Brooklyn Park Event Business Owner Shares Perspective on Tariffs
Tariffs on international goods are up and can impact any imported product from fresh produce to car parts. A Brooklyn Park business owner said he’s hopeful that these will benefit American business in the long run.
Demand Rises for Large-Scale Events
Inside EideCom in Brooklyn Park, employees pack, plan and prepare for an eye-catching event. The business helps create and put on large-scale event productions for companies nationwide.
Founder and CEO Charles Eide said he wants to help bring people together.
“We do the audio/visual part of a large meeting, corporate conference. Any sort of large corporate gathering, where a company wants to impact their people,” Eide said.
He said there’s a huge demand for these events. They cost can range from hundreds of thousands of dollars and costs in the millions. Eide said to these groups, it’s worth the money to bring people together.
Proof? He said the demand is rising.
“They are doing events at a pace we’ve never seen before. We’re talking about– companies are doing more events than they were, even before COVID,” Eide said.
Charles Eide said he came up with his company back in 2003. Since then, it has grown exponentially and continues to expand.
Tariff Impact on Audiovisual Industry
Since tariffs were imposed, concerns were raised about rising prices on imported products. Many items Eide works with come from across the world. He named a few: Hungary, Japan, France, China and Taiwan.
But the impact on cost for the AV industry is more complicated than the price of groceries.
“It shows you how complicated, how fine-grained all of these effects are,” University of Minnesota Professor George John said.
John said one thing is certain: tariffs have gone up since January. But in EideCom’s case, most of his products are built to last many years.
“You’ve got a whole bunch of different things coming in, a lot of which is imported. But, they are not imported for that activity at hand,” John said, referring to Eide’s industry. “For long-run equipment, for long-lived equipment– what we normally call durable goods. You’re not going to see immediate price changes.”
That’s exactly what Eide said he has: a backlog of equipment and current equipment that’s built to last between five and 20 years.
“The equipment that is already here, in the United States, and working, is going to continue to keep working,” Eide said.
EideCom workers prepare a truckload of equipment for a big event.
A Positive Perspective
He said even though most of his equipment is made outside the U.S., he’s hopeful that tariffs would encourage companies to work in the U.S. instead.
“If we bring manufacturing to the United States, we are going to have hundreds of thousands of more event jobs, just in the making of this equipment,” Eide said.
Eide thinks this could only make the economy grow. In the meantime, he said his business is not slowing down anytime soon.
John said production in the U.S. is possible– and could happen fairly quickly. But at this time, he notes, nothing has really changed yet. He said one good way people can keep track of prices for items sold on Amazon is by using the website CamelCamelCamel.
