US biting the hand that feeds its consumers value-for-money goods

Walmart has asked some Chinese suppliers for price cuts of up to 10 percent per round of additional tariffs the Donald Trump administration imposes on Chinese goods.

The US retail giant is doing nothing but trying to shift the burden of the United States' arbitrary tariffs onto Chinese suppliers. So the strong pushback from the latter is fully understandable. They are not only in the position of shouldering the full cost of the US' irrational duties, but also have no space to further reduce their prices.

Most Chinese suppliers' margins are already "razor-thin" due to Walmart's strategy of procuring goods cheaply in order to maintain its competitive advantage. As reported, for some Chinese suppliers, any price reduction greater than 2 percent would see them make a loss. No wonder those Chinese suppliers that have had their own upstream vendors directly refuse any requests to cut prices by more than 3 percent.