Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
Perhaps you’re tired of the nonstop flow of bad news since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, and you’re unplugging a little with some hobbies. That might mean reading more novels or comics, collecting vinyl records or Blu-Rays, getting into knitting or art, or finally cracking that Wingspan board game that’s been gathering dust on your shelf.
Sadly, I have bad news: Even your hobbies can’t escape global politics.
Trump has been quite erratic in his trade wars with Canada, Mexico, and China this year. Yet even with all the confused delays and exemptions, the fact remains that the tariffs he’s imposing on those three countries are universal. These import taxes are meant to attack every single product that originates from our bordering neighbors and our East Asian rival. Yes, there are loopholes, but the overall effect is clear: These countries are to be punished, and our dependence upon them means we’ll be shouldering lots of pain as well. Our politicians are straight-up admitting that!
Most urgently, the constant wavering on tariffs fosters a climate of uncertainty, anxiety, and scrambling that makes it so much harder for smaller businesses and more precarious industries to navigate the chaos. Plenty of attention has rightly been paid to the most necessary goods that reside in the crosshairs (fresh and frozen foods, energy, toilet paper, apparel). Less noticed are the resultant impacts on everything that gives joy and fulfillment: physical pages, artistic recordings, objects for creation and play.
If you work in those very sectors, you’ve likely been on edge for a while now. Jim Henderson, a co-founder of the iconic California record store Amoeba Music, told me that he and his fellow indie-chain executives had been “dreading Trump’s tariff bonanza” since the 2024 election. Amoeba is best known for its ample vinyl and CD stocks, but its three locations sell a little bit of everything: books, DVDs and Blu-Rays, audiophile gear, and customized merchandise.
“Several vendors—from turntable manufacturers to apparel companies, on through some of our label partners—have either posted price increases or warned us of their imminence,” Henderson wrote in an email. “With the doubling of the China tariffs, we can count on them revisiting the new cost and pricing structures that were presented.”
Executives aren’t the only ones feeling the peril. Scour the online spaces where niche hobbyists gather to chatter about their interests, and you’ll find months’ worth of casual questions and creeping fears. One Blu-ray forum post from the day after the election asked whether enthusiasts should “Start hoarding now?” Reddit’s vinyl community featured a postelection question about the “potential tariff effect on vinyl,” which earned a grim reply: “If tariffs are instituted on a grand scale in the States, you likely won’t have money for hobbies anyway.”
Blogs devoted to tabletop games have long been fretting about the tariffs, with one executive straight-up telling the media last month that “board games are about to get more expensive.” (Grim timing, since we’re coming off a couple of boom years for that sector.) The CEO of Blick Art Materials told Hyperallergic that the company had “purchased more inventory than normal for a few product lines to hedge against higher costs,” such as paints, inks, and utensils.
Bleeding Cool founder Rich Johnston has likewise been documenting comics-industry jitters for months on end. These have manifested in publishers’ proclamations that cheap single-issue comic books are a thing of the past, as well as in a panic-sales spike for a new Brian K. Vaughan graphic novel that occurred just before the original tariffs were set to go into effect in February.
The tariffs come during a rough patch for the comics industry in particular. Johnston told me in a phone conversation that late last year, the comics industry had mostly been “reliable” and that “people were very happy” with how things were chugging along—until Diamond Comic Distributors, once the top comics distributor in the world, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January. Publishers hurried to switch distribution systems and request emergency donations from concerned fans, while others (like the famed imprint Dark Horse) chose to preemptively cut costs through mass layoffs. Now the tariffs threaten to exacerbate these issues even further.
“Usually it’s those component parts that go bust: the actual printers, the actual distributors,” said Johnston. “The delay has helped, especially since the biggest publisher, Canada’s Transcontinental,” has offered to absorb the cost burden of the tariffs instead of surcharging its clients.
Part of the reason these tariffs hit these industries the hardest is because Canada is a leading supplier of paper products. “It’s not down to paying Canadians less or slave labor or having different governmental incentives,” said Johnston. “It’s literally cheaper to cut down a tree and turn it into print, because they’ve got huge forests that are very easy to access, and they have a lot more experience and skills.”
There are American printing presses, of course, but those “only have so much capacity, which makes their prices already higher,” Johnston explained. “But now the Canadian advantage is being tariffed away, and it’s all more expensive.” (And yes, the printing extends far beyond comics or even standard bestsellers. As Johnston cheekily informed me: “Canada prints a lot of Bibles.”)
For Amoeba, the physical media industry has already been weathering headwinds, as media companies like Sony decide to stop producing blank minidiscs and Blu-Rays for personal recordings altogether, and studios like Warner Bros. dump a bunch of back catalog on YouTube instead of prepping any new video releases. The tariffs have not helped, due to the fact that both vinyl and video discs tend to be pressed and processed in bulk from Mexico, with the plastic boxes for DVD and Blu-ray sets manufactured in China.
There are, however, some local saviors for music and movies. “Over the last few years, a little bit more of our new vinyl has been pressed in the United States because of a few pressing plants that have opened,” said Jim Henderson. “But by and large, so much of what we get from the labels is being pressed outside of the states.”
With only a few major pressing plants out there for both discs and vinyl, and with all sorts of tangled relationships between labels and manufacturers and suppliers and distributors, it’s also hard for Amoeba to change things up preemptively in anticipation of cross-border tariffs. (One hedge available to Amoeba: the used and secondhand vinyl and movies markets, on which the tariffs have little impact.)
However, even if the temporary tariff reprieves may soften the blows, there is still the major question of China, where so much manufacturing of cheap goods and materials is based: toys, component bits, machinery, colors, and more. One raw-materials retailer told Hyperallergic that certain pigments, colors, and brushes that are offered for a wide variety of crafts, much like musical instruments, are largely sourced from China and will be subject to the price hikes. Tabletop gaming enthusiasts who want to use 3D printers to home-manufacture minis and figurines may find themselves stymied by the fact that 3D printers are largely produced in China, which also provides us with the large majority of our board games.
When it comes to yarn and textiles you can use to knit and sew your own clothes, forget about it; China has even that on lock. Craft retailers stateside that already started to phase out China-made goods since the tariffs from Trump’s first term and Biden’s succeeding one may just be encouraged to further embrace that trend, though they won’t be able to replicate China’s manufacturing prowess by any means.
The overall effects won’t be limited to just these four countries, either. Since “a lot of goods come to the world from America and then get distributed elsewhere,” Rich Johnston said, Canada might be inclined to set up its own global export facilities in order to get around the inevitable tariff—which will, of course, force a rethinking of Canadian trade relations with other nations, for all kinds of products. Mexico, the largest exporter to the U.S., will be eyeing such diversion tactics as well. Perhaps they’ll both look to China as an example, which has long outsourced certain factories and parts to Southeast Asian countries (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia) in order to sidestep other nations’ trade barriers.
At the heart of it, though, what worries Jim Henderson most is that “all this noise around tariffs has created an economic reaction and tension that is not easily unwound,” he wrote to me. “People start talking/tweeting/commenting and hearing about inflation and the price of eggs or whatever and it causes many to pause or scale back on recreational spending, and that ripples on through retail and restaurants and all the different ways one would expect it to.” In lean times, “people turn to selling more of their collections and private items” to stores like Amoeba—instead of buying more from them.
Put it another way: Even with the delays, the damage has been done. Trump can pull back his tariff orders altogether, but consumers are already feeling the instability and distrust in the broader economy.
If there’s one bit of relief from the storm clouds, it’s that these businesses have a deep and passionate community to lean on. “We generally tend to try to accentuate the positive as well as the deep variety we have,” Henderson explained. “People come to Amoeba for a variety of reasons: We do live shows, and we have sales and community events.” Everything’s going to become a little more local, now.
Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.
