Walmart will raise prices in the USA. “Customs still too high”

The financial director of Walmart, the largest supermarket chain in the USA, announced on Thursday that the company would be forced to raise the prices of its goods because of the duties introduced by President Donald Trump. He stated that despite the reduction of Chinese duties, they are still “too high”.

As he said in interviews for American media, the director of John David Rainey, the prices of some goods, such as bananas, have already begun to grow in connection with the tutorials, but larger increases are waiting for consumers in the following months.

“Currently, it is difficult to act in retail trade, because prices are rising in such a quick way. There has never been a historic precedent before that prices would grow so high and so fast,” Rainey Bloomberg told. “The scale of tariff increases, however, is so large that retailers are not able to bear them themselves,” he added.

In an interview with MSNBC, he stated that although a recent agreement with China reducing customs rates to products from China from 145 percent. up to 30 percent They are a good signal, it is still a “too high” level of customs.

The company considered one of the barometers of the American economy has been doing well until the first quarter has recorded a better result than expected. However, she warned that she could not predict what conditions she would deal with in the second quarter, so she did not publish the forecast for this period.

According to reports, the management of Walmart together with the heads of competitive networks, such as Target and Home Depot appealed to the White House in April for a reduction in customs duties, warning that otherwise it could mean empty shelves in stores.

Despite these warnings, the current data indicate that so far companies have largely consumed customs costs, reducing their margins instead of raising prices for consumers. Inflation data from the last two months were better than expected. This was also indicated by the reading of the PPI production price indicator published on Thursday, i.e. the prices of goods, which from March to April fell by 0.5 percent. Despite the growth of 0.4 percent expected by specialists

According to Bloomberg, these data indicate deteriorating consumer forecasts and moods, and companies do not raise prices because they are afraid of a decline in demand.

From Washington Oskar Górzyński (PAP)

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