Will Trump’s Trade War Break America’s Addiction to Cheap Stuff?
The president has said American children should be content with two dolls instead of 30. But the country’s shopping habit has been built over decades of abundant imports from Asia.
By Rachel Wolfe
ROBERT NEUBECKERAs a high-schooler in the 1950s, Kay Washburn babysat for 50 hours to afford her $25 dream dress.
After spotting the moss green, knee-length frock with matching bolero jacket in the window of her local J.J. Newberry’s five-and-dime store, she worked for a month and a half to pay it off in installments, wearing it for years until it all but disintegrated.
In the intervening decades, as Americans turned from being primarily the makers of stuff to the buyers of it, Washburn’s consumption soared.
She no longer saves her pennies for clothing and has become accustomed to buying what she wants, when she wants it.
The now 89-year-old recently clicked “purchase” from her bed on a pair of lightweight capris from Chinese fast-fashion retailer Shein.
The pants cost $5.95, less than what she pays for a burger and fries from In-N-Out, her favorite fast food chain.
She plans to wear the pants for just a season or two.
Much of the clothing, homeware, tools and toys that Americans now buy is so inexpensive that it can be purchased almost without thinking.
That has fueled an addiction to cheap stuff.
No matter how quick the shipping time, the rush we get from our personalized phone cases and matching pajama sets is shorter: We throw many of these items out after only a few uses and start the cycle all over again.
With the approach of Black Friday, the most visible display of America’s shopping compulsion is just around the corner.
President Trump’s tariffs and his vision of restoring America as a manufacturing powerhouse are challenging this “buy now, worry later” mindset.
According to the Tax Foundation, Trump has raised the average effective tariff on all imported goods from 2.5% in 2022 to 13% today—the highest level since 1941.
Over the summer, the administration closed a loophole that allowed some cheap goods, such as Washburn’s capris, to enter the country tariff-free.
China and the U.S. have reached a framework for a trade deal that lowers tariffs from a spring high of 135%, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, but still leaves many Chinese goods subject to an average estimated 48% rate.
The Supreme Court is currently deciding whether the Trump administration has the authority to levy many of these new tariffs at all.
In response to criticism that tariffs are making goods more expensive, Trump has implied that Americans should just buy less.
“Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” he said this past spring.
It would be a major departure from the direction the country has gone—though not everyone is opposed to buying less stuff.
“I think, ‘I want that, I’m going to get it,’ not, ‘Is that worth 50 hours of babysitting?’” said Washburn, who is retired and lives in Rohnert Park, Calif.
“There has to be a happy medium somewhere.”
Washburn says she wants to change her habits for the sake of both the country—which she believes has become too dependent on cheap, imported goods—and her own pocketbook.
The value of some categories of the cheapest goods exported to the U.S. from China and Vietnam, two of its largest suppliers of low-cost goods, increased 36% between 2015 and 2025, to an estimated $176 billion.
They account for approximately 61% of the home goods, 55% of the furniture, 69% of the footwear and 50% of the clothing and textiles that Americans bought in 2024, according to consulting firm AlixPartners.
Those shares have slightly decreased in recent years as manufacturing has expanded to other countries, but total imports have increased and now include a much wider universe of goods.
“The consumption of cheap stuff has exploded,” said AlixPartners retail managing director Nitin Jain.
That consumption is also the biggest driver of the U.S. economy.
Consumer spending accounted for 68.2% of the U.S. GDP in the second quarter of 2025, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, slightly above the long-term average.
There might be a limit to the price increases the American consumer is willing to swallow.
Corporations know this and say they have chosen, so far, not to pass on the full impact of tariffs.
But few economists believe that will last.
Already, inflation is ticking up, and voters are once again agitated by the cost of living, recently electing Democrats who ran on the issue of affordability in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City.
Still, psychologists and analysts of consumer behavior say it will take a prolonged period of higher prices and lower availability, along with a broader shift in our collective mindset, for shopping habits to change for good.
“The fact that it feels good to buy stuff isn’t going anywhere,” said Stephanie Preston, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who researches consumerism.
“People still have this expectation that they should be able to buy these things.
They will just be more and more mad about how much they cost.”
The human brain is wired to reward short-term pleasure over longer-term goals, Preston said.
Each time we buy a product that we think will make our lives a little more convenient, pleasurable or stylish, we experience a rush of feel-good dopamine.
“It provides this kind of immediate pleasure that makes you forget whatever it was you were worried about,” Preston said.
The problem is how quickly positive feelings fade and how frictionless it has become to get another hit with just a single click.
Quitting requires both ignoring that urge and going against a society that historically has reinforced, rather than condemned, the accumulation of evermore items, Preston said.
There has been some backlash, especially among younger generations, to the environmental impact of fast fashion and overconsumption, but consumer spending has just kept growing.
Consumers worldwide are on track to buy about 40% more individual items of clothing in 2025, on average, than they did in 2005, according to McKinsey.
In the U.S., the firm said, that increase is likely much higher.
People now wear an article of clothing only seven times, on average, before donating it or throwing it away.
Between 2019 and 2024, American households’ average annual number of home and garden purchases increased 16%, from 95 to 110 per household.
Purchases of toys, which primarily come from China, went up 15%, from 33 to 38.
Women’s clothing, also a major import from China and other Asian countries, grew 27%, from 15 to 19 per household, according to AlixPartners.
The country’s love of cheap stuff escalated into full-blown addiction during the pandemic, when Americans were stuck at home while leaps in technology made online shopping easier than ever before.
Kanwal Haq was one of those who ramped up her digital consumption, buying pajamas, home décor, craft supplies and games.
And like many others, she didn’t stop once the quarantine lifted.
In 2024, the 35-year-old placed 144 Amazon orders for everything from a flimsy hand towel holder to a multicolored pack of eight Apple watch bands that she had to cut to fit her wrist.
She bought a package of influencer-recommended hydrating face masks (which made her break out) from the TikTok shop.
And she ordered a dozen ill-fitting vacation outfits on Shein.
Her habit even started to strain her relationship with her husband.
“I knew something had to change when I started trying to beat him to the mailroom and hide whatever I had ordered,” said Haq, who runs a women’s health nonprofit in Troy, N.Y.
Growing up as the child of working-class immigrants, Haq was swept away by how inexpensive each individual purchase was.
But after making a New Year’s resolution to log every single one of her credit card swipes, she realized a considerable portion of her paycheck was going to “junk.”
She unsubscribed from marketing emails from her favorite brands, canceled her Amazon subscription and has been trying to find alternatives from small, female-owned businesses for the items she actually needs.
She’s made a few slip-ups along the way.
But when her husband asked a few months ago how many of the parcels in the full package room were hers, she felt proud to be able to truthfully answer “none.”
Consumption has been increasingly important to the U.S. economy since the end of World War II, when wartime factories pivoted to producing consumer goods and manufacturers needed to build markets for their products.
Advertisements from the time told Americans that purchasing products such as cars and washing machines would not only satisfy their own needs and desires but also, in the wake of the Great Depression, help to fuel a prosperous postwar economy, said Lizabeth Cohen, a historian at Harvard University and the author of “A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.”
One two-page spread in a 1947 issue of Life Magazine encouraged families to “buy more for [themselves] to better the living of others.”
Echoes of the same economic argument were made after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
In the 1970s, manufacturers seeking cheaper, nonunion labor for greater profits began to offshore their production to countries with less regulation, Cohen said.
By the 1990s, China was emerging as a leader in low-cost production, with retailers such as Zara and Forever21 relying on Chinese manufacturers for much of their merchandise.
That marked the beginning of a widespread cultural shift to shorter cycles in clothing and décor trends and to throwing stuff away rather than repairing it.
Chip Colwell, an anthropologist and the author of “So Much Stuff,” a history of consumerism, thinks that tariffs will cause people to buy less in the short term.
“But as soon as they can buy more, they will.”
The pandemic’s temporary supply-chain disruptions, he explained, did nothing to tamp down long-term demand.
Altering our shopping habits for good would require “a very fundamental shift in our relationship to the things in our lives,” Colwell said.
“The value that they contribute, the way they sometimes harm the environment and can even harm ourselves.”
A true reset, Colwell believes, would require a prolonged period of economic hardship akin to the Great Depression.
But even then, people who can’t afford to buy a home, upgrade their car or take a vacation might continue to buy relatively cheap consumer goods.
“Whether or not people will keep buying as much stuff is very hard to predict,” said Devashish Mitra, an economics professor at Syracuse University who researches trade.
“Chinese goods might still be relatively cheaper than the alternatives.”
Tariffs could give Americans an opportunity to form different kinds of consumption patterns.
People might find that they actually prefer the experience of shopping secondhand or buying from local artisans if they are compelled to do so, especially if the items they end up purchasing last longer and look superior to those they get from overseas.
“All of these items are becoming more accessible because of cheaper pricing, but the quality is lower so it has to be replaced more often,” said Kimberly Reuter, chief executive of Richmond-based supply-chain consulting firm CSG Consulting.
“We’ve gotten addicted to the cycle of buying something new, using it to the end of its unmaintained life cycle, throwing it out and buying a new one.”
In some corners of the internet, buying less—or “underconsumption”—has already started to take off.
Proponents cite the environmental, financial and psychological benefits of buying less, or nothing at all.
In Rohnert Park, Calif., Kay Washburn subscribed to a meditation app that she now opens for a guided breathing exercise every time she feels an urge to scroll through shopping site Temu.
“I’m trying to train myself to forget this option to help bring us back to where we need to be as a country,” said Washburn.
“But it’s a lesson in discipline, let me tell you.”
Tariffs have led influencer Ava Vancour, a college freshman, to rethink how she makes content.
“Opening packages is literally the best feeling in the world,” she said, and it used to be what she was known for.
Her back-to-school shopping trip for her senior year of high school racked up 6.8 million views as her followers looked for inspiration for their own wardrobes.
This year, however, her precollege hauls of dorm-room decor and clothes each received less than 100,000.
She suspects the decline is due to people hesitating to buy items that, while still relatively inexpensive, have started to go up in price.
So she’s pivoting to making more videos that take her followers along as she gets ready for the day, styling apparel she already owns.
She’s also been participating in Project Pan, which requires her to finish a makeup product—or “hit pan”—before she buys another one.
“I don’t need to buy a million things,” Vancour said.
“If it’s not something my followers resonate with.”
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