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Donald Trump had a message for Americas children this week: Two dolls is plenty. Somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are gonna be open,’ the president said while discussing his 145% tariffs on China. Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.” Trumps new message of austerity oddly echoes Jimmy Carters era-defining “Crisis of Confidence” speech from 1979. Its a far cry, though, from the gilded lifestyle Trump is famous for and the promises he made on the campaign trail. Vote Trump and your incomes will soar, he told a crowd in Pennsylvania last September, without explaining just how hed make that happen. Your net worth will skyrocket. Your energy costs and grocery prices will come tumbling down. Still reeling from the persistent sting of inflation, a slim majority of voters proved amenable to Trumps message of imminent relief. According to a Gallup poll from October, 52% of voters said the economy would be extremely important to their presidential votethe highest number since the Great Recession election in 2008. After the election, two-thirds of voters described the economy as not good in exit polls. If Trump came into office with a mandate, as he repeatedly claims, it was a mandate to “Make Groceries Less Pricey Again.” So far, Trumps promised stratospheric incomes and subterranean grocery prices have yet to materialize. Instead, after Trumps tariffs, recession indicators are everywhere. Tariff surcharges are showing up in some receipts and websites, and pointedly not showing up in others. Meanwhile, YouTubers and TikTokers are going all in on homesteading as a way to thrive in lean times. Even some senior Trump officials are reportedly beginning to hoard groceries and supplies in advance of high prices and shortages to come. Trumps widely reported comments on frugal doll-shopping mark his starkest appraisal yet of the gale-force economic headwinds consumers are now facing. Previously, Trump had only hinted at the possibility of economic turmoil from his tariffs. Throughout his campaign, he framed tariffs as a cost-free way to stop foreign countries from taking advantage of the U.S., bring back domestic manufacturing, rid consumers of all that pesky inflation, and generally transform America into an economic Hercules. It wasnt until after the election that he refused to rule out higher prices as a result of his tariffs, and not until after hed already been re-inaugurated did he finally admit there will be some pain. For the past few months, Trump has been quiet about what that pain will actually feel like in practice. Will it be a pinprick or something closer to a shattered fibula? As recently as March, the president was assuring Americans, We’re going to become so rich, you’re not gonna know where to spend all that money. On Wednesday, however, following reports that the U.S. economy contracted in the first quarter of his term, Trump finally defined the contours of hardship to come. With his statement promoting the two-doll lifestyle, Trump flatly relented that pain would take the form of higher prices, scarcity, and diminished buying power. His subdued confession sits in stark contrast to his first term in office. In 2020, when COVID hit, Trump seemed loath to ask Americans to make sacrifices. Trump left it to the states to decide whether to advise citizens to shelter in place or not. He also refused to mandate mask use, despite the advice of top immunologists. (I want people to have a certain freedom, and I dont believe in that, he said at the time.) Of course, it would be a lot easier to take at face value the president’s new embrace of American sacrifice and the two-doll lifestyle if it wasnt coming from a billionaire who thinks other billionaires deserve more billions. As the president advises parents on how to budget, his supporters in Congress are hard at work figuring out how much they can cut from Medicaid to ensure Trumps tax bill passes muster. It seems that part of the calculus guiding his tariff strategy is knowing he and his fellow billionaires will be fine no matter what.
Category:
E-Commerce
Branded is a weekly column devoted to the intersection of marketing, business, design, and culture. Costco has been on a good run lately. The beloved big-box club chain has been winning new fans for its no-nonsense stand on continuing its DEI policies, with comparable store sales up 6.8% in its most recent quarter. But as Costco shoppers know, its in-house Kirkland Signature brand, which includes everything from underwear to frozen pizza, has long been the discount clubs not-so-secret weapon. Kirkland marks its 30th anniversary this year, and in whats shaping up to be a challenging economy for consumers across the board, its poised to become more important than ever. Kirkland-branded products (excluding gas) already account for nearly a quarter of Costco salessome $56 billion in its fiscal year that ended September 1. That makes Kirkland bigger by revenue than Nike ($51 billion last year) or Netflix ($39 billion). Like all private labels, it competes with brand-name consumer products largely on pricean obvious advantage in belt-tightening times. But Kirkland is also the rare private label thats developed its own powerful, and surprisingly elastic, brand identity. When it was founded in 1983, Costco offered only name-brand goods, but over time the company became concerned with rising prices, sometimes even when underlying commodity prices were going the other way. So it decided to jump on the then-burgeoning trend of creating lower-priced house-brand alternatives. At first, it followed the practice of Sears and other major players of that era who created multiple distinct private brands for different categories. But ultimately this struck management as confusing: Consumers couldnt be expected to associate dozens of newly invented brand names with Costco. Kirkland Signaturefirst used on vitamins and shampoo, in 1995was named after the Seattle suburb where Costco was based at the time. The biggest-selling Kirkland products tend to be staples like toilet paper, paper towels, and bottled water. But as the label has developed a quality reputation, Costco has gradually become more and more adventurous about where the brand can go, and there are now an estimated 500-plus Kirkland-branded products, from high-end liquor to aluminum foil to sushi. Its hard to think of any other single brand successfully competing in such a dizzying array of categories. Meanwhile, the discounters core strategy of limiting choices in each category and generally offering far fewer SKUs (stock-keeping units) than most big-box stores ended up making Kirkland even more potent. A few years ago, according to The Wall Street Journal, Costco decided Kirkland would become one of its two diaper offeringsmeaning either Huggies or Pampers had to go. Costco and Huggies-maker Kimberly-Clark made a deal to manufacture the Kirkland diapers; Huggies stayed. (Costco later switched to another manufacturer, but Huggies kept its slot.) Speculating about which big brands actually make Kirkland productsare its apparent dupes of a popular pair of Lululemon pants actually made by Lululemon?is a Costco-fan pastime. Costco generally doesnt comment (and did not respond to an inquiry from Fast Company), but its widely accepted that Starbucks supplies some Kirkland coffee, its batteries are made by Duracell, and Bumble Bee supplies its tuna fish. And plenty of Kirklands supply partners are quite open about the relationship: Ocean Sprays logo is right below Kirklands on its cranberry juice bottles. And while Grey Goose has in the past denied supplying its vodka, Oregons Deschutes Brewery has put its logo on the popular Kirkland Signature Helles-Style Lager it now brews for Costco. Traditional brands continue to outsell private label alternatives by a wide margin, but store-brand sales continue to grow. (Target, Walmart, and others still have multiple private labels, but direct Costco rival Sams Club has moved to a similar model built around its Members Mark cross-category house brand.) And Costco has reiterated that it believes it can continue to grow private-label sales. While its not yet clear what the full fallout of the Trump administrations nascent and ever-changing trade war policies will look like, its a safe bet that shoppers are going to become increasingly price-sensitive this year; the Conference Boards expectations index of forward-looking consumer sentiment has plunged, with tariffs a cited concern. That means more interest in lower-cost private labels in generalbut maybe especially for a private label with a quality reputation. It may not be as attention-grabbing as a $1.50 hot dog, but Kirkland Signature seems positioned to become more popular than ever.
Category:
E-Commerce
Americas federal public lands are unique, part of our birthright as citizens. No other country in the world has such a system. More than 640 million acres, including national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges, as well as lands open to drilling, mining, logging, and a variety of other uses, are managed by the federal government but owned collectively by all American citizens. Together, these parcels make up more than a quarter of all land in the nation. Congressman John Garamendi, a Democrat representing California, has called them one of the greatest benefits of being an American. Even if you dont own a house or the latest computer on the market, you own Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and many other natural treasures, he wrote in 2011. Despite broad, bipartisan public support for protecting public lands, these shared landscapes have come under relentless attack during the first 100 days of President Donald Trumps second term. The administration and its allies in Congress are working feverishly to tilt the scale away from natural resource protection and toward extraction, threatening a pillar of the nations identity and tradition of democratic governance. Theres no larger concentration of unappropriated wealth on this globe than exists in this country on our public lands, said Jesse Deubel, executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, a conservation nonprofit. The fact that there are interests that would like to monetize that, theyd like to liquidate it and turn it into cash money, is no surprise. Landscape protections and bedrock conservation laws are on the chopping block, as Trump and his team look to boost and fast-track drilling, mining, and logging across the federal estate. The administration and the GOP-controlled Congress are eyeing selling off federal lands, both for housing development and to help offset Trumps tax and spending cuts. And the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, led by billionaire Elon Musk, is wreaking havoc within federal land management agencies, pushing out thousands of civil servants. That purge will leave Americas natural heritage more vulnerable to the myriad threats these lands already face, including growing visitor numbers, climate change, wildfires, and invasive species. The Republican campaign to undermine land management agencies and wrest control of public lands from the federal government is nothing new, dating back to the Sagebrush Rebellion movement of the 1970s and 80s, when support for privatizing or transferring federal lands to state control exploded across the West. But the speed and scope of the current attack, along with its disregard for the publics support for safeguarding public lands, makes it more worrisome than previous iterations, several public land advocates and legal experts told Grist. This is probably the most significant moment since the Reagan administration in terms of privatization, said Steven Davis, a political science professor at Edgewood College and the author of the 2018 book In Defense of Public Lands: The Case Against Privatization and Transfer. President Ronald Reagan was a self-proclaimed sagebrush rebel. Deubel said the conservation community knew Trumps return would trigger another drawn out fight for the future of public lands, but nothing could have prepared him for this level of chaos, particularly the effort to rid agencies of thousands of staffers. The country is in a much more pro-public lands position than weve been before, Deubel said. But I think were at greater risk than weve ever been beforenot because the time is right in the eyes of the American people, but because we have an administration who could give two shits about what the American people want. Thats whats got me scared. The Interior Department and the White House did not respond to Grists requests for comment. In an article posted to the White House website on Earth Day, the Trump administration touted several key actions it has taken on the environment, including protecting public lands by opening more acres to energy development, protecting wildlife by pausing wind energy projects, and safeguarding forests by expanding logging. The accomplishments list received widespread condemnation from environmental, climate, and public land advocacy groups. That same day, a leaked draft strategic plan revealed the Interior Departments four-year vision for opening new federal lands to drilling and other extractive development, reducing the amount of federal land it manages by selling some for housing development and transferring other acres to state control, rolling back the boundaries of protected national monuments, and weakening bedrock environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act. Meanwhile, Trumps DOGE is in the process of cutting thousands of scientists and other staff from the various agencies that manage and protect public lands, including the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM. Nearly every Republican senator went on the record this month in support of selling off federal lands to reduce the federal deficit, voting down a measure that would have blocked such sales. And Utah has promised to continue its legal fight aimed at stripping more than 18 million acres of BLM lands within the states border from the federal government. Utahs lawsuit, which the Supreme Court declined to hear in January, had the support of numerous Republican-led states, including North Dakota while current Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was still governor. To advance its agenda, the Trump administration is citing a series of emergencies that close observers say are at best exaggerated, and at worst manufactured. A purported energy emergency, which Trump declared in an executive order just hours after being inaugurated, has been the impetus for the administration attempting to throw long-standing federal permitting processes, public comment periods, and environmental safeguards to the wind. The action aims to boost fossil fuel extraction across federal lands and watersdespite domestic oil and gas production being at record highswhile simultaneously working to thwart renewable energy projects. Trump relied on that same emergency earlier this month when he ordered federal agencies to prop up Americas dwindling, polluting coal industry, which the president and his cabinet have insisted is beautiful and clean. In reality, coal is among the most polluting forms of energy. This whole idea of an emergency is ridiculous, said Mark Squillace, a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado, Boulder. And now this push to reinvigorate the coal industry seems absolutely crazy to me. Why would you try to reinvigorate a moribund industry that has been declining for the last decade or more? Makes no sense, its not going to happen. Coal consumption in the U.S. has declined more than 50% since peaking in 2005, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, largely due to market forces, including the availability of cheaper natural gas and Americas growing renewable energy sector. Meanwhile, Trumps tariff war threatens to undermine his own push to expand mining and fossil fuel drilling. The threat of extreme wildfirean actual crisis driven by a complex set of factors, including climate change, its role in intensifying droughts and pest outbreaks, and decades of fire suppressionis being cited to justify slashing environmental reviews to ramp up logging on public lands. Following up on a Trump executive order to increase domestic timber production, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins signed a memo declaring a forest health emergency that would open nearly 60% of national forest lands, more than 110 million acres, to aggressive logging. Then theres Americas housing affordability crisis, which the Trump administration, dozens of Republicans, and even a handful of Democrats are pointing to in a growing push to open federal lands to housing development, either by selling land to private interests or transferring control to states. The Trump administration recently established a task force to identify what it calls underutilized lands. In an op-ed announcing that effort, Burgum and Scott Turner, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, wrote that much of the 500 million acres Interior oversees is suitable for residential use. Some of the most high-profile members of the anti-public lands movement, including William Perry Pendley, who served as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management during Trumps first term, are championing the idea. Without guardrails, critics argue the sale of public lands to build housing will lead to sprawl in remote, sensitive landscapes and do little, if anything, to address home affordability, as the issue is driven by several factors, including migration trends, stagnant wages, and higher construction costs. Notably, Trumps tariff policies are expected to raise the average price of a new home by nearly $11,000. Chris Hill, CEO of the Conservation Lands Foundation, a Colorado-based nonprofit working to protect BLM-managed lands, said the lack of affordable housing is a serious issue, but we shouldnt be fooled that the idea to sell off public lands is a solution. The vast majority of public lands are just not suitable for any sort of housing development due to their remote locations, lack of access, and necessary infrastructure, she said. David Hayes, who served as deputy Interior secretary during the administrations of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and as a senior climate adviser to President Joe Biden, told Grist that Trumps broad use of executive power sets the current privatization push apart from previous efforts. Not only do you have the rhetoric and the intentionality around managing public lands in an aggressive way, but you have to couple that with what youre seeing, he said. This administration is going farther than any other ever has to push the limits of executive power. Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a Colorado-based conservation group, said Trump and his team are doing everything they can to circumvent normal environmental rules and safeguards in order to advance their agenda, with no regard for the law or public opinion. Everything is an imagined crisis, Weiss said. Oil, gas, and coal jobs. Mining jobs. Timber jobs. Farming and ranching. Gas-powered cars and kitchen appliances. Even the water pressure in your shower. Ask the White House and the Republican Party and theyll tell you Biden waged a war against all of it, and that voters gave Trump a mandate to reverse course. During Trumps first term in office, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke repeatedly boasted that the administrations conservation legacy would rival that of his personal hero and Americas conservationist president, Theodore Rooseveltonly to have the late presidents great-grandson, Theodore Roosevelt IV, and the conservation community bemoan his record at the helm of the massive federal agency. Like Zinke, Burgum invoked Roosevelt in pitching himself for the job. In our time, President Donald Trumps energy dominance agenda can be Americas big stick that will be leveraged to achieve historic prosperity and world peace, Burgum said during his confirmation hearing in January, referencing a letter in which the 26th president said to speak softly and carry a big stick. The Senate confirmed him to the post in January on a bipartisan 79 to 18 vote. Some public land advocates initially viewed Burgum, now the chief steward of the federal lands, waters, and wildlife we all own, as a palatable nominee in a sea of problematic potential picks. A billionaire software entrepreneur and former North Dakota governor, Burgum has talked at length about his fondness for Roosevelts conservation legacy and the outdoors. Whatever honeymoon there was didnt last long. One hundred days in, Burgum and the rest of Trumps team have taken not a stick, but a wrecking ball to Americas public lands, waters, and wildlife. Earlier this month, the new CEO of REI said the outdoor retailer made a mistake in endorsing Burgum for the job and that the administrations actions on public lands are completely at odds with the longstanding values of REI. At an April 9 all-hands meeting of Interior employees, Burgum showed off pictures of himself touring oil and gas facilities, celebrated cleancoal, and condemned burdensome government regulation. Burgum has repeatedly described federal lands as Americas balance sheetassets that he estimates could be worth $100 trillion but that he argues Americans are getting a low return on. On the worlds largest balance sheet last year, the revenue that we pulled in was about $18 billion, he said at the staffwide meeting, referring to money the government brings from lease fees and royalties from grazing, drilling, and logging on federal lands, as well as national park entrance fees. Eighteen billion might seem like a big number. Its not a big number if were managing $100 trillion in assets. In focusing solely on revenues generated from energy and other resource extraction, Burgum disregards that public lands are the foundation of a $1 trillion outdoor recreation economy, nevermind the numerous climate, environmental, cultural, and public health benefits. Davis, the author of In Defense of Public Lands: The Case Against Privatization and Transfer, dismissed Burgums balance sheet argument as shriveled and wrong. You have to willfully be ignorant and ignore everything of value about those lands except their marketable commodity value to come up with that conclusion, he said. When you add all their myriad values together, public lands are the biggest bargain you can possibly imagine. Davis likes to compare public lands to libraries, schools, or the Department of Defense. There are certain things we as a society decide are important and we pay for it, he said. We call that public goods. The last time conservatives ventured down the public land privatization path, it didnt go well. Shortly after Trumps first inauguration in 2017, then-Congressman Jason Chaffetz, a Republican representing Utah, introduced legislation to sell off 3.3 million acres of public land in 10 Western states that he said had been deemed to serve no purpose for taxpayers. Public backlash was fierce. Chaffetz pulled the bill just two weeks later, citing concerns from his constituents. The episode, while brief, largely forced the anti-federal land movement back into the shadows. The first Trump administration continued to weaken safeguards for 35 million acres of federal landsmore than any other administration in historyand offered up millions more for oil and gas development, but stopped short of trying sell off or transfer large areas of the public domain. Yet as the last few months have shown, the anti-public lands movement is alive and well. Public land advocates are hopeful that the current push will flounder. They expect courts to strike down many of Trumps environmental rollbacks, as they did during his first term. In recent weeks, crowds have rallied at numerous national parks and state capitol buildings to support keeping public lands in public hands. Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, who voted to confirm Burgum to his post and serves as the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has taken to social media to warn about the growing Republican effort to undermine, transfer, and sell off public lands. I continue to be encouraged that people are going to be loud. They already are, said Deubel, the executive director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation. Were mobilizing. Weve got business and industries. Weve got Republicans, weve got Democrats. Weve got hunters and weve got nonhunters. Weve got everybody speaking out about this. In a time of extreme polarization on seemingly every issue, public lands enjoy broad bipartisan support. The 15th annual Conservation in the West poll found that 72% of voters in eight Western states support public lands conservation over increased energy developmentthe highest level of support in the polls history; 65% oppose giving states control over federal public lands, up from 56% in 2017; and 89% oppose shrinking or removing protections for national monuments, up from 80% in 2017. Even in Utah, where leaders have spent millions of taxpayer dollars promoting the states anti-federal lands lawsuit, support for protecting public lands remains high. Even in all these made up crises, the American public doesnt want this, Hill said. The American people want and love their public lands. At his recent staffwide meeting, Burgum said Roosevelts legacy should guide Interior staff in the mission to manage and protect federal public lands. Those two things, management and protection, must be held in balance, Burgum stressed. Yet in social media posts and friendly interviews with conservative media, Burgum has left little doubt about where his priorities lie, repeatedly rolling out what Breitbart dubbed the four babies of Trumps energy dominance agenda: Drill, Baby, Drill! Map, Baby, Map! Mine, Baby, Mine! Build, Baby, Build! Protect, Baby, Protect, Conserve, Baby, Conserve, and Steward, Baby, Steward have yet to make it into Burgums lexicon. By Chris DAngelo, Grist This article originally appeared in Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Sign up for its newsletter here.
Category:
E-Commerce
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