Walmart CFO John Rainey tells CNBC in an interview that the retail giant is getting ready to jack up prices the second convicted felon President-Elect Trump returns to power and hits them with massive tariffs on imported goods. “We never want to raise prices,” said Rainey. “Our model is everyday low prices. But there probably will be cases where prices will go up for consumers,” he continued, adding that it’s too early however to tell which products they’re going to have to jack up.
Lowe’s CEO Marvin Ellison said they’re pretty concerned about the risk of higher costs and are already having conversations with suppliers about the “what ifs of tariffs,” as they wait to see what Trump’s fucking stupid plan is going to look like. “We’re not waiting to act. We’ve got plans in place, we’ve got scenarios in place, and we’re trying to understand the implications,” said Ellison.
Now maybe the most likely scenario is that Trump gets talked out of the promised maximal version of his tariff plan and isolates it to a single sector like, say, socks. The cost of socks going up would of course be annoying as shit but it’s just socks and doubling the price of a pack of Fruit of the Loom no-shows obviously won’t be a grievous burden on the average consumer. That way Trump can claim he’s on-shored the manufacturing of socks because this one factory in Arkansas is booming and the photo-op gets hours of Fox News coverage, America wins, MAGA, suck it libs, end of story.
Could definitely see that happening. One the other end though, if the fat fuck really means it, and the price of a Playstation 5 Pro game console, now $699, goes up to nearly $1,000, for example, then damn we sure are looking forward to all the MAGA influencers who bitched and moaned about inflation over the last few years to suddenly turn around and start trying to tell their audiences that this is the “price of freedom” or some horseshit like that. And that’ll be just for entertainment’s sake, forget the electoral implications. Just thermostatically Dems are already going to be in a very solid position going into 2026 given the composition of the midterm electorate in this era, but if the Orange God Emperor is for real with the tariffs he promised on the campaign trail – estimated to cost US consumers $78 billion in spending power – then it’s setting the GOP up for a fucking massacre.