(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Are you ready to pay 80 percent more for a USB-C cord? Unfortunately, Walmart, Target and other major retailers have decided to start dramatically raising the prices of thousands of imported products.
Of course our paychecks are not going up dramatically as well, and so our standard of living is going to go down. We live at a time when 70 percent of Americans are already more financially stressed than they have ever been before, and now big corporations are going to be hitting us with a tsunami of enormous price hikes.
If prices of many imported goods go up by 5 or 10 percent, we can handle that.
But apparently Target is going nuts with their price hikes. For example, it is being reported that the price of one popular USB-C cord is being increased by 80 percent…
Now, thanks to insider information from Target workers, the extent of the raises are becoming apparent. Staff say it is just the beginning.
A $9.99 USB-C cord from the store’s in-house Heyday brand is now ringing up at $17.99, according to a self-identified employee on Reddit.
‘It’s happening,’ the worker wrote, sharing a photo of the price tag update. ‘All of Heyday is going up.’
Seriously?
Did Target really need to do this?
And Target CEO Brian Cornell has also warned that prices will be going up on many common grocery items…
The company’s CEO, Brian Cornell, started warning customers during a March earnings call, when the US was staring down potential 25 percent tariffs on Mexican and Canadian products.
At the time, he warned that everyday grocery items that frequently cross borders before making their way to Target’s aisles — like strawberries, avocados, bananas, and coffee beans — were set to increase.
Of course Target is not the only major retailer that is raising prices.
JD’s manually curated links for God-fearing MAGA patriots
Last week, Walmart CFO John David Rainey told CNBC that customers should expect price increases “towards the tail end of this month, and then certainly much more in June”…
In an interview with CNBC, Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said tariffs are “still too high” – even with the recently announced agreement to lower duties on imports from China to 30% for 90 days.
“We’re wired for everyday low prices, but the magnitude of these increases is more than any retailer can absorb,” he said. “It’s more than any supplier can absorb. And so I’m concerned that consumer is going to start seeing higher prices. You’ll begin to see that, likely towards the tail end of this month, and then certainly much more in June.”
When President Trump heard about this, he went ballistic.
On his Truth Social account, he insisted that Walmart should “EAT THE TARIFFS”…
After Walmart last week said it would have to jack up some prices because of high costs of the global trade war, Trump on Saturday responded forcefully in a Truth Social post, demanding Walmart reverse its decision.
“Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain,” Trump said. “Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, “EAT THE TARIFFS,” and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!”
Trump believes that Walmart should be able to absorb the tariffs since the company is making so much money. But it has also been pointed out that Walmart’s margins are very thin…
“Walmart made “BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected,” Trump posted on social media on Saturday. That’s accurate — Walmart is America’s biggest retailer and had a strong 2024 on the back of inflation-weary customers seeking out its notoriously low prices.
But Walmart’s profit is a function of its massive scale, rather than artificially high prices. As a percentage of sales, Walmart’s operating income last quarter was just a little over 4%. Its net profit margin was less than 3% — razor-thin by business standards.
When I visited a local Walmart recently, I was stunned by how much prices had changed.
And if Walmart CFO John David Rainey is telling the truth, the price increases that we have seen so far are just the beginning.
Sadly, the truth is that prices are rising to absurd levels just about everywhere.
One father in Florida recently made headlines all over the world when he revealed that he spent $1,400 to take his family of four to Disney World for a single day…
A Florida father-of-three was utterly disgusted at the $1,400 he had to pay to take his family of four on a ‘bargain’ day out to Walt Disney World.
Craig Stowell took his three kids and his wife to the self-proclaimed ‘Happiest Place on Earth’ in Orlando while family was in town visiting them, but he quickly found out just how deep the one-day trip was going to hit his pocket.
‘It started with the ticket purchase, and then it ran right into the parking, and then it just was like a cash cow for the rest of the day,’ the small business owner told Fox and Friends.
I remember my parents taking me to Disney World when I was a child.
But these days only the wealthy can afford to take their kids to our ridiculously overpriced theme parks.
Most of the country is just trying to find a way to scrape by financially from month to month. Consumer sentiment just fell to the second lowest level ever recorded, and the rising cost of living was the biggest reason for the drop…
U.S. consumers are becoming increasingly worried that tariffs will lead to higher inflation, according to a University of Michigan survey released Friday.
The index of consumer sentiment dropped to 50.8, down from 52.2 in April, in the preliminary reading for May. That is the second-lowest reading on record, behind June 2022.
The outlook for price changes also moved in the wrong direction. Year-ahead inflation expectations rose to 7.3% from 6.5% last month, while long-term inflation expectations ticked up to 4.6% from 4.4%.
After four years of steadily rising prices, we really are facing a historic economic crisis.
Unfortunately, it appears that prices are just going to keep going even higher.
I wish that I could tell you that there is an easy way out of this mess, but I cannot do that.
We are all just going to have to find ways to tighten our belts even more, because the purchasing power of our dollars is just going to continue to go down.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.