Since October, Frank Vaughan has been fixing up a 1990 Catalina 18 sailboat at his home in Cedar Creek, Texas. By early this year, the boat was just about lake-ready. All it needed was some sails.
So in February, Mr. Vaughan, 66, ordered two new Dacron sails from a Chinese company. He got an estimate that each would cost $400. Then he got an update email, and another in the weeks that followed. Because of tariffs, the price would be about $1,200 each.
Then in early March, he asked a Canadian company about getting sails from it instead. But that company sourced from China, too, and the sails would cost 50 percent more than he had hoped to pay. An American company quoted him closer to $800 each — its sailcloths are from China, too — and there was a waiting period of six to eight months.
Finally, at the end of last month, he found a set of used sails for $236 each. “They will do for a while,” Mr. Vaughan said, though the sails weren’t as crisp and shiny as new ones. He bought his boat for a couple of thousand dollars. “I’m not willing to spend multiples of that just for sails for it,” he said, describing the whole situation as “very frustrating.”
Mr. Vaughan, who is retired after working as a pilot and in human resources, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on his hobby since he began sailing in the 1980s. Still, now that he is living on a fixed income, if materials keep going up like this, he may give up the sport. “It would be a terrible loss,” he said, imagining how hard it would be “looking at the water, wishing I was on the water.”
Tariffs will touch almost every aspect of American life. This month, President Trump announced a blanket 10 percent tariff on most imported goods, which, though less extreme than his earlier plans, will probably cause price spikes. In particular, tariffs on China — which President Trump says will be 145 percent — could meaningfully raise prices on a wide range of goods for American consumers. That includes goods beloved by collectors and hobbyists.
Some people are preparing to absorb the cost of, say, the Chinese-made dice required for role-playing games. But others are getting ready to give up, or cut back on, the objects that sprinkle their lives with joy.
Hobbies are, by definition, nonessential. Many hobbyists are quick to note that, while seeing prices go up for model train parts or imported butter would be a bummer, more profound devastation may come elsewhere. Still, hobbies ameliorate the stressors of work, the news or family life. And they are intertwined with identity. Many hobbyists, rather than describing how they engage with an activity (“I play video games” or “I enjoy quilting”), define themselves as a gamer or a quilter.
Now, Americans may need to rethink their relationships to those activities. “Any time there’s an economic downturn, people cut back on discretionary funds,” Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester, said. Consumers, uncertain about whether they will still have jobs in 90 days, may dial back on nonessential purchases like recreational supplies, or turn to used goods when possible.
‘An Expression of Time and Place’
For hobbyists, the threats are two-tiered. Many foreign goods will themselves become more expensive (consider an imported bottle of French wine in an era of 10 percent tariffs). But as the goods needed to construct an item become pricier, domestically produced goods may swell in price, too (consider the Portuguese cork, Chinese glass bottles and French oak a domestic winemaker may use).
To discerning collectors, the origins are the point. A bottle of wine is “an expression of time and place,” said Keith Williamson, a 52-year-old ophthalmologist and wine collector. Mr. Williamson has kept a close eye on tariff news and, earlier this year, he stocked up on more than 10 cases of 2018 and 2019 wines from the Bordeaux and Rhône Valley regions in anticipation of possible tariffs, spending about $70 a bottle. (Mr. Trump said last month that he would impose 200 percent tariffs on foreign wine before reducing them to 10 percent, at least for a 90-day pause.)
Mr. Williamson emphasized that missing out on just-released 2022 Bordeaux wines (an excellent vintage) would not be “a matter of life or death.” But for him, who estimates that he buys 150-200 new bottles each year, this would be a disappointment.
Though he is engaged in an expensive hobby, he is still mindful of value — he said he rarely pays more than $200 for a bottle. If substantial tariffs hit wines, he said he would most likely stop buying new foreign bottles, turning to his existing cellar and supplementing with domestic wines — though he worries that the domestic wine distribution industry could be hurt by the loss of imports, too.
For Alia Danilo, a 29-year-old recreational baker in Brooklyn, the realization that Kerrygold butter prices might rise hit especially hard. She seeks out the butter, which is imported from Ireland, for such butter-forward treats as lemon curd filling for a tart. The Kerrygold butter price varies at local grocery stores, but it can be as high as $8. Ms. Danilo, who works in a medical office and described herself as living paycheck to paycheck, said that if the cost of Kerrygold and other premium baking ingredients spiked, she would just “sacrifice” the hobby altogether, a prospect she finds depressing.
Board Games in Crisis
Part of the challenge for hobbyists (and the businesses that serve them) is all the uncertainty. The tariff landscape this week looks radically different from the way it looked earlier this month. Business owners — including those who turned a hobby into a hustle — are scrambling.
Kate Hay, a quilter who started an online quilt supply shop last year from her home in Austin, Texas, was relieved that many tariffs Mr. Trump had announced were paused for 90 days. Many fabrics she sells are from Japan and South Korea — which, prepause, faced tariffs of 24 and 25 percent.
But she remains concerned that, after these wild few weeks, quilters will hunker down and avoid buying new materials. Such a turn would, in many ways, return the all-American craft to its roots in making do with scraps of what you have, she noted. That’s in some ways a lovely prospect. But it’s one, she fears, that may crush small businesses like hers.
Gary LeMaster, a baseball card collector who now sells cards online and helps host a trading card podcast, explained that the penny sleeves, top loaders and magnetic holders he uses to package cards are all imported from China. He now spends about $76 for 100 magnetic holders, but this month his distributor said the new price would be about $160 per 100 holders. Such costs, he said, are not sustainable in the long term.
According to Juli Lennett, an analyst at the market research firm Circana, adult consumers — including those who buy action figures, play strategic card games or collect sports trading cards — represent almost 20 percent of the toy market and are the fastest-growing segment. Nearly 80 percent of toys imported to America come from China, and she predicts that, if 145 percent tariffs remain, those consumers will be forced to absorb higher prices. And it’s difficult to imagine that kind of manufacturing moving stateside quickly.
Andrew Lynch, pulling small dinosaur figurines out of the box of a game called Dodos Riding Dinos at the Brooklyn Strategist, a game store, demonstrated the bespoke nature of many of the plastic parts that are used in tabletop games. Cards are relatively easy to produce stateside, he explained, but these little figurines cannot be produced in small runs, especially for affordable prices, in domestic plants. More than three-quarters of the store’s games come from China, he said. Taking down games from the shelves in the store, he flipped over boxes and read out the labels one by one: Made in China, made in China.
Anticipating tariffs last month, Mr. Lynch, who manages inventory for the store, preordered 12 extra copies of each of the most popular games, which should last him about three months. He estimated that within a couple of weeks, he would start seeing higher prices from manufacturers and would have to adapt. Already, some small American board game companies are halting shipments from China, and some are shutting down altogether.
Redditor Rage
Hobby forums, normally places for trading tips about knitting patterns and sharing photos of new projects, are now hosting in-depth analyses of tariff news and heated political debates. Ben Schinkel, 42, an avid gamer who voted for Mr. Trump, said that the news cycle had inspired him to do some research into tariffs; he concluded that “tariffs are good if we can get a better deal for things from China and other countries.” But he said the tariffs will most likely make him more selective about which video games he buys, and he would draw the line at $90 for a new game — unless it was a new Mario or Zelda game. (Many new games now cost close to $70, and Mr. Schinkel pays around $20 a month for an Xbox Game Pass subscription.)
Other gamers seem more unsettled. “Even some very staunch Trump supporters I know, some friends of mine, are getting radio silent on their love for the gentleman,” said Ryan Hughes, who owns a video game store in Albany. Mr. Hughes, who also runs a payment software company used by other game stores, is frequently in touch with other store owners and said that, in general, the industry is in “panic mode.” Much of the gear needed to play games — GameCube and PlayStation controllers, memory cards, wires and consoles — is imported from China and may be tariffed steeply. (Such parts are largely not included in the electronics exemption the Trump administration announced this month.)
People have maintained hobbies through hard times before — underemployed Americans with extra free time tinkered through the Great Depression, wove through the 1970s economic downturn, gardened through the 2008 financial crisis and weathered the sourdough-scented Covid recession.
But an idea that has become widespread in the world of contemporary hobbies is that the “the more you spend on it, the realer it is,” said Anne Helen Petersen, the writer of the Culture Study newsletter, who often writes about hobbies (and is herself an enthusiastic dahlia gardener). Ms. Petersen suggested that tighter budgets might lead some people to lean into the community aspect of hobbies. Maybe it will be hard to buy the brand-new version of everything. But does a neighbor have a tool you can borrow?
Such a communal approach is the hope for Luis Garcia, 25, in Guadalupe, Calif., who recently started playing the Manga card game One Piece in a game shop at a local mall. Mr. Garcia, who does not currently have a job, has spent about $500 on a few sets of cards, which are imported from Japan, since picking up the game in December. If prices rise, he said, he hopes his gaming group could strike some kind of agreement not to play with the new editions of card sets. If a box went up to more than $145, he said, he would not buy it.
But Mr. Garcia would like to keep playing. “In a world where most of our time is in front of a computer or phone, it’s nice to be able to go out and move pieces of cardboard around and talk to some people,” he said.
Avery Heinonen, a 20-year-old student in Bloomington, Ill., who spends about $70 a month on his model train hobby, said that “if the hobby becomes less affordable, I think it loses some of its ability to bring people together.” That’s not only because of a rising cost in parts imported from China, he said, but because people may have less money to spend on gas to get to meet-ups, or less time to devote to club meetings, like the ones he attends every Thursday and Sunday near Peoria, Ill.
But still, he struck an optimistic note. “The model train hobby has survived world wars, the Depression, and the move of industry overseas,” he said. As long as “there are a few of us, the hobby is going to be strong.”
Lora Kelley is an associate editor at The Atlantic. She previously reported on business for The New York Times.
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