A Taiwanese food shop in Brooklyn, New York City is among the small businesses now adapting to survive U.S. President Donald Trump's sweeping global tariffs. Yun Hai imports all of its products from Taiwan, which are now subject to a 32% tariff. TaiwanPlus speaks to Yun Hai's founder Lisa Cheng Smith to find out how they're coping.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Lisa you're really on the front lines here in terms of impact of Trump's
00:04tariffs importing foreign goods is central to your business how are you
00:09coping with this new policy were you prepared for a 32 percent tariff a lot
00:16of the coping is trying to find the fine print to understand what it really means
00:20because it's so easy to read the top line and just panic essentially we
00:26definitely didn't expect like a 32 percent tariff it's quite high we thought
00:32okay maybe a few percentage point Taiwan wasn't really central to the tariff
00:35conversation in the United States but when we saw the 32 percent you know we
00:41immediately realized like okay we need to find out what's going on read the fine
00:45print but also rapidly prepare for change truth be told you know all of our
00:50products that we sell are from Taiwan people come to our business for
00:54Taiwanese goods so we'll never change that and what we have to figure out is
00:59just how to keep these goods as accessible as possible and so we're
01:03trying to figure out how do we not raise prices to the point where people won't
01:07buy it anymore I know there's probably a lot of moving parts right now but what
01:12are some ways you're exploring to manage these added costs so the added cost once
01:18we think about all the added costs from the tariffs but also our domestic costs will
01:23be even more expensive so like for example we use boxes here to ship our
01:28orders I'm sure this will get more expensive too so we're expecting price
01:31hikes across the board so we're essentially adding 40 percent to our cost
01:36basis when we're estimating so we're trying to figure out what levers we have to
01:41pull so that could be like negotiating with the suppliers I know the Taiwanese
01:45government has put together a sort of fund to help people who are importing or
01:51exporting our costs are really in like advertising affiliate payments so just
01:57trying to think about like okay what can we do ourselves how can we work a little
02:01bit more smartly to reduce costs what are some trade-offs you're willing to make but
02:06what are also the non-negotiables the non-negotiable at the heart of Yunhai is
02:12just that we will always be intent on telling the story of Taiwan and sharing
02:19Taiwanese culture through food so that's non-negotiable and everything else is
02:25kind of you know up for grabs like if we need to change a little bit what we're
02:31importing or change you know our different business channels we can do that so
02:36long as we don't sacrifice the cultural aspect of our business
02:42you