What Rising Costs Look Like Inside Five Small Businesses

Meadow Propsom had to make a purchase and ship inventory on a day that turned out to be the highest the dollar-to-peso exchange rate had been "in so long." She runs Silvia Sol, a fashion brand she launched while still in college.

"You kind of just get unlucky because it's so unpredictable right now," she said. "No one really knows what direction it's gonna go into."

Main Street Assembly has been talking to business owners across manufacturing, fashion, mental health, and youth sports about rising costs and customers with less to spend. These are pressures they didn't create and can't negotiate. All they can do is find ways to adapt.

Costs are up, and somebody has to eat them

Her first drop reached customers in Germany, Norway, and the UK. International shipping rates differ by country to begin with, she said, and then there are "tariffs and taxes that are added on afterwards on top of the shipping costs that can already be high."

"Either you have to increase your prices or you eat the cost," she said. "Especially when you're just getting started, that can really hurt your brand in the beginning."

Coach Alex Lalaoui, who owns the Soccer Learning Center in Jersey City, listed his own: fields, equipment, insurance. "Everything is up now."

He won't move the cost onto families. "I refuse to price families out," he said. He says the same about the sport generally. "We started with soccer ball in the field, in dirt, in streets, and now you wanna make it like twenty-eight carat gold. That's not how it works. It's got to be a sport that is affordable for all."

The only thing either of them can control is how much of that cost reaches the customer.

Adapting to external forces

Michael Quinn and his father run Acorn Products Corporation, an injection molding company with two plants in upstate New York.

Politicians call small businesses the backbone of the economy. "You would think as a small business, if we're the backbone, we'd get some sort of help there," Michael said. "But no, not really. Not as much as you'd think."

What he actually pays: income tax through the year, property tax, and tax on materials the company buys. "We get destroyed."

"What are we getting from the taxes that we pay? I don't know. Just permission to live here, I guess. And New York's the worst for it."

He brought up his father, who works fifty and sixty hour weeks. "And for what? And they get how much of it? It's frustrating, right? Because we don't work for anybody else. It really is just us driving it and then paying it."

Suppliers rank their customers too. "Usually everything that's coming to us, a bigger fish is gonna get it first," he said. Quality slips: "We see quality issues all the time from our suppliers that we usually have to just deal with." And there's nobody to pass it to. "A lot of the problems end up coming back to me or my dad."

Meadow hit a version of it before she ever placed an order, when she looked at manufacturing in New York, where she lives. "It's very not small business friendly. If you want to find a factory, they're not really willing to work with small businesses." She went looking elsewhere.

Hiring runs into the same problem. Dr. Sarosh Cooper's mental health practice, Footprint Therapy and Evaluation Services, grew about 300% in two years, from six clinicians to nineteen.

It could have gone further. "I could have hired more," he said. "There just wasn't anybody else to hire."

Part of that is who else is bidding. He described competitors funded well enough "to develop a fund of money that they can operate at a loss," chasing what he called "a big kind of tech win." Those companies "can pay salaries and wages that I can't."

So he competes on the parts he controls. What Footprint offers instead of a bigger number is a job that isn't "a mechanical lifestyle," one that "values their quality of life," plus real professional development. "Anybody who comes here is gonna learn a lot," he said.

Where there's room to move, they move. Where there isn't, they carry it themselves.

Customers pulled back

For the owners selling to households rather than to other businesses, the demand side moved too.

Sarosh watched it happen to his own clientele, which is mostly middle class. "In just a short amount of time, we've seen huge portions of middle class 'wealth' just disappear in the last year and a half," he said.

Why people come changed too. During COVID, clients arrived for self-development, with time on their hands. Now they arrive in crisis. "There's an immediacy and urgency in their suffering," he said. "They won't come unless they have to. It's not any longer because I'd like it or I want personal growth. It's because I have to."

That reshapes the work itself. "Which means on our end the work is that much more intense and taxing."

He built new services to meet it. "In order to meet where the market is, we're diversifying our offerings to really survive in this environment," he said.

Terrell Dominick, who runs a women's e-commerce fashion brand under her own name, sees the same tightening. "My customer, she just doesn't have the disposable income that she once did," she said. Fashion competes with things that aren't optional. "It's not food, it's not water, it's not transportation. Like those are the things that people are focusing on."

After four years of quick growth, she's watching it flatten. "Now I'm seeing that growth pretty much stagnant."

She traces part of it to attention that arrived in 2020 and left. "Everybody cared about the black consumer, the black woman," she said. "As soon as the climate shifted, that care also shifted." It didn't stay in marketing, or on screen. "It shifted in hiring and firing."

She's watching businesses close "at crazy rates" -- major brands, she said, "and especially like black women owned businesses."

Her response was to take less. She ran a slightly smaller margin last year, knowing what her customers were facing. "We went a little above it," she said. "I would love to come up, you know, everybody make it through this together."

Everyone in this economy is stretched, customers included. Small businesses can't change that -- what they can do is get closer to what their customers are actually dealing with.

What they're carrying

Asked where she finds information on tariffs and how to price around them, Meadow said: "I'm just kinda figuring it out as I go." Then: "Maybe I should be looking at the resources more."

Michael said much the same about a tax burden he can't avoid. "We're definitely making do."

Terrell wouldn't call it a difficult time. "I think we're a resilient group," she said, "but it's very challenging right now."

Coach Alex has been at this twenty-four years. He keeps "finding ways forward," he said, because "quitting, I don't think, is an option under my watch." His reason: "These kids are counting on you."

Then: "The pressure either is gonna wreck you or build you."