Standing in the middle of the one of the grocery stores his family has run for decades, President & CEO Stew Leonard Jr. is surrounded by fresh produce, dairy products and meat — most of them facing new steep increases from tariffs affecting imports, which took effect overnight Thursday. Until now, he’s been absorbing the cost of tariffs alongside producers to avoid having to pass on prices to his customers, but he says that can only last so long.

For the last several months, the U.S. has been charging a 10% tax on most of what we import. Overnight Thursday, the rate increased to 15 percent on goods from Europe, Japan, and South Korea, and even higher tariff rates are hitting trading partners like Canada, Switzerland and Brazil.

This means that typical items on Americans’ grocery lists l

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