Consumers may not be psyched about Walmart’s announcement that it’s going to raise prices because of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, but other retailers are likely breathing a sigh of relief.
Retail analysts told Business Insider that Walmart did other companies a favor with the news, giving them more freedom to raise their own price tags.
“What they are doing is providing air cover for the tens of thousands of retailers — extra-large, large, medium, and small — all of whom are faced with exactly the same issue, and all of whom are going to be raising their prices,” said Mark Cohen, a professor at Columbia Business School and the former director of retail studies at Columbia Business School. Other retailers are, he said, “delighted” about the benchmark Walmart set.
Retailers across the board are contending with rising costs, the experts told BI, but Walmart “leads the market on price,” according to the cofounder of the blog Omni Talk Retail, Chris Walton. The country’s biggest retailer said shoppers will probably start to see prices tick up at the end of this month and more drastically in June, and those BI spoke to agreed with that timeline.
“We have always worked to keep our prices as low as possible and we won’t stop. We’ll keep prices as low as we can for as long as we can given the reality of small retail margins,” Molly Blakeman, a spokesperson for Walmart, told BI in a statement.
GlobalRetail analyst Neil Saunders wrote in an email that Walmart’s honesty about price hikes might open the door for other retailers to have “open dialogues.” Yet the honesty didn’t come without consequences — Trump bashed the company in a Truth Social post, saying Walmart should, ‘”EAT THE TARIFFS,’ and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching.”
Representatives for the White House directed BI to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s comments on Monday about Walmart, when she confirmed that Trump will be “watching” the company and said he “has always maintained that Chinese producers will be absorbing the cost of these tariffs.”
Trump’s reaction will likely influence how other retailers manage their own pricing conversations, the experts said.
“Retailers will have learned they need to be very careful — and it’s very tricky — on how they articulate that so as to not wind up on a Truth Social post,” Michael Baker, a senior analyst at D.A. Davidson, told BI. “That does add a layer of complication.”
He anticipates executives will figure out how to more delicately discuss tariffs on coming earnings calls so as not to anger the president. Walton told BI that other retailers may try to avoid talking about rising costs publicly, and instead let shelf prices speak for themselves.
“President Trump has sent a warning shot that he doesn’t like companies talking about price increases related to tariffs,” Saunders wrote. “That may make some retailers more hesitant to draw a link, but I don’t think it will stop them putting up prices. They will need to financially.”
The president has issued not-so-subtle warnings about price hikes before, like when he sharply criticized Amazon for its reported plans to publicize how much tariffs were contributing to rising costs. Amazon said it had no plans to do so on its main site at the time, but experts told BI that the swift reaction sent a “warning signal to other companies” nonetheless.
Though Walmart may be one of the first big box retailers to publicize looming price hikes, it’s better positioned to deal with the new tariffs than some competitors. Both Saunders and Baker said the company’s scale gives it the ability to offset some of the tariff impact.
