The meme that shows the true cost of Trump’s trade war
Plus: Levi’s radical Pride collection is gay as hell
The meme that shows the true cost of Trump’s trade war
A growing genre of social media posts now tracks the rising costs of goods in real terms as President Donald Trump’s tariffs hit some of the biggest retail stores in the U.S.
On Reddit pages for stores like Walmart, Target, and Michaels, users have posted images of price tags like receipts, showing what Trump’s tariffs have already cost consumers over the past several months. Price tags for a Jurassic Park-themed T. rex dinosaur toy at Walmart show the retail price jumping from a sale price of $20 up to $55. Elsewhere, a charging cable went from $9.99 to $17.99 and a sheet cake pan went from $24.99 to $39.99. The photos are in line with price increases Business Insider tracked using data from the third-party service AisleGopher.
Walmart reported it grew sales 4% in the most recent quarter, but its net income fell to $4.49 billion, same-store sales fell, and the company admits it won’t be able to eat the cost of tariffs itself. CEO Doug McMillon argued Walmart was “positioned to manage the cost pressure from tariffs as well or better than anyone.” While more than two-thirds of the products the retailer sells are made, assembled, or grown in the U.S., he said tariffs will pass on some inflated costs to consumers.
“We will do our best to keep our prices as low as possible, but given the magnitude of the tariffs, even at the reduced levels announced this week, we aren’t able to absorb all the pressure given the reality of narrow retail margins,” McMillon said on Walmart’s earnings call last month. Other companies including Best Buy, Costco, Mattel, Macy’s, and Nike have said they already have or soon will raise some prices due to tariffs.
Like “I Did That” stickers of then-President Joe Biden at gas station pumps during Biden’s term or egg price trackers under Trump, tariff price tag photos draw attention to cold, hard numbers. But sometimes the specific numbers matter less than the overall feeling.
One post on the Target subreddit shows an end-cap display selling Crayola 10-pack markers mistakenly listed for $99 instead of 99 cents. The photo is jokingly labeled with the caption, “Tariffs be like…,” but the months-old meme needs to be updated. According to the third-party service PriceTracker, Target hasn’t sold those markers as cheap as 99 cents since 2024. They now cost $2.59.
Previously in Yello:
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Levi’s radical Pride collection is gay as hell
As companies shy away from Pride this summer, Levi’s is leaning in with a pointed collection that pays homage to LGBTQ history. This isn’t your standard rainbow-washed corporate Pride capsule. In fact, compared to the pared down Pride campaigns of other brands this year, it’s downright radical.
Brands like Target have scaled back their own Pride collections this year while corporate donations to Pride festivals are down across the country, including in New York City, where about a quarter of donors have canceled or scaled back their giving, according to the New York Times. That retreat is misguided for some retailers or geographies, per an Ipsos survey conducted by GLAAD, a LGBTQ+ advocacy group. The survey found 70% of Americans said knowing that a brand or store offered Pride merch had either a positive impact or no impact on their purchasing decisions. Enter Levi’s, an American icon and the world’s largest makers of pants.
To create its Pride collection this year, Levi’s designers embarked on a discovery process that included consulting with San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society and researching archival buttons, posters, and clothing as far back as the 1970s.
“We pulled iconography from past eras because we wanted to honor our history and San Francisco’s history as a safe space for people from all over the country,” Levi’s designer Cristobal Aleman said in a statement. It’s “for the community, from the community,” he said. Items like a pink-on-black $40 “I Know, You Know” cap and the $138 “I Know, You Know” denim jacket read like a reference to “gaydar,” and it signals the collection’s inward community focus.
Levi’s designers incorporated the upside-down pink triangle into several pieces. A symbol once used to identify gay men in concentration camps was reclaimed as a symbol of gay pride by Germany’s first post-war gay rights organizations in the 1970s, and the Silence=Death Project poster during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s further popularized the symbol.
Levi’s designers used the pink triangle to house the message “United For Freedom, Our Diversity Is Our Strength” for one t-shirt design as a statement about inclusion, and pink is one of six colors used to create a multi-colored triangle-within-a-triangle icon that appears on a $25 tote, $30 t-shirt, and $40 ball cap. It’s a clever way to mash up the triangle with a color palette inspired by Gilbert Baker’s 1978 Rainbow Flag, referencing two symbols at once.
This isn’t a collection designed for a suburban Target, and it includes references to the activism that’s at the core of the movement that sprung from the Stonewall Riots that led to the first Pride. A $25 bandana that already sold out makes overt political statements. In between illustrations of flowers, butterflies, a leather jacket, the Golden Gate Bridge, and a buttocks wearing jeans with a handkerchief in the back pocket the Target censors certainly wouldn’t approve of, there’s slogans like “Power to the People,” “Our Diversity Is Our Strength,” “Out Is In,” and “Out of the Closet Into the Streets.”
When the U.S. saw a rapid rise in acceptance of same-sex marriage and an expansion of marriage rights more than a decade ago, brands responded to the zeitgeist by adopting Pride month branding, products, and messaging. Like its straight cousin, the 2010s tech design aesthetic Corporate Memphis, Corporate Pride was a cultural product that emerged during former President Barack Obama’s presidency, but its high point and jump-the-shark moment was likely 2019 when Trump’s campaign released rainbow “Make America Great Again” shirts and hats.
Corporate Pride has been a rough measure of political culture. In 2015, Facebook offered users rainbow filters, but fast forward to January, and Meta removed nonbinary and trans themes on Messenger and got rid of a ban on calling LGBTQ people “mentally ill.” New Gallup polling tells a parallel story. While support for same-sex marriage is at or near record highs for Democrats and independents, it’s fallen among Republicans from 55% to 41% since 2022.
The moment gives brands like Levi’s that do speak out for Pride the chance to prove their values at a time when it’s less popular and more polarizing to do so. Since Levi’s are for Democrats and Wranglers are for Republicans, though, the denim brand doesn’t have much to lose by leaning in. Corporate Pride may be in retreat, but with its 2025 collection, Levi’s shows how to use history and design to tell a story about Pride that feels as relevant as ever.
Have you seen this?
Trump administration to rebrand Biden-era Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute: “We’re not going to regulate it.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced a new name that reflects a more hands-off approach that the Trump administration has taken to A.I. [Deadline]
Trump’s calling. “Well over 100” people have Trump’s personal phone number, one ally said in a new report. Meanwhile, Republican town halls are going about as well as you’d expect considering what’s come out about the Big Beautiful Bill Act. [Whig]
History of political design
Mitt Romney gubernatorial campaign Pride weekend flier (2002). While running for Massachusetts governor, former Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and his running mate Kerry Healey released a flier over Pride weekend that said "All citizens deserve equal rights, regardless of their sexual preference." Romney later voted in favor of the bipartisan Respect for Marriage Act in 2022 to codify same-sex marriage protections.
A portion of this newsletter was first published in Fast Company.
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