DECATUR, Ill. (WAND) - Tariffs have started on dozens of countries for almost every item entering the United States. Local shoppers say they are worried for when costs start to spike.
"Today I found some good deals," said Carol Riess as she left a grocery store in Decatur. "I'm surprised because I was expecting prices to go up but I did pretty good so far on this one. I'm kind of thinking it might go up next time."
William Ridley is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois's Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics. He said it won't be long until we start to see costs spike, especially for produce.
"For products that are moving across the border on a regular basis and don't have to come very far to get here, if you think of avocados from Mexico, we're likely to see price increases in pretty short order," said Ridley. "Now for other goods that we're buying from more distant parts of the world that take longer for things to get across the ocean on a cargo ship, we might not see price increases until weeks or perhaps a couple of months down the road."
Ridley said the last time tariffs were similarly high and widespread was in the 1930s. The Smoot Hawley Tariffs occurred when Congress reacted to worsening economic conditions through tariffs, and led to the worsening of the Great Depression.
"What we're going to see across the board is increases in the costs of goods that households buy on a regular basis, that might be groceries, that might be household items, furniture, clothing, anything you might imagine, is going to be affected by these tariff actions, and in a really big way, because these are really significant increases in tariff rates," said Ridley.
Tariff actions have made headlines recently because some have been cancelled then reinstated or had rates increased or decreased. Ridley said its hard to know just what impact tariffs will have without set rates from specific countries for a consistent amount of time.
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