Bridal Shop Owner Says U.S.-China Tariffs Will Hurt His Business

The U.S. Trade Representative's office has been meeting with business owners to hear how a slate of new tariffs with major trading partners is affecting their companies. One bridal shop owner was among those who spoke up.

Here & Now's Robin Young checks in with Steve Lang, president of the American Bridal and Prom Industry Association and owner of Mon Cheri Bridals, about how the tariffs impact his business. Lang says his business hasn't taken a hit from tariffs yet, but he fears it will be affected if President Trump makes good on his to impose more tariffs.

"My concern is that I don't think the Chinese are going to back down very easily. I think with Mr. Trump's personality, he may just carte blanche say that everything that's coming in needs to be subject to an additional border tax," Lang says. "Look I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, but I don't agree with his philosophies. You can't be a bully all the time. Sometimes you can. Sometimes you can't."

On Trump's claims that tariffs will compel China to open markets to businesses 

"I can't see how it would be better for me if the moves of putting tariffs in put my myself, my own company and many of my peers out of business. It may be too little too late. I don't think Mr. Trump understands how to negotiate with the Asian population. The worst thing you can do is make them lose face. Your chairman is in a situation where this is a tit-for-tat type of situation and personalities are involved. I don't think that's Mr. Trump's long suit, and I fear that personal aggression is going to take over, rule the day as opposed to logic."

On his testimony before a government panel 

"I basically said that putting tariffs together, isolating the 360 million people in the United States, when the rest of the world is still going to do business with China, is not a formula for success. All it's going to do is raise our prices. And I do believe there's a big issue with intellectual property, and my organization has also been working on that for five years. But China's basic resource is labor. The two things they have in their country are rare-earth minerals, which are needed for batteries, and labor. And if they owned all the oil in the world, would we stand back right now and raise prices on oil by 25 percent to teach them a lesson? No, we wouldn't. It would be a mutiny in this country. You need to really sit down and negotiate piece-by-piece and not put up a wall, and basically, you know, dare them to scale it. They're doing business with the entire world, and they're being very effective at that. And the more they do business with other countries to backfill that hole where they need to keep growing 8 percent a year, the less important becomes the United States. They're in Africa. They're in South America. They're in Europe. They're building bridges. They're trying to turn their economy away from an export economy into a high technology economy. And I can't blame them for that."

"If they owned all the oil in the world, would we stand back right now and raise prices on oil by 25 percent to teach them a lesson? No, we wouldn't. It would be a mutiny in this country."

Steve Lang

On Trump's hope that tariffs will help bring business back to the U.S. 

"I can't find labor to do the kind of work that I need done. I mean, some of our garments have 150,000 hand-sewn beads on them. There's nobody here that wants to do that work, and even if I could find people to do that work, my dresses would become 10 times the cost of what they are right now. It's always been the option, but nobody's taken up that charge because it isn't just a matter of cost, it's a matter of finding the laborers that want to do that kind of work. Even in China -- there's a labor shortage actually in China right now -- there are even people there that don't want to do that kind of work anymore because they have options. They can go work in banks. They can work in technology. We know eventually, long-term maybe in 25 years, this business is going to have to move to other low-labor countries. It's the allure of the jungle, that's the way it works. You could not bring this back onshore right now."

On how the price of wedding gowns would rise if they were made in the U.S. 

"The average price of a wedding gown has dropped precipitously over the last decade. The average retail price right now, the sweet spot, is between $1,200 and $1,500, and that's the lion's share of the goods, maybe 90 percent of the sales. That dress wholesale would go up dramatically, probably by 50 percent. And therefore, the consumer's going to be the one paying the bill."

"These tariffs aren't just an issue of negotiating different margins and so forth. It's a matter of life and death."

Steve Lang

On how tariffs would help counterfeiters 

"It's not like we have choices here to make these in the United States. And we have to deal with China, and these tariffs aren't just an issue of negotiating different margins and so forth. It's a matter of life and death. I mean we could not take a 25 percent increase and pass that along. The stores wouldn't accept it. We'd have to raise the prices, and therefore, all the counterfeiters we've been fighting for the last five years — although very valuable to consumers — and that's going to be a whole 'nother issue. Right now, there's a trillion dollars in counterfeiting going on worldwide. Half of that hits the United States, so we're talking about $500 billion worth of counterfeiting that takes a bite out of the U.S. economy. That $500 billion is equal to if we put tariffs on everything.

"[Counterfeiters'] value is going to look even better than it is right now. They're using our pictures to bait-and-switch customers, and they're saying, 'Here's a dress that normally retails for $1,500, I could ship it to you directly from China for $400.' And the real kick is that when they ship these in, they ship them in as gifts, so they pay no duties at all. I pay $3 or $4 million a year in duties now before these tariffs going [in]. I pay more to the government in tariffs than they make in profit. These tariffs go in, it almost doesn't make sense to work so hard. And at 64 years old, I built this company into a $100 million business over the last 28 years. I could lose everything."