A piece in the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported on and unexpected effect of President Trump’s tariff war:
But one local lighting company, NoogaLights, canceled a planned show for Fort Oglethorpe’s Barnhardt Circle. NoogaLights’ owner, John Haustein, said the show would have been the first of its kind at the site and was designed to run alongside the city’s ice-skating venue.
“The tariffs that have been going on has affected our industry greatly,” he said by phone.
“For us, we’re looking at a half-a-million to a million light bulbs per show, and when that price doubles,” Haustein said, “that is just not something that we can absorb.”
The pressures squeezing NoogaLights fit a broader pattern of uncertainty and indicators of economic slowdown, said Howard Wall, director and chief economist of the Center for Regional Economic Research at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
The tariffs have had a scattershot effect across a range of industries and company sizes, he said. Seasonal decorations are items that can be kept year-to-year, he said, and big retailers are more resistant as large companies have inventories, order in bulk and order much further in advance.