by Two years ago, I used this space to bring you a home furnishings twist on “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” This reprise came a year after one of my favorite HNN columns, “The 12 Days of Christmas: A Supply Chain Lament.” Ah, the good old days of deadhead containers and the post-pandemic plummeting of consumer demand.
Yes, it’s that time of year again.
So, today, as we consider what no doubt will be a wild ride in 2025, I give you, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Tariffs.” We are slowly but surely composing a holiday songbook for our industry, and in only six or seven more years, if we aren’t eliminated by nuclear winter or a perpetual climate change summer, we’ll have enough tunes to debut a Christmas album. I’m already picking out sweaters for the album cover! That’s right, vinyl is back! We’ll party like it’s 1999, which as I recall is when we feared the end of the digital world with the “advent” of Y2K.
We certainly won’t party like it’s 2024. A bevy of bankruptcies, a devastating hurricane that dared to streak from the Gulf deep into the mountains of North Carolina, another national election that further polarized and divided, and no end in sight for conflicts in Ukraine, Syria, the Middle East and the Red Sea mean we need to spike that eggnog with some of the hard stuff.
In furniture, we’re looking down the wrong end of the barrel of steep tariffs on goods made elsewhere, further supply chain instability that likely will result, and a spotty record for housing starts, among other coal in our respective stockings. Oh, let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow!
But, hey, if the proverbial stocking is half full of coal, that means it’s half not full, right? Cue the music. Grab a karaoke mic. Ah one, ah two . . .
It’s beginning to look a lot like tariffs
Everywhere you go
Take a look at CNN, the pundits are raging again
At inflation rates and prices all aglow
It’s beginning to look a lot like tariffs
Upcharges in every store
But the prettiest sight to see is the MADE IN USA
On your chest of drawers
Some leather upholstery and rubberwood for a fee
Is the wish of many a store across the land
But with tariffs running so high, China is getting shy
And Mom and Dad will need a payment plan!
It’s beginning to look a lot like tariffs
Everywhere you go
There’s a tax on the goods we love, from the countries we think fondly of
It’s the kind that makes the prices grow and groooooow!
It’s beginning to look a lot like tariffs
Soon the laments will start
And the thing that’ll make ’em sting is the cost of everything
Consumers put into their shopping carts.
It’s beginning to look a lot like tariffs
Imports will cost much more
But the prettiest sight to see is the MADE IN USA
On your chest of drawers
Sure it’s duties once more.
I don’t know about you, but I could use another swig of that eggnog.
Yes, tariffs and duties threaten to take yet another bite out of consumer demand still lagging after the surges seen during the pandemic when we all were cocooning. And they might help domestics, what scant few there are remaining, but that will depend on the details of the new administration’s trade policies. Of course, the incoming administration could very well be huffing and puffing and only threatening to blow the trade house down. But betting on a bluff is bad strategy.
And speaking of cocooning, this good advice from the animal kingdom via The New Yorker magazine: Visualize our industry’s future emerging from a cocoon as a beautiful butterfly. Then lower our expectations, because butterflies emerge from a chrysalis, not a cocoon, so in this analogy we are actually a moth. Accept our moth identity and fly toward a flame. Or, as another of the author’s takeaways advises, when life gives you lemons, eat the lemons off the ground under the cover of night like a possum.
But that’s enough holiday cheer for this week. Until next time, which will be after the flip of the calendar, the merriest of Christmases to those who celebrate advent, the happiest of Hanukkahs to those of the Jewish faith, and to everyone sincere wishes for a restorative, rejuvenating and somehow even restful holiday season.
