Jerk Report #2 When the rules change overnight

If you run a business that touches imported goods, this week changed your math.

Most people are reading this week’s news as a tariff story.

It is. But it’s also a jerk story.

And once you see it that way, you have more agency.

Position

Tariffs went up. Costs rose. Some businesses passed them on. Some absorbed them.

That’s where things are.

Velocity

Tariff bills for mid-sized U.S. businesses tripled last year, according to JPMorgan Chase Institute data.

That’s how fast things were moving.

Acceleration

Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled IEEPA tariffs illegal.

Relief.

By Friday, a replacement 10% global tariff was announced under different authority.

The change accelerated — reversed — and accelerated again. In 48 hours.

Jerk

Acceleration you can plan around. It’s fast, but it has a direction.

Jerk is what happens when the acceleration itself snaps — when the rate of change changes direction without warning. Not faster or slower. A fundamentally different direction. Your planning systems — cash flow models, supplier contracts, inventory orders placed six months ago — were built for acceleration. They have no mechanism for jerk.

Thursday: relief. Friday: new tariff authority. Same 48 hours.

That’s not acceleration. That’s jerk.

The National Retail Federation named it plainly: retailers plan inventory six to nine months out. That’s impossible when the rules change overnight. One outdoor furniture founder said: “Uncertainty is like kryptonite to a business. You can’t make any investment decision when you don’t know what the world looks like tomorrow.”

The Main Street Alliance, representing over 30,000 small businesses: “Rates jumping overnight. No phase in. No planning horizon.”

This is real whiplash from tariff jerks.

How Businesses Are Responding

Three patterns are emerging. They’re not equal.

Freezing.

Most common. When the rate of change exceeds your decision-making capacity, the nervous system defaults to wait. A wine shop owner in White Plains, watching a shipment cross the Atlantic, couldn’t tell if it would be hit by the new 10% tariff when it arrived Monday. “We’re reactive to what’s become a very unstable situation,” he said. Freezing isn’t weakness. It’s a rational response to jerk. But it has a cost.

Getting liquid.

One toy company — Kids2 — found itself owed an estimated $15M in refunds from tariffs the Supreme Court just declared illegal. But there is no automatic refund process. The administration has signaled it will resist. Getting that money back means lawyers, brokers, and months of waiting. So Kids2 sold nearly half its potential refund to a hedge fund at a discount — because cash now at a haircut beats waiting for a process that doesn’t exist yet. That’s reactive. And sometimes reactive is the right call.

Building range.

In Dallas Fed focus groups from late 2025, most small businesses reported slowing demand and rising costs. But one Houston restaurant owner said his business was doing well when peers were closing. His reason: “We’ve always been community-oriented, and that seems to be the reason for our success.” That’s not a tariff strategy. That’s a business built on relationship and range — multiple suppliers, customer loyalty that doesn’t evaporate when prices shift, cash reserves treated as infrastructure, not reward.

Freezing is what happens when jerk exceeds your decision bandwidth. Getting liquid is converting jerk into a manageable velocity problem. Building range is structural antifragility — it's not that jerk doesn't hit you, it's that you have more to absorb it with.

The businesses in the most pain built for one scenario. When jerk hit, there was nothing to absorb it. The businesses with range weren't lucky. They had slack by design.

The difference isn’t size or age. A three-generation pet shop can have range. A 30-year-old company can be fragile if it never stress-tested the model.

Most haven’t. Not because they’re bad operators. Because nothing made it urgent until now.

What You Can Actually Do

This newsletter won’t save a business with no slack. If your margins are already at zero and your supplier list has one name on it, the practice below will tell you that faster — but it won’t fix it overnight. What it will do is tell you exactly where you stand. That’s more than most people know right now.

The tariff environment will not stabilize in time for your Q2 decisions. Plan around the uncertainty itself, not around a predicted outcome.

Three questions worth sitting with:

·       Where am I operating with a single point of failure? One supplier. One revenue stream. One customer who is 40% of my billings.

·       What do I actually control when external costs spike? Relationships, margins, what I cut first, what I protect — do I know the order?

·       If costs rose 15% next month, what would my first three moves be? Not if. What, and in what order.

The businesses that froze mostly froze because they’d never practiced the scenario. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a design gap. And design gaps can be fixed. Start with this quick exercise:

Five-Minute Practice

 You don't need a special tool for this. Open Claude at claude.ai — it's free.

Then run these three prompts, in order. Fill in your specifics.

"I'm a [type of business] at [your website URL] with [X employees]. My biggest input cost is [Y]. Walk me through what I should be asking my supplier this week given the tariff ruling."

"Now help me build a simple scenario plan. What do I do if that cost rises 10%? 20%? 30%? What's the first call I make in each case?"

"What are the questions I'm not thinking to ask about my supply chain right now?"

That third prompt is the one to show you blind spots like "You haven't asked about your payment terms with suppliers — that's often where cash crises start, not product costs.”

AI won't make the decisions. But it will help you think faster than the chaos moves.

You can't predict jerk. But you can have a protocol for it. That's not the same as control. It's better — it works even when you're wrong about what comes next.  

Rose Thun writes the Jerk Report every Monday. Subscribe at designrosetta.com/jerkreport