‘Uncertainty’ on tariffs looms for Kansas shops that sell goods from Europe
Au Marché and Brits, side-by-side shops selling imported goods in downtown Lawrence, have weathered past economic turmoil: 9/11, the Great Recession, the pandemic.
Tariffs are the latest challenge on the horizon.
Au Marché owner Lora Wiley and Brits owner Sally Helm must now navigate the whipsaw tariff policy of President Donald Trump’s administration. Au Marché sells products from across Europe, while Brits focuses on the United Kingdom. Both are heavily dependent on imports to offer the authentic overseas goods their customers want.
They are taking a wait-and-see approach for now. While tariffs could eventually force them to raise prices, it may take weeks for extra costs to trickle down to their stores. In most cases, the shops buy from vendors and distributors importing products, rather than import directly.
“It’s stressful,” Wiley told The Star on Wednesday morning. “It’s so hard to know what to expect.”
As if to illustrate the point, just a few minutes after the interview, Trump abruptly paused for 90 days, much of the steeper tariffs he imposed a week ago. Dozens of countries had been subject to a variety of tariff rates, with a 20% rate slapped on goods from the European Union. Goods from the United Kingdom were targeted with a 10% rate.
The U.S. stock market immediately soared before plunging again on Thursday. Still, Trump kept in place a baseline 10% tariff on most countries – a rate that would have been considered astounding prior to the current administration and has raised fears of a recession.
The baseline tariff means that any foreign goods that end up on the shelves of Au Marché and Brits will still be taxed at a 10% rate when they are brought into the United States. And those costs will inevitably make their way to Wiley and Helm, and perhaps their customers, but not yet.
“We just haven’t been responding because there’s so much uncertainty,” Helm said. “Next week, they could be gone for all we know.”
Au Marché and Brits are separate businesses, but sit next to each other on Massachusetts Street and have an intertwined history. Helm, a devoted Anglophile, opened Brits with a childhood friend in 1995 after returning from what she calls a life-changing trip to England.
Wiley opened Au Marché (French for “at the market”) in 1998 after meeting with Brits’ owners. While attending the University of Kansas in the early 90s, Wiley studied abroad in France, where she discovered a small shop that sold American foods, that was a poignant reminder of home.
Wiley and Helm’s stores are stocked with everything needed to bring a sense of the United Kingdom or several European countries – France, Germany, Sweden and others – back home. Wiley, especially, emphasized the expatriate community her shop serves with its array of European chocolates, cheeses and candies and other foods.
They have only just begun to hear from vendors about how tariffs will affect them. Wiley said vendors have told her they want to keep customers in mind. In what she called a generous move, one French vendor told the business it would only pass along a 5% surcharge on what, at the time of the interview, was a 20% rate.
Decisions by individual businesses about how much of a tariff’s cost to pass along down the supply chain drive how much more the end-point consumer ends up paying. If Wiley and Helm have many suppliers like the French vendor, the need for price hikes may be minimal.
“I think that our vendors will absorb some of that, just like I plan to absorb some of that, as much as I can for our customers,” Wiley said.
Wiley predicted Au Marché wouldn’t begin to experience vendor price increases for another four to six weeks, perhaps longer. Helm said it would take a couple of months for higher prices to reach Brits.
Many of the items stocked by both stores are shelf-stable things like canned foods, teas and packaged candies that don’t quickly expire. Because of that, it may take some time for goods imported after tariffs took effect to actually reach the shop floor.
When Helm spoke with The Star around midday Wednesday, she had heard 30 minutes earlier from one of her vendors, a company that gets teapots from China that are then shipped to the United Kingdom. While Trump paused higher tariffs for most countries, he kept a high rate in place for China. As of Thursday, the rate stood at 145%.
“It pretty much said they’re holding off because it’s a bit crazy right now,” Helm said, referring to the vendor. Another distributor last week said it would pass on a 5% surcharge, Helm said.
“If things get really bad, we can always start doing some more orders ourselves and that way we cut out the middleman,” Helm said. But direct imports are “a lot more work,” she said, and require more advanced planning.
Small businesses susceptible to tariffs
Small businesses like Au Marché and Brits are particularly susceptible to the effects of tariffs, said Donna Ginther, director of the Institute for Policy & Social Research at the University of Kansas. Unlike a major retailer like Walmart, they aren’t big enough to individually have much leverage to negotiate prices with distributors, so they’re more likely to be stuck with higher costs.
More broadly, companies will hold off on making decisions amid the continuing uncertainty. While Trump announced a 90-day pause, there’s no guarantee the higher tariff rates won’t return in three months. And the rate on Chinese goods appears to climb daily.
“Basically, because the rules of economic engagement keep changing, it freezes the economy and economic activity,” Ginther said.
For now, Wiley and Helm are watching events unfold. The 2008 recession was the first time Wiley said she recalled “true worry” over her shop and she called the pandemic the worst time since it opened. She takes some comfort now, reflecting on those times as she braces for the potential challenges posed by tariffs.
“So knowing that we survived the Great Recession of 2008, knowing that we survived COVID, I mean it doesn’t make me feel like, ‘Oh, I can do anything,’” Wiley said. “But it makes me feel better knowing that this too shall pass and we have some skill sets we can call on to right whatever rough waters are ahead.”
This story was originally published April 11, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
