By Barnaby "Bottom-Line" Coyne
Mike Roach and Kim Osgood didn't set tariff policy. They just run Paloma Clothing, a shop in Portland, Oregon, that now finds itself squeezed by a trade fight between Washington and Ottawa. In an interview with NPR, the couple described how the escalating tariff dispute between the U.S. and Canada is landing directly on their business — in costs, in sourcing headaches, in the daily math of staying open.
The fight itself is bigger than one storefront. Canadian premiers have pushed back hard against tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, with Prime Minister Mark Carney and provincial leaders saying, in blunt terms, that Canada can no longer take Washington's trade commitments at face value. That's a dispute playing out in press conferences and diplomatic cables. But NPR's conversation with Roach and Osgood is a reminder of where trade wars actually land: on small retailers who don't have the scale to simply absorb a tariff hit or the lobbying muscle to fight it in Washington.
We don't have exact figures here on how much Paloma Clothing's costs have risen, or what share of their inventory is tariff-exposed — those specifics weren't detailed in the available reporting, and we'd want them before drawing sharper conclusions about the scale of the damage. What is clear is the pattern: when two governments trade tariffs, the invoice tends to show up first at businesses like this one, long before it shows up on Capitol Hill.
Somebody's paying for this. Let's find out who.
— Compiled from reporting by NPR and Al Jazeera.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."