By Anna Gustafson for the Georgia Independent.

Broadcast version by Trimmel Gomes for Georgia News Connection reporting for the Georgia Independent-Public News Service Collaboration

When Katrina Golden opened Lil Mama’s Sweet Treats in Augusta in 2019, she had recently retired from the federal government, and her friends had long been urging her to start a business after falling in love with the baked goods she’d make for them.

After selling out a church vendor event and having people repeatedly tell Golden where she needed to bring her baked goods next, she decided to take the plunge and open a coffee shop and bakery at the Charlie Norwood Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in downtown Augusta.

For Golden, a military veteran who served during Desert Storm, the new cafe was the perfect combination of baking and community.

“I used to what people call stress bake. I like baking. I love baking,” she said. “I find passion in creating things.”

While the COVID-19 pandemic threw her a financial curveball, the hospital community was happy she was there and, by the end of 2024, she was making around $600 a day. It wouldn’t be long, she thought, before she could earn $700 a day.

Then President Donald Trump took office in 2025, and his policies have left Golden and small-business owners across Georgia and the United States facing revenue loss, first amid tariffs Trump imposed on imported goods and now with rising gasoline prices due to the U.S.-Israel war in Iran.

Not long after the start of 2025, Golden noticed a dip in her earnings following the administration’s firing of federal workers in Augusta. As job uncertainty grew, fewer people wanted to spend money on items like coffee, she explained. Then, that dip grew. These days, she’s often making less than half of what she had been just a year ago.

“It is the end of April. I can count on two hands the number of $300 days we’ve had, or anything over $300,” Golden said.

On top of the revenue loss, Golden is spending between 30% and 40% more than she was a couple of years ago because of tariffs that have caused rising prices for items like coffee, cups and packaging for desserts.

“Long term, it’s not sustainable for small businesses,” Golden said. “Just bottom line, it’s not. In the past year in my area, there’s been three bakeries that closed, just in the past year. One of them wasn’t even open longer than about a year. We’re still open simply because, one, I refuse to give up.”

She has received some grant money, which has helped, but Golden says she is exhausted. The financial pressures mean that she’s regularly working more than 12-hour days doing all of the baking that’s needed. She could easily use at least two more employees in the bakery, but the money is not there to hire them.

Now, the cafe owner hopes elected officials will hear stories like hers and make change. If they don’t, she said, more small businesses will not only continue to struggle but close altogether.

“Let’s bring an end to the economic chaos, please,” Golden said. “I think I’ve got more gray hair past year or so than I need in my life.”

For some small businesses, an unhelpful tariff refund

After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in February that many of Trump’s tariffs were illegal, the federal government set up an online system allowing businesses to apply for refunds from the $166 billion in tariff revenue the federal government has collected, but some small-business owners said they won’t be able to recoup even a portion of what they lost. Golden won’t be able to apply for a refund because she doesn’t directly import affected goods, even though tariffs have cost her business significant revenue.

Patrice Hull, the owner of the clothing store Stuff We Wanna Say in Atlanta and the founder of Created to be Noticed, a line of clothing and bags, was also financially harmed by tariffs but cannot apply for a refund. While she has long worked with manufacturers abroad to create her clothing and bags, she had to stop purchasing items from other countries because the tariffs made importing unaffordable for her. That meant while she lost money because she could no longer sell the items she had once imported as part of her clothing line, she can’t apply for financial relief from the federal government.

“I just stopped ordering because it just wasn’t feasible,” Hull said. “So then I decided to just sell miscellaneous things like pens, journals, hats that some of them I make myself, or not actually make, but I embroider and do things myself. So, in essence, I diluted my brand in order to stay afloat just by selling whatever I could to make a dollar at that point.”

Travis Reid, the owner of Square 1 Art, a Norcross-based company that digitizes students’ artwork for school fundraisers nationwide, is able to apply for a refund after he paid $50,000 in duty tax for one shipment. Prior to Trump’s tariffs, he would pay about $10,000. While he’s able to apply for a refund, he said he expects the actual process of obtaining one to be completely disorganized.

“It’s going to be such a convoluted nightmare,” Reid said. “I went through PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] during Covid, and, as chaotic as that was, this tariff thing is probably going to make that look like a cakewalk.”

The federal government has the ability to make the refund process more streamlined, said Shawn Phetteplace, the national campaigns director for Main Street Alliance, a network of small-business owners across the country.

“The government has this data; they don’t need all these businesses to register,” Phetteplace said. “They were the ones who collected the money in the first place. … What the government also needs to do is they need to allocate more resources to Customs and Border [Protection] to be able to process the claims, because if folks are having issues and they can’t reach a real person, that’s a problem.”

Reid’s Square 1 Art business has been operating for a quarter of a century, and it’s had to ride out plenty of challenges, but he said it’s the Trump administration that has inflicted the most financial harm on them.

“Been in business 25 years; we’ve pretty much seen it all,” he said. “This is the only administration that I can directly pinpoint his policies impacting me negatively and demonstrably.”

Statewide, small businesses in Georgia paid $3.9 billion from March through November 2025 in tariffs, according to a February report from U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, a Democratic lawmaker from Massachusetts and a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Nationwide, small businesses paid more than $63.1 billion in that same time period.

Families are also being financially affected by tariffs, according to a February study by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation. That report found Trump’s tariffs raised costs for American households by an average of $1,000 in 2025 and, if they remain in place, could cost households another $1,300 in 2026.

Rising gas and healthcare costs

At the same time that small businesses are shelling out more because of tariffs, they’re also dealing with rising costs for healthcare, energy and gas, Reid noted.

“These tariffs are absolutely self-imposed on all of us. This chaos with the strait in Iran, with gas prices and everything, all of this is self-imposed, and it makes no sense to me at all,” Reid said.

“Can you imagine where the market would be running right now if we didn’t have these tariff pressures and $5-a-gallon gas?” he continued. “It’s just unbelievable.”

Hull said those increased gas costs are a big drain for her business.

“Due to the high cost of gasoline, shipping costs have gone up, and shipping has slowed down … because a lot of people don’t want to move their trucks for half a load, so it takes them a little longer to get to a certain place,” Hull said. “It takes a little bit more money. It all impacts us, not to mention light, gas and water on your own building.”

Healthcare costs, too, are increasing after congressional Republicans last year refused to extend an Affordable Care Act tax credit that had helped Americans to purchase health insurance.

Golden is losing one of her longtime employees who took a new job because she is aging out of her parents’ insurance coverage and needs health coverage. While Golden can provide paid time off and other benefits, she’s unable to afford health benefits. The ACA tax credit, Golden said, could have allowed her employee to afford health insurance and remain at the coffee shop.

Small-business owners themselves can’t afford health insurance because of the loss of the ACA tax credit.

“I could barely afford healthcare before that went away, and now it’s just completely off the table,” Hull said.

State Rep. Jasmine Clark, a Democratic lawmaker who represents a portion of Atlanta, said the loss of the ACA tax credit has significantly hurt small businesses.

“Who are the people who are buying into ACA? They’re people who don’t get insurance from their jobs,” Clark said during an April 20 press call. “They are the small-business owners, and they are people like farmers and others, where the way that they get health insurance is something other than employer-based.”

These challenges facing small businesses, Clark noted, come as Trump is pushing to slash funding for the federal Small Business Administration.

“Many of our small-business owners are trying their best to make it through this storm, and there are some small-business owners that have just said, Hey, I tried, but I’m going to have to close my doors,” Clark said. “And that’s really unfortunate because we’re seeing a lot of that in the Atlanta area.”

Anna Gustafson wrote this article for the Georgia Independent.

Source: Public News Service