H Houst & Son, a Woodstock institution for more than nine decades, is feeling the squeeze from President Donald Trump’s insistence that higher tariffs on imported goods will deliver faster economic growth and cheaper prices for U.S. consumers.

Items that once cost a dollar now arrive in the U.S. at $1.30 before they reach the shelves, and that means that Houst’s charges $3 more, said store manager Michelle Conley, who has worked at Houst’s for 23 years. The store runs weekly price-change reports and sometimes skips stocking certain items altogether rather than pass on steep increases to loyal customers.

“We’ve had so much fluctuation this year with the tariffs going up and down,” Conley said. “It’s been very complicated.”

Family-owned stores like Houst’s, whose offerings run the gamut from nuts and bolts to Trailway’s tickets for the bus to New York City that stops outside its doors, sit at the intersection of small-town life and global trade policy. A Supreme Court decision expected in November on the legality of Trump’s tariffs looms over local Catskills businesses, some of which say the effects are visible on every invoice and others that shrug them off as just another cost of doing business.

At Windham Hardware, where Jim Lawrence took over a business run by his father in 1980 that was established in 1887, customer service—not price fluctuations—are what drives the business. The store has endured floods and blizzards and a surge in prices during Covid, yet the tariffs haven’t hit just yet.

Diane Lawrence, left, and her husband, Jim, are the two full-time employees at Windham Hardware, a family business Jim’s father bought in 1967 that has served Windham since 1887. Roy Gumpel/The Overlook.

“The average person will tell you, we have a wealth of knowledge and you can be out of here in 15 minutes,” said Lawrence, 67, who arrives at work by 7 a.m. and runs the store with his wife, Diane, and one part-time employee.

Lawrence raised two kids while keeping the shelves stocked with paint, nails, and the parts customers needed for the endless upkeep of mountain homes.

“This is all I’ve known,” he said. “It’s been my life.”

Yet storm clouds are gathering far from the Catskills. Ace Hardware, the world’s largest hardware cooperative, warned last year that tariffs on goods from China and Mexico would drive up costs across its 5,000 member stores. Economists say the same pressures will inevitably reach local shelves.

“The tariff is a tax on imports, and it is the person or business doing the importing that pays that tariff,” said Hans Vought, a history professor at SUNY Ulster who studies U.S. economic policy. “If they are paying more for what they import, they are going to pass those costs on to the consumer by raising the cost of the finished product. Sooner or later, those prices are going to go up.”

For now, the dust hasn’t settled, and independent hardware stores are working hard to retain the trust of customers whose parents and grandparents depended on them for generations.

“I love being able to help people fix their own problems,” Conley said. “They don’t have to hire a plumber.”

Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.