Some N.C. Businesses Are Actually Happy About Tariffs

President Trump’s tariff crusade is disorienting the global economic order, rocking retirement accounts, and torching international relationships. 

But for third-generation Sneads Ferry shrimper Nancy Edens, the president’s tariffs are a relief. “It feels like he threw us a lifeline,” she said.

Edens’ grandfather in the 1950s started B.F. Millis & Sons Seafood, a waterfront fish house overlooking the New River. Business has never been worse, she said. “My father’s been in business all of his life–and he said this past year, he’s never seen it like this,” she said. “Never.”

Last year, a seafood processor and reliable customer said he didn’t want their product since he could buy much cheaper imports—a first for the family. “It’s never happened before,” Edens said. “The prices have just continually gone down because of the imports.”

Shrimpers like Edens point to the proliferation of farm-raised imports as the impetus for the domestic industry’s collapse. State data show that in 2023, the fewest number of licensed commercial fishermen participated in the shrimp business on record, down to 270 compared to more than 1,000 in 1995. The dockside price of shrimp dropped to $2.14 per pound, worth a third or less of its 1970s value, adjusting for inflation. 

Restaurants and processors that purchase from local fish houses have come to prefer cheaper imports. 

Edens is a board member of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, an industry group that has lobbied for tariffs for decades. The group points to a host of ethical and economic arguments for imposing tariffs on certain exporters, including combating the use of slave labor, antibiotics, and artificially low prices. As of January, 94 percent of the nation’s shrimp were imported, with producers led by India, Ecuador, Indonesia, and Vietnam, according to data shared by the group.

“If consumers knew what imported shrimp were being treated with, you would not want it,” Edens said. 

‘Ready For It’

Business leaders across various sectors are uneasy with the arrival and rollout of Trump’s tariffs, but still others remain in a happy minority. 

For Anderson Gibbons, chief marketing officer of Kings Mountain-based Specialty Textiles, Inc., the phone calls started a few weeks ago. Then the bump in orders trickled in last week. “I hope you’re ready for it,” Gibbons said one buyer told him. 

STI’s upcycled furniture fabrics are exclusively sourced nearby from unused polypropylene byproducts, like plastic waste or fabric trimmings. The company’s top competition is Chinese mills, which have historically cranked out far cheaper fabrics.

When Trump increased tariffs during his first term, Gibbons said Chinese mills artificially lowered their prices using government subsidies to break-even pricing, a level that stuck around until recently. 

This month, Trump hiked tariffs on many Chinese imports, including textiles, to 145 percent. 

“In a week period, we went from being $1.50 a yard more expensive to being 50 cents less,” Gibbons said. “Personally, I’m thrilled.”

In 1990, North Carolina employed more than 170,000 workers in textile mills compared to 21,000 last year, according to federal data. As global trade agreements gutted the state’s textile industry, STI hung around. “We were too stupid to quit,” Gibbons said. “It was not the easy path, but we’re ready to capitalize and be one of the last ones standing.”

To justify its higher price point against foreign competition, STI differentiated itself as environmentally conscious with artisan designs—a strategy Gibbons said has paid off. “Our thesis was if we could out-style, if we could compete globally with pricing, and if we could deliver quicker than a container ship from Asia, then someone would buy our fabrics,” he said. 

The firm has participated in a globalized business model; it owned cut-and-sew factories in Nicaragua and China until 2019 and exports some to Vietnam and Cambodia. But domestic production and selling have remained its core business, Gibbons said. The Kings Mountain mill employs 250, with another 50 working in a distribution facility in Mississippi that helps the company deliver stored fabric to customers on a quicker turnaround than ocean-bound imports. “I’m trying to beat the boat,” he said. 

The bulk of STI’s buyers are domestic manufacturers that make furniture for retailers like Crate & Barrel and Restoration Hardware. Given the daily policy whiplash, Gibbons said his biggest fear is scaling up too quickly to meet newfound demand. 

“It’s not really a capital problem. It’s a personnel problem. We want to make sure the business is here to stay. The last thing we want to do is hire 100 extra people and have to lay them off,” he said. “The amount of scale of the business that could come our way is a primary reason why I’m humbled and honestly, a little bit scared.”

A Business Gamble

Not all homegrown textile manufacturers are as optimistic. The CEO of American Giant, which crafts clothing from Halifax County-grown cotton, told the New York Times this week that dampened consumer confidence could counteract any benefits. “It’s feeling a little too chaotic and poorly explained,” Bayard Winthrop told the outlet.

Jon Sanders, economist and director of the Center for Food, Power, and Life at the conservative-leaning John Locke Foundation, said the tariffs’ economic impact is bound to be uneven. “There are winners to having the tariff…And then you have a lot of others who are not winning,” he said, including consumers. “The overall effect is kind of like a dead-weight loss in the economy.”

Lynda Loveland, spokesperson for the North Carolina Farm Bureau, said the group didn’t lobby for or against tariffs, but said it “supports a fair opportunity and a level playing field for farmers to sell their products in the global marketplace.”

Fourth-generation Johnston County farmer Kim LeQuire said the tariffs could be good, bad, or both. “I’m not going to make any hardcore declarations because there’s so much uncertainty,” she said. “We can’t put on pause anything that we’ve already started in the ground.”

Several years ago, LeQuire said, the farm invested in growing asparagus, which has a three-year harvesting period. “It was delicious,” she said. “But when it came time to sell it, we couldn’t hardly get rid of it because there was so much cheaper asparagus coming in from Peru or Chile.

“Who’s going to pay me for my asparagus when they can get it so much cheaper in your local grocery store?” she said.

LeQuire’s farm, Kornegay Family Farms and Produce, will tend up to 8,500 acres this year, the bulk dedicated to sweet potatoes and tobacco, and some to watermelon, cotton, and soybeans. 

The farm’s sweet potatoes are mostly domestically sold, LeQuire said, whereas its tobacco is mainly exported. Depending on the crop, the president’s tariffs could have varying impacts on her business. Tariffs on competing imported products could help, she said, but in the case of tobacco, retaliatory tariffs imposed by other countries will likely sting. “Of course, that’s in the back of all of our minds,” she said. Still, she’s hopeful that North Carolina-grown tobacco’s reputation for a higher quality flavor will still draw foreign buyers. 

Between monitoring rainfall and hurricanes, LeQuire said farmers face so much uncertainty that Trump’s tariffs are just another unpredictable factor to gauge. 

“There’s so much out of our control,” she said. “But the main thing is, just have a lot of faith and do a lot of praying, and just realize that we’re all dust and vapor.”

Johanna F. Still is The Assembly’s Wilmington editor. She previously covered economic development for Greater Wilmington Business Journal and was the assistant editor at Port City Daily.