This family business paid $200,000 in tariffs last year, but won’t cut corners

By Brett Rowland
The Center Square

La Tienda has been delivering the best of Spanish cuisine to Americans for three decades, but the task has become more expensive after President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Last year, La Tienda paid about $200,000 in import taxes, said Jonathan Harris, a second-generation member of the Virginia-based family business.

“That’s hard for a small business like ours,” Harris told The Center Square. “We really focus on the highest-quality products.”

Switching to lower-quality products to save money wasn’t an option, Harris said.

“These tariffs have made us less competitive, so we really have to focus on service and make sure that every product is delighting our customers,” he said.

Trump’s tariffs, including at least 10% on imported goods from all trading partners and up to 15% on Spanish imports, added up for La Tienda, which works with 80 different vendors in Spain.

“It’s been a year of shocks,” Harris said.

The origins of La Tienda trace back to the 1960s, when Don Harris fell in love with Spain while stationed in Valencia with the Navy. The family launched La Tienda in 1996, in the early days of e-commerce. The business also offers catalogs.

The Harris family takes time to get to know the company’s suppliers. They share the stories of those small Spanish businesses with American consumers.

Harris was meeting vendors at a Madrid food show when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025.

“Spanish people are very nice and they were mostly just giving me hugs and asking me how I was doing,” he said.

Trump suspended those “Liberation Day” tariffs days after announcing them while working on more tailored trade deals with other countries.

Later, La Tienda asked its suppliers what they could do to lower prices. Some of the larger companies helped; others couldn’t.

The next challenge was figuring out how to make it work for La Tienda’s U.S. customers. For months, it was clear that imported products would face tariffs, but just how much was unclear.

“We basically just held the line, we raised a few prices,” Harris said.

After months of uncertainty, Trump and EU leaders announced in August a deal capping tariffs at 15%, which Harris said was a relief to finally know.

“Once it finally became clear, we had to make a lot of individual decisions, just like thousands of companies across the country, how much do you absorb and how much do you pass on,” Harris said.

Recent studies have shown that American businesses and consumers are bearing most of the costs of Trump’s tariffs.

Trump says the tariff burden has “fallen overwhelmingly on foreign producers and middlemen, including large corporations that are not from the U.S. However, that contradicts several recent reports on who pays the tariffs, which can be a complex negotiation between all parties involved.

Nearly all tariff costs fall on American importers and consumers, according to a report from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that nearly the entire tariff burden is passed on in the form of higher prices, directly impacting American businesses and consumers.

Uncertainty over Trump’s tariffs persists as the U.S. Supreme Court considers a legal challenge to the president’s authority to issue tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Harris said the company’s customs broker keeps an eye on the latest news, but even the looming Supreme Court decision won’t end the uncertainty.

“There are a lot of unknowns, even if the Supreme Court does make a decision. What’s the timeline for rebates? Or is a new tariff going to be imposed immediately afterward? Is it retroactive?” he said. “There are so many questions.”

The Supreme Court is expected to decide a case challenging the president’s tariff authority before the end of July, but a ruling could come sooner because the court agreed to expedite it.