San Francisco's Chinatown is feeling the pressure of rising tariffs on Chinese imports. Many businesses reliant on goods from China are raising prices.
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00:00In San Francisco's historic Chinatown, businesses are facing challenge of
00:06rising costs due to tariffs on Chinese imports. To cope, many are raising their
00:12prices. At Lion Trading, a religious incense shop, the manager explains that
00:1798% of their products are affected by these tariffs as everything is imported
00:23from China. Basically 98% of our store products are all affected by the
00:28tariffs because everything is manufactured and imported from China.
00:31There's no way in America that they can make Jaws papers like this. Obviously
00:38they can make incense, but it's not the traditional incense that we use.
00:41Despite the price hike, they are absorbing half of the cost to ease the
00:46burden on customers. We are planning to raise the price about 50% and just for
00:53us we will absorb the other 50% for our customers. I do feel like if we
00:58raise prices really high very fast, people won't be ready. We are slowly
01:04raising the prices on incense. So for example, if we're selling a bundle of
01:10incense for $17.99, it will probably go up to like $22.23. Customers like Stephanie
01:17are feeling the impact as rising prices force them to buy less. She says instead
01:24of enjoying more items, they have to cut back that changes everything because
01:30instead of getting three, I'd probably just get one, you know, and, and it would
01:35be like, this is something you get to enjoy, right? And when you have to cut
01:41back and you have to cut back, you don't get what your enjoyment stuff is cut
01:47first. In Chinatown, restaurants like Lai Hong Lounge are also slowly
01:53increasing prices to avoid scaring off customers. Owner Leon Zhu shares that the
01:59goal is to keep price hikes as minimal as possible. I own three restaurants in the
02:05Bay Area, including Lai Hong Lounge in Chinatown. We've had to adapt to the
02:11current economic status with the rising tariffs by slowly increasing our prices.
02:16Our strategy is to increase it as little as possible so that we don't scare off
02:22our customers. However, locals like Listang are concerned about the future. Then it's
02:30gonna impact maybe like how much people can go out together or how many people
02:34can, you know, be in a group together because it's gonna, obviously the cost is
02:39gonna be a lot more for, you know, the larger group, the group. I think in terms
02:45of the small businesses in Chinatown, I'm, I'm worried about them because I know
02:50restaurant businesses in general have a really small margin. So I do worry about
02:57some of the smaller businesses, how they're gonna manage. She worries about the
03:04small margins for businesses and how rising costs might affect the community,
03:08especially smaller restaurants that already struggle.