Oregon businesses are skeptical of Trump’s tariffs reimbursements
Mia Maldonado
(Oregon Capital Chronicle) In 2021, Richard Smith and Serengeti Savage took over the downtown McMinnville tea shop where they had their first date. The shop sits along the town’s popular Third Street, which is lined with antique shops, restaurants, wineries and other unique gift stores.
Right as the couple was feeling ready to hire employees at Velvet Monkey Tea Shop and reached the end of a supply chain crisis last year, President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on foreign imports.
Although the Supreme Court ruled those tariffs were illegal and ordered that the Trump administration reimburse businesses, the couple and many other small Oregon businesses owners say they’re unlikely to receive those refunds because the manufacturers that they buy their products from were the ones who paid those tariffs directly.
The tea shop was one of three businesses where reporters and U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, a Democrat representing the 6th Congressional District based in the Willamette Valley, met with owners to discuss the impact of tariffs just days ahead of the federal government launching a refund system Monday.
The tea shop relies on suppliers who import foreign tea mostly from India and China because there isn’t a large American tea manufacturing sector, and tea plantations take decades to become profitable, Smith said.
Since Trump imposed tariffs, the shop is down half its supply because some of its main suppliers went out of business. A kilogram of tea that used to cost $60 now costs the business $220.
The couple has taken most of the hit themselves so they don’t have to put extra costs on the customers. Each of them pays themselves less than $1,500 a month, which is less than minimum wage.
“We’re not an affluent community,” Smith said. “It’s really hard for people to come in and see these pricing increases on stuff that they like to consume every day, and so it is a way that major global politics and uncertainty has affected our everyday lives.”
A few businesses down from the tea shop, Entwined co-owner Lia Harris finds herself in a similar situation. Most of the products she sells in her yarn shop are from New Zealand or Peru, and a yarn manufacturing industry doesn’t really exist in the U.S.
“Because the domestic textile market moved overseas, it would take decades to restore any sort of manufacturing to a domestic market,” she said. “We would love to buy more American, but that just isn’t possible right now.”
Another concern Harris pointed to was the end of the de minimis exemption, a trade regulation that Trump ended in August 2025 that previously allowed shipments worth $800 or less to enter the country tax-free.
“We’ve had delays and cancellations, and we’ve also lost some of our suppliers who have chosen to shut down rather than continue to carry the cost of the United States tariffs,” she said. “The tariffs are a significant disruption. We don’t have large lines of credit. We don’t have Wall Street backing. We are absorbing those increases on our own until we can no longer handle that, and we have to pass that on to our customers.”
At Hopscotch Toys and Games, owner Linda Hays said most of her products come from China. When Trump first imposed tariffs, she maxed out credit lines to buy as many products as she could before prices went up.
“One of the things that caused so much uncertainty wasn’t just that the tariffs were instated, but that it was so erratic,” Hays said. “Your manufacturer would put their goods on a boat, and by the time it got to shore, it was twice as expensive to bring it into dock, and then they would watch the tariffs go down.”
Friday was Salinas’ fourth stop in her affordability tour across her district.
“This isn’t a location where people stop off because it’s the beach,” Salinas told reporters. “It’s the local community that really makes these businesses run.”
Salinas said she is working on legislation to try to support small businesses that didn’t directly pay tariffs but were still affected by them.