Empty shelves in American stores? Hypermarkets appeal

"There has never been a historical precedent for prices to rise this high and this fast," said the chief financial officer of Walmart, the largest supermarket chain in the U.S. American store owners say the White House tariffs are to blame.

As the company's director John David Rainey said in interviews for the American media, the prices of some goods, such as bananas, have already started to rise due to tariffs , but consumers will see bigger increases this and in the coming months.

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“It’s hard to operate in retail right now because prices are going up so quickly. There’s never been a historical precedent for prices going up so high and so fast,” Rainey told Bloomberg.

" However, the scale of the tariff increases is so large that retailers are unable to bear them on their own, " he added.

He told MSNBC that while the recent agreement with China lowering tariffs on Chinese products from 145 percent to 30 percent is a good sign, it is still "too high."

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The company, considered a barometer of the U.S. economy, has fared well so far and posted a better-than-expected first-quarter result. But it cautioned that it could not predict what conditions it would face in the second quarter and did not issue a forecast for that period.

Walmart executives, along with executives from rival chains like Target and Home Depot, reportedly appealed to the White House in April to lower the tariffs , warning that failing to do so could mean empty shelves in stores.

Despite these warnings, the data so far indicates that companies have largely absorbed the costs of the tariffs, reducing their margins rather than raising prices for consumers. Inflation data for the past two months has been better than expected. This was also indicated by the reading of the producer price index (PPI) published on Thursday, which fell by 0.5% from March to April, despite the 0.4% increase expected by experts.

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According to Bloomberg, the data indicates deteriorating forecasts and consumer sentiment, and companies are not raising prices because they fear falling demand.