As earnings season wraps up, there’s one word on the tip of every executive’s tongue: tariffs. And buried under their latest quarterly earning stats are some fascinating insights about how retailers are thinking about the looming trade restrictions.

However, don’t expect a single company line. Reactions to tariffs range from tentatively concerned to tentatively optimistic, depending on the retailer’s business model.

In some ways, the biggest deciding factor is the diversity of their manufacturing portfolio and how far along retailers are in finding suppliers outside of major markets such as China, according to Lauren Beitelspacher, associate professor of marketing at Babson College, who specializes in supply chains.

“Who this is going to hurt the most is smaller retailers who either don’t have the negotiating power to take on production capacity in these other countries or don’t have the financial capability to absorb the cost of the tariffs,” she said.

And yet raising prices is a tough sell in this economy, Beitelspacher added, putting the onus on retailers to find another way to deal with higher costs.

Keep reading here.—AV