The US supreme court recently struck down Donald Trump’s tariffs, opening the door to up to $175bn in refunds for businesses that paid the import taxes. However, the process for claiming that money is by no means certain. Trump himself said that the issue could be tied up in courts “for the next five years”.
Across the country, small businesses have struggled to navigate the fallout from Trump’s global tariff wars. The Guardian asked small business owners in the US how their lives and livelihoods have been affected.
Elizabeth Vitanza, who runs a lighting and home furnishings company in Los Angeles with her husband, John Ballon, said that all of the modern brands they work with have raised prices at least 12% over the past year.
“None of this is pro-business or pro-American,” Vitanza said.
When Trump won re-election in 2024, Vitanza and Ballon immediately put in a large order with one of their Swedish brand partners, “in the hopes that they could rush production” before tariffs kicked in, she said. They still got hit with a five-figure tariff on the order.
Ballon said: “The money that we had set aside to renovate our showroom, to maybe increase people’s salaries – to do things that businesses do with money that they budget for – suddenly was now being cut into in substantial and unexpected ways.”
“Why would anyone start a business right now?” Vitanza asked. “I wouldn’t if I didn’t have a firmly established one.”
A furniture maker in Texas, who asked to remain anonymous, said that “the tariffs have raised the price of imported lumber – which can’t be grown domestically – and on cabinet hardware, which is not manufactured in the United States”. Due to the increase in material cost, he had no choice but to raise prices.
Rob Coughlin, who manages a small Minnesota-based outdoor gear company, Granite Gear, said the company has faced near-daily uncertainty since 2025’s “liberation day”. Prior to the tariff implementation, the company paid a 18% duty fee, which then jumped to 46% after Trump’s announcement of reciprocal tariffs. In August, following negotiations with Vietnam, the US lowered the tariff to 20%.
In the spring of last year, when the company met retailers, panic set in. “We didn’t know what our pricing would be when we were going to start flowing product,” he said. “How do I go to REI with pricing when I don’t even know what [it’s] going to be?”
When chatting with other, larger brands in the space, Coughlin said: “Their strategy was to push back on pricing.”
He noted: “Small brands like us, we just don’t have that leverage.” The company ultimately raised its prices roughly 10 to 20%.
Dr Charlie Elrod, who founded a company that makes natural health products for livestock, tried to push off raising prices for as long as he could.
“The tariffs, especially those on Brazil, have raised our costs by about $1m in the last year,” he wrote. After six months of eating the cost, the company increased prices 5%. “That helped some, but our profitability is definitely lower this year,” he said.
Both before and after the supreme court ruling, more than 1,000 companies filed lawsuits against the government over its tariff policy. On Wednesday, a US trade court judge ordered the government to begin paying billions of dollars in refunds to importers who paid tariffs that the court said were collected illegally.
“We are tracking the tariffs in a spreadsheet in the hopes that one day we will have our ducks in a row to be able to file a claim for a reimbursement,” Vitanza said. “But we’re not counting on it.”
When asked if he’s attempting to get a refund, Howard Trenholme, a bakery and cafe owner based in Moab, Utah, said that he had “not even considered” it as a possibility.
“The complexity and need for legal services likely offsets the remote possibility of a refund as an end user buying through various vendors in a chain,” he wrote.
Coughlin expressed similar sentiments: “When I look at the money that I would get refunded versus the possible legal fees … it could really hurt me in the long run.”
He added: “I will not try to claim a refund, as this administration has shown that it is duplicitous in its dealing with the American people and any attempt to collect will be a waste of time and money.”
