President Donald Trump's tariffs appear to be hitting the shelves at Walmart and Target stores across the US.
Walmart employees have been sharing photos recently on the Walmart subreddit showing sharp price increases of as much as 45% at the retail giant. Some of the items have also seen price increases at the rival retailer Target.
In one example, a Walmart label shows the price of a Jurassic World T. rex toy jumping from $39.92 on April 27 to $55 on May 21, an increase of nearly 38%.
A third-party website that tracks Walmart prices, AisleGopher, shows the price was $29.74 back in November.
Another toy — a Baby Born doll — jumped from $34.97 in March to $49.97 in May, an increase of about 43%.
And in a third case, a left-handed fishing reel sold by Walmart went from $57.37 in April to $83.26 in May, a 45% jump. The price was $51.12 on March 14, according to AisleGopher's price history.
Some of the price increases have happened even more recently.
On Wednesday, the same two toys were listed on Target.com for roughly the same prices that Walmart had carried them for before the price increase. By Thursday, however, the Baby Born doll price was increased to be in line with Walmart.
"We have always worked to keep our prices as low as possible and we won't stop," a Walmart spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement. "We'll keep prices as low as we can for as long as we can given the reality of small retail margins."
"Pricing fluctuations are a normal course of business and are influenced by a variety of factors," the spokesperson said in a follow-up statement. "We remain dedicated to managing inventory and reducing expenses to maintain everyday low prices. Nothing about the current environment changes our focus — in the last quarter we had 6,500 rollbacks which is 1,000 more than last quarter."
Walmart's chief financial officer, John David Rainey, said recently that tariff rates remained "too high" and warned prices would go up on some items in the coming weeks and months. Trump responded by saying Walmart should "eat the tariffs."
Target CEO Brian Cornell said that price increases would be a "very last resort" and that the company would look to offset the new import costs in other ways. Target didn't immediately comment when contacted by BI.
Though certain items are seeing significant hikes, companies can choose to raise prices for a variety of reasons, and the listings don't indicate how much tariffs may have affected the retail price.
David Bellinger, a Mizuho retail analyst, said in a note on Wednesday that investors expected the overall impact of tariffs to represent a low-single-digit percentage of total spending.
A US federal court ruled on Wednesday that Trump doesn't have the authority to impose his sweeping tariff strategy.
Walmart has said it sources about 60% of what it sells in the US from US suppliers, and the company has been on a multiyear effort to reduce its reliance on Chinese goods, which were the subject of the steepest tariff rates.
