't have customers at that price. Not sure their exact numbers, but basically, for a $1500 bike, insurance was coverng $1200, so the customers would need to come up with $300 out of pocket to get their special needs child a custom bike. Now that bike is $3000, insurance still only covers $1200, so they would need to come up with $1800 out of pocket to get a bike for thier kid.

So my BIL will be 62 years old, and reentering the job market soon. Small businesses will just close. Large corporations will do layoffs, I am sure 90% of them already have layoff plans they've vetted and will spring them when they have to.

"Optimizing operations." Good one! I remember hearing the terms Smartsizing, and rightsizing back in the day.

very, VERY irritating

However, that's actually what my staff & I dif for nearly 20 years.
That said, the number of jobs our efforts cost people was zero in 20 years. We saved an average of nearly 7x what it cost the company to have us there with no headcount reductions ever.
So yes, it's corporate code, but it doesn't have to be.

The Chinese tariffs are killing us (along with most of our industry). Domestic production of apparel and accessories is a very small fraction of what's outsourced to China, Vietnam, South Korea, etc. The capacity to ramp that up (factories, machinery, labor, domestic raw materials) is currently non-existent.

I'm the VP of HR and my CEO asked me to analyze several scenarios last week including layoffs, pay reductions at several levels, and shutting down at least one division. UGLY. We have a Board meeting on Thursday, during which decisions will be made on which path we're going to follow. None of it is good.

As well in a number of other lower State level positions but otherwise it's going to be a damn nightmare and take 10+ years for the Democrats to fix the Republicans working to deliberately hurt the country to appease the ultra wealthy.

50 year old company that processed soybeans, mostly for export.
They closed, citing the uncertain tariff situation, and then the MAGA owner tried to say that wasn’t the primary cause, but that just increased exposure for the story.

that will allow them to survive over the next 3.5 years of chaos and economic stupidity. That means chugging along with a skeleton staff to fill the few orders they get from other struggling companies and that means long term damage as they lose skilled staff and have to train new hires. It's going to suck for us all unless this stupid man and his stupid administration realize blanket tariffs on everybody else in the world (except his bromance Putin)are not going to do anything but throw us into a depressopn and piss everybody on the planet off....or if Congress finally decides to do its job. I don't see either happening for some time, so we're going to be in a world of suck for a whlile.

I hope you don't get that pink slip. I hope your company survives. I hope this country doesn't collapse under the weighty of too many billionaires. I just know we're in for a rough ride for a while.

if we haven’t already done it, to ban regardless of any tariffs, all uninspected food (dairy to begin with) . You can’t fire those who keep you safe. None of those products will come here. It’s our lives too. 🇨🇦

Donald will only double down on stupid - there was a reason all his companies failed, he doubled down cause you can’t tell him anything when he knows all the answers.

after he was ALREADY labeled one of THE WORST PRESIDENTS EVER

how fucking STUPID are the people who vote for him

I work for a bank in the retail mortgage division, and they have recently revised the 2025 forecast down over 10% and had another waive of layoffs.

We just can't handle all the winning !!

The layoffs due to AI were bad enough, and with layoffs from tariffs it's calamitous.

Update your resume

The material is delivered when needed, but is still in the pipeline upstream. I’m retired, but right now my old Fortune 500 company would be cutting inventory commitments. The material shortages will start to appear about 3-4 months out.

Firms plannig to buy some freight for $100K have $100K budgeted for that delivery. All the sudden they have to pay that $100K and another $145K tariff, they'll just refuse delivery or neglect to pick it up.

The stuff that takes 3 or 4 months to arrive is an even worse scenario, that money is committed, and all the sudden it's more than double the price when it arrives. Some of those firms wouldn;t have even made those orders at the new price. It's a disaster.

I fully expect next Spring when the yearly bonuses are announced for the CEO to talk about tariffs. About how there are no or reduced bonuses this year to pay the tariffs. I rely on this money yearly to do home projects or improve savings, but I can get by without it, but I wonder if the language he uses will be explicit enough for everyone to understand that, "yeah, you're not getting abonus this year because we had to pay trump's idiotic tariffs." We've got 52,000 emplyees, I bet every single one of them that voted for Trump will be making excuses, but will actually know that yup, that $20,000 bonus or whatever amount you rely on didn't come this year because of Trump.

surprised either. The orange fuck wad's "plan" is progressing at break neck speed. There better be more resistance going forward or we're all fucked.

PS- Go Green

For instance, "How long are millions of Americans to be expected to be without jobs to execute Trump's trade war? Are we talking years? Because these factories you're talking about returning to America will take years to build? How do you expect working people to survive without jobs for years, will there be enhanced unemployment, expanded Medicare? "

That's where we will be in a few months. Millions of unemployed Americans sacfricing their entire livlihoods for Trump's idiotic promises.

to building an in ground swimming pool expecting that bonus money. We not only lost the bonus, but the profit sharing as well, and a 10% cut in salary.

The hole in the backyard was already dug.

It feels like it’s coming again, but this time even more prolonged - if Krasnov doesn’t change direction pretty damn quick.

Bush was an idiot and the people around him made a ton of mistakes that gave us the 2008 meltdown, but they never said to themselves, "OK, let's cause a total economic meltdown on purpose so we can rebuild things the way we like them."

That's what's unique about right now, this is a choice. And the scary part is they have a lot of their faithful going along with the choice of a recession. I have seen many Trumpsters posting the idiocy that, "Trump wants to cause a recession so they can refinance the national debt, $9B of which is due in June..." They think a recession will lower interest rates automatically so they'll save money refinancing things. They don't understand how US debt works, period. And a recession isn't lowering interest rates automatically. It's sheer idiocy and proof they'll believe whatever they hear.

Trump could tell them, "If we cause a slight recession, everyone in America will see diamond shitting birds show up at their homes and crap them out 25 carat diamonds every day for 3 weeks straight. And then we'll all be rich!" And they'd be out there building bird houses and telling everyone Trump is a genius for solving all our problems with diamond shitting birds. They're literally getting millions of Americans to believe, "Yeah, a recession will be good for me..."

But nope, the greediest of the greedy wanted more ill gotten gains and bet against the house to get the fucking asshole reelected, and now we all lose.

I am retired for the last few years, but spent my career working in a support role for auto suppliers at small to mid sized manufacturing plants. Both as Tier I and Tier II suppliers. Tier I sells direct to the car companies while Tier II supplies Tier 1 etc.

As vehicle models build out and are replaced by new models, it is necessary to keep getting new business to replace what you had to keep people employed. For the first 20 years I worked, there always seemed to be something new coming through the pipeline. Over the years, it became more and more difficult to win bids against competitors in Mexico and China. Cost was king. If Chrysler is selling 200,000 Minivans a year, saving 50 cents on a single component is pretty significant. Multiply that by the thousands of parts on a car, and the pressure to cut costs was tremendous.

Our Tier 1 customers would tell us that they wanted us to look at using sub suppliers located in those countries because it would be cheaper. Their customers were beating them up to do the same thing to the Tier II suppliers like us. Detroit, the arsenal of democracy in WWII, was filled with dozens and dozens of tool and die shops that made the tooling needed to make the parts. Even a lot of that work was sourced to China as the customers were trying to get them cheaper as well.

Even when we were able to win a bid, the profit margin was so slim that any unexpected issues meant you were selling a part for $6 that cost you $7 to make. Not only that, the tooling is owned by the customer, so even when you won a bid, it was always being shopped around as they could pick it up and move it at any time. Many suppliers like the one I worked for had to open their own plant in Mexico, just so they wouldn't lose out to another competitor.

Hard to pay wages of $600 per week and trying to win bids against someone paying $600 per month, so as time went by, more and more new business was lost. A manufacturing plant in a small town that reliably employed 300 people, saw the workforce erode over time to 250, then 200 and eventually 125. In some cases, the plants closed completely and sat abandoned and vacant. Not only was this devastating to generations that had worked there, it destroyed the local tax base. I retired 3 years ago, and the plant I worked in has about 60% of the number of employees it once did when I was there.

What is an interesting contrast is that on one hand, people support this outsourcing because low cost labor makes it cheaper for consumers, but at the same time we praise unions and cheer when they earn big wage increases. I recall the debate over paying fast food workers $15-$20 per hour with people saying "Well, McDonalds will just have to raise the price of a Big Mac by 25 cents" In the business I was in, raising prices would result in even more product being outsourced.

When I worked for a Tier I, one of the biggest car companies in the world wanted a retroactive price cut. That meant they wanted our company to write them an $8 million dollar check for parts that we already sold, that were on cars that they had already sold. Told us in no uncertain terms, that it we didn't play ball, they would look at resourcing everything we had to someone else who would. Since our plant employed nearly 300 people and they were 2/3 of our business, we really had no choice but to give them what they wanted.

And we've known for 40 years that we were going to lose a lot of our manufacturing jobs. But tariffs are seldom the answer. The US has spent the last 40 years retraining our working population to become service workers rather than manufacturing workers. There was never going to be a good living making $2 widgets anymore. And between outsourcing and automation, auto suppliers just employ far fewer people. But that's not necessarily a bad thing IMO.

So after 40 years of a race to the bottom as manufacturing was trying to compete with lower cost foreign companies, we're further shocking things for the American worker by all the sudden telling these places that everything they need to make their parts is much more expensive. It's not going to cause manufacturers to build new plants and hire high wage workers in them, it's simply going to cause them to shut down.

Joe Biden actually brought manufacturing jobs back, and he didn't need tariffs to do it. He supported unions. He provied incentives to bring critical chip manufacturing back to the US. High tech jobs that pay well, that require skill and training. Those are the jobs we want back. This fantasy that America is ever going to return to a place where small town US folk can graduate high school, walk down the road to the stamping plant and work next to their freinds and family making enough money to own a home, two cars, while sending their kids to college, and earning a pension is long dead. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, those jobs aren't good jobs anymore, and nothing will make them good jobs again. You're never going to see people at stamping plants for autoparts in the US making $140K a year with great benefits and pensions. That's the type of jobs we used to have in Michigan, in 1990 people working the assemply lines at GM, Ford, and Chrysler, in the union were making $28 an hour or so, that's the equivalent of $140-150K a year today. That's not coming back.

When Trump talks about "bringing manufacturing" back to the US you have to know a few things. First, he understands nothing about how economies work. Second, he's literally said workes make too much money and literally everything he's ever done has been in the pursuit of cheaper and cheaper labor.

So basically, he's going to kill whatever manufacturing was left in the US by causing a deep recession. And a recession is already guaranteed, the economy and consumers do not like all of this uncertainty. People have stopped spending, we're seeing some big signs of that in the data which is actually being muted a little bit because some people did some big purchases before the tariffs hit. And that's all the economyis built on, regular people having money to spend and being willing to spend it.

"This fantasy that America is ever going to return to a place where small town US folk can graduate high school, walk down the road to the stamping plant and work next to their freinds and family making enough money to own a home, two cars, while sending their kids to college, and earning a pension is long dead."

How is that rationalized as a good thing? If fast food workers deserve $15-20 per hour and McDonalds can just raise the price of a Big Mac by 25 cents to pay for it, why can't people just pay more for a widget made here?

The UAW had 1.5 million members in 1979 and now have a little over 1/4 that number. Look at the number of auto assembly plants in Mexico and understand that those vehicles all used to be made here with UAW represented workers. How is it that Jeep can build vehicles in Toledo, but also decide to build the same vehicles at a 2nd plant in Mexico? That plant could have been located here instead.

My brother just bought a pickup truck a few weeks ago that stickered for $63k. They build the same truck in the US, Canada, and Mexico. By the luck of the draw, his was from Canada. The dealership had examples from all three countries on their lot, yet they all had similar MSRP. If moving those assembly plants out of the US made the vehicles cheaper, I'm not seeing it.