D an Hargest has spent 25 years building Acme Prints into a fixture of Phoenix’s indie scene. The Roosevelt-area shop survived the financial crisis of 2008. It survived the pandemic shutdowns. But this year, Donald Trump’s tariffs and hiccuping economy have brought a different kind of hurt. Bleeding red ink, Hargest last week laid off two of his 18 employees. Those were the first layoffs since Hargest started the business “on his back porch” in 1999. “It was very painful,” he says inside Acme. Down a hallway of the former cold- storage warehouse, two walls are lined with a patchwork of thank-you letters noting past charitable donations. “When I think about how the other people feel,” he says, “it’s just agonizing.” Hargest’s roots in Phoenix’s music community run deep. Before he launched Acme, he fronted Pollen, the Arizona- based power-pop/alt-punk band that toured with Less Than Jake and shared stages with Weezer. Today, musicians, tour managers and indie record stores of all stripes rely on his shop for T-shirts, hoodies, embroidered caps, patches, posters, stickers, and other custom merch. And like many in Phoenix’s independent community, he’s increasingly worried about what his business is up against. “I’ve never seen such a drop-off in orders as I have this year,” Hargest says. “Every screen-printing company I talk to is affected the same way. This has been an existential threat to their survival.” Economists see the trend Hargest describes as a widening wave afflicting industries that rely on imported goods. The financial hardship doesn’t come so much from slow orders or late payments. Rather, a sudden spike in import costs and paper- work brought on by the Trump administra- tion’s tariffs are crippling businesses too small to curry favor with the president directly. In some cases, duties have more than doubled, and the president’s capri- cious — and, pending a Supreme Court decision, potentially illegal — rule changes have made doing business even harder. America will survive this cult-of- personality president’s economic policies. But in the meantime, many local entrepre- neurs are hanging by their fingernails. When policy hits the ground Since the tariffs were put in place this year, small music businesses across Phoenix, Tempe, Mesa and beyond — screen printers, record stores, merch managers, gear retailers and others — describe the same pattern: shrinking margins, slower orders, and rising uncertainty. It is not a desert mirage. “The prices of imported goods have risen,” says Domenico Ferraro, an associate professor of economics at Arizona State University. “Perhaps not as fast or as much as one might have anticipated, but the price effects are there.” On November 5, 2025, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the consoli- dated case Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. The key question is whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) grants the president authority to impose sweeping tariffs, a power the Constitution delegates to Congress. Trump’s team argued to the justices that the state of the American economy was, in effect, an emergency that could be addressed only by levying huge taxes on imports. Observers noted that even this Supreme Court, which has made pretzels of the Constitution in order to grant Trump extraordinary powers, seemed skeptical of this argument. A decision is expected in early 2026. Until then, Trump — not Congress — is raising or cutting tariffs on various coun- tries, and on particular goods, like a man with the U.S. economy at the end of a yo-yo string.“Volatility has become its own cost,” Hargest says. “We’ve had jobs where the tariffs changed between the day we quoted and the day we paid. We lost money on that order.” Hargest says the hardest hit items are artist-to-fan accessories such as enamel pins, patches, and keychains. “Nobody even tries to make that stuff here,” he says. “We’ve printed for ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ for over a decade, and Jimmy is very made-in-USA oriented. Once, they wanted a hat with a woven patch, so we did a deep dive and spent an incredible number of hours researching companies that claimed to manufacture in the U.S. and never found one that actu- ally did. They were all just saying it or importing from somewhere else. There are products where you simply don’t have a domestic option, and even when you think you do, you’re crossing your fingers that it’s real.” That added stress doesn’t end with T-shirts, pins and keychains. It moves through warehouses, into vans, into clubs, and onto the merch tables where managers like Bryan Sandell are trying to make the new math work. The road’s new reality Sandell grew up in a musical household. His father, a classical guitarist turned exec- utive in the musical-instrument business, with stops at Fender and Yamaha. The family spent stretches in Germany and England for his father’s work, giving Sandell an early sense of how the music industry operates beyond the States. Now, as the owner of Tempe-based 1212 Management, he sees the effects of the tariffs up close. “[Tariffs are] chiseling away at our profits,” says Sandell. “I’m trying not to pass that cost along and just treating it as the cost of doing business.” He’s speaking from his headquarters, a mid-century ranch house in Tempe’s Maple-Ash neighborhood that once doubled as a live-radio venue, hosting musicians such as Arizona indie-pop artist Zella Day. Recent changes in music, along with tariffs, have had him considering selling the space alto- gether to stay ahead of uncertainty. Having spent years on the road himself as well as managing Authority Zero, The Expendables, Ballyhoo!, and Jason DeVore, and road-managing Rebelution to ScHoolboy Q and Goldfinger, he sees the pressure affecting not just the business, but artists, too. “It’s hard to plan tours because we’re so dependent on backends, and ticket sales have been soft,” he says. “You hear about artists having mental breakdowns because of the financial stress.” There is good evidence that stress has been increasing for professional musicians in recent years. A 2023 survey by Help Musicians and the Musicians’ Union in the UK found nearly one in three professional musicians reported low mental well-being tied to financial instability and touring stress. A 2025 report by Chartmetric, the global music-analytics firm, captures the structural side of the problem. Since 2022, the share of artists who are touring has sharply fallen — mid-level acts from 19 to 12 percent, top-tier acts from 44 to 36 percent. Sluggish ticket sales are a major reason, exposing a deeper fault line in the music economy, where the risks of touring Authority Zero live streaming. (Bryan Sandell) Dan Hargest of Acme Prints. (Maria Sagan) HOW TARIFFS ARE UPENDING PHOENIX’S MUSIC UNDERGROUND PAYING THE PIPER BY JP OLSEN
