ST PAUL, Minnesota — President Trump’s global tariffs have created a lot of uncertainty on Wall Street and Main Street. A toy store on St Paul’s Grand Avenue has finished playing nice.
“We have everything to lose if this isn’t stopped,” said Dan Marshall, who co-owns Mischief Toy Store with his wife Millie Adelsheim and their daughter, Abigail Adelsheim-Marshall.
The company has joined nine other small businesses across the country in suing the Trump administration, questioning the legality of the President’s use of Emergency Powers to bypass Congress and impose tariffs, particularly the 145% levies on Chinese imports.
“About 80-90 percent of toys are made in China,” Marshall explained. “There are only a few companies left making them in the United States, and this has been going on for 40 to 50 years. “This is not something that can be changed overnight.”
While his prices and inventory appear to be stable right now, Marshall can point to several shelves of popular Calico Critters toys, which are the last few he’ll have in stock for a while.
“That company just told us they will not be releasing their fall line of products because of the tariffs,” he informed me. “It’s one of several companies now that we’ve already lost access to future orders, they just said, ‘Nope, they’re not going to be available.'”
With similar calls from the majority of their 100 vendors, he believes stock for the holiday season is a big question mark.
“We carry a couple of months of inventory in our basement, so that we can restock our shelves and our vendors carry a couple of months in their warehouses, but after that, it’s all ‘just in time’ inventory,” according to him. “If that’s interrupted, which it has been now, the inventory just runs out after just a few months.”
According to Marshall, the struggle for small toy shops to survive will also hurt the few toy makers who still manufacture in the United States.
“We just learned that this company, Two Bros Bows, which has been made in the United States since its inception, is closing,” Marshall said, holding up some of the store’s toy bows and arrows. “They told me they were closing because they had seen fewer and fewer toy stores in the United States, their sales had been declining, and they knew tariffs would not help them. I was like, “But your products are made in the United States.” But they said it wasn’t a reason to remain open.
Assuming he can find the inventory, Marshall predicted that if tariffs remain in place, the next few weeks will be fraught with difficult pricing decisions.
“Something like this Moon Ball… is going to go from $8, to $20, and that ball is not worth $20,” he told me. “It simply isn’t, and people aren’t going to buy it for $20. “Where does that leave us as a business?”
Kent Erdahl: What do you think? “There seems to be a worry out there right now about speaking up, are you worried about that?”
Dan Marshall: “We are not afraid of Trump. The Constitution empowers Congress, not the President, to impose tariffs. Yes, the Emergency Powers Act authorizes him to do certain things, but it does not specify tariffs, so everything he has done is clearly illegal in terms of the trade war he has started. That is why we are suing him.
And if you’re wondering if it’ll scare away customers, you’ve never visited Mischief Toy Store.
“Our whole mission is to promote diversity and representation and social justice,” Marshall told the crowd. “We want to create a safe environment for children of all ages to find things they enjoy playing with, but Trump is opposed to all of that.
Our customers have known this since we first opened nine years ago. We made that very clear, and we succeeded. When this comes along and threatens that, we will fight.”