A guitar pedal CEO used 1.83 million Amex points to settle a tariff bill

1.83M

The lede of this very, very good Bloomberg article says it all when it comes to how tariffs are creating massive challenges for some US small businesses:

“When a tariff bill for almost $11,000 arrived without warning, Robert Keeley reached for one of his last financial lifelines and cashed in 1.83 million American Express reward points to pay it.”

Do read the whole thing.

Per Amex, 1.83 million rewards points equates to about $18,300 that could be used to book flights.

Keeley could’ve booked a one-way trip to Japan, flying first-class from his Oklahoma City office with one stop in Chicago, with all those points (based on today’s prices). Or done that full round trip in economy more than a dozen times.

As we’ve flagged: tariffs, in the eyes of the stock market, are a solved problem. In the eyes of US executives, they are not.

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“Right now, it is too hard to ship impact quickly. We spend too much time inward instead of with the community, and we lack the depth we need in some of the fundamentals,” Sharma said in the memo.

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