Last year was full of talk about tariffs. Are they coming up or going down? On which products and countries? How could businesses handle all the uncertainty? But while there was a lot of discussion of these fees, paid on imported goods and raw materials, there wasn’t actually that much evidence of their price impact at stores. According to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, that’s about to change. 

Tariffs had a modest impact on prices in 2025

Tariffs are a tax on businesses, which means you’d expect that if tariffs go up, so do prices. But the effect of President Trump’s ever-changing but always aggressive tariff policies didn’t cause the huge price hikes and widespread economic damage many feared in 2025. 

Economists offer several likely explanations. One is all the exceptions and carve-outs the government made after announcing the tariffs. What Trump threatens and what ends up being charged are often very different. 

“The actual tariffs are much lower than what were announced, and that is one of the reasons why the effects have not been as big as feared,” Harvard economist Gita Gopinath told The New York Times.

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Another big reason is timing. Trump hasn’t been shy about his love of tariffs. That means many people got ahead of the new taxes by stockpiling goods before they came into effect. 

“Consumers and business time very-short-run purchases to try to minimize tariffs,” according to the Budget Lab at Yale University. “This can reduce the amount of imports of higher-tariffed goods and countries for a time.” 

But Jassy says this tactic to keep prices down may have reached its expiration date. 

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