One day last week, I was signing some checks to pay a few newspaper bills. An item I already knew about on one invoice caught my eye, and for some reason it started a cascade of annoyance and curiosity that ultimately led to this column.
This will be another boring money story, but what’s bothering me is knowing that a lot of these problems could have been avoided, saving businesses and families a lot of frustration.
The check I signed was for eight blankets for our press. Without going too deeply into the art of printing, blankets cushion the newsprint sheet against the printing plate to help produce a clean image.
The price for the eight blankets was $929, but the item that pushed my button said, “Tariff (10%), $82.70.”
Now, an extra 82 bucks for equipment you’ve got to have is not going to knock any business to its knees. To a degree, that’s the cost of doing business. You sign the check and move on.
I don’t know why this got my attention after more than a year of paying higher prices for which tariffs are directly responsible.
Press blankets last for several months, so we only need to buy them a couple of times per year. But another product that we’ve got to have is printing plates. We buy at least 1,200 every month, and tariffs on those are a much greater burden.
Here’s the story about our purchase in August. The cost of the 1,200 plates was $6,352. The tariff added $1,008. Then a second “surcharge” by the plate supplier cost another $648.
The plates cost a total of $8,008, with the tariff being 12.5% of that amount.
For 2026, we’ll buy at least 15 pallets of plates. That means we’ll pay an extra $15,000 in tariffs, and I am passing that along to the 15 other newspapers that we print. Because that’s what you do when your costs increase.
Maybe that’s what annoyed me and prompted this column. The printing business is tough these days, and it’s no fun explaining to other newspaper operators why their weekly bill is rising. We’re all friends, and to their credit they have rarely complained, but these higher prices have to sting them the same way they do me.
The newspaper probably is paying other tariffs that aren’t coming to mind. Fortunately, our newsprint, which is produced in Canada and trucked to McComb, is exempt from tariffs. But the closure of a few mills has raised the price of paper. In this case, the tariff is from supply and demand.
Other higher costs are for gasoline and electricity. We buy a lot of fuel for our two delivery trucks, which make six out-of-town trips per week, and the price is way up since we bombed Iran at the end of February and tankers in the Strait of Hormuz got stuck there.
We spent $2,351 for gasoline in September, as opposed to $1,328 a year ago. That’s not a perfect comparison because we have a new print customer in Rankin County and make one more weekly delivery than last year. But fuel costs are averaging $700 more per month than they did in 2025.
The electricity bill for our building has been up $500 a month or more since early this year. Most months we’re not using any more electricity than before, so it’s whether you believe the increase is due to data centers or from Entergy billing us for system improvements.
It amazes me that President Trump has made decisions that raised prices for everybody, especially when he said in 2024 that he would lower prices. His description of fuel costs as a small increase is insulting, especially to families who live on a tight budget.
Companies don’t ignore tariffs; they raise their prices. And when you attack another country, it responds.
Higher prices are real. In the long run, we’ll get past them. But for now, we must all pay a price — even though much of this was avoidable.
