By their own admission, Grand Avenue toy store owners Millie Adelsheim and Dan Marshall have never filed a lawsuit before, let alone one aimed at pausing international tariffs. Suing the White House struck them as an ambitious but appropriate place to start.
“We estimate about 85% of our toys are impacted by Trump’s 145% tariffs,” said Adelsheim and Marshall, the husband-and-wife co-owners of the Mischief Toy Store, in an open letter Friday explaining how they’ve been thrust into the front lines of an international trade war. “Every day, we’re getting notices of price increases from our suppliers. Several have left the US market altogether and many others have paused production. As a country we will be seeing huge price increases and shortages on every kind of consumer product — not just toys — in the near future.”
With the financial future of their shop and their industry on the line, Mischief Toy Store has joined with Stonemaier Games and four other board game manufacturers, a children’s clothing company called Princess Awesome, a metal treating company and an importer of fine art to file legal action against the U.S. government in an effort to roll back international tariffs recently imposed by the Trump administration.
The lawsuit — “Princess Awesome & Stonemaier Games, et al. v. Customs” — was filed Thursday in the U.S. Court of International Trade in Manhattan, with the 10 plaintiffs represented, free of charge, by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a non-profit Libertarian law firm.
‘A somewhat strange partnership’
Around St. Paul, Adelsheim and Marshall are known for backing progressive causes, making the group effort “a somewhat strange partnership for us. While we may disagree on other issues, we are all in full agreement on the need to check Trump’s abuses of power. He is not a king and we cannot allow him to act like one.”
The plaintiffs argue that the U.S. Constitution grants Congress, and not the president, the power to impose financial tariffs on foreign countries, and that the tariffs will be financially devastating to their businesses and industries. On Feb. 1, the president imposed tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada and China, citing the need to address illegal immigration and fentanyl importation. On April 2, he expanded the tariffs to almost every country, calling trade imbalances a national emergency that empowered him to take unilateral action.
He later paused most of those tariffs for 90 days, allowing time to renegotiate trade deals. While certain Trump policies have gained a following with segments of the American public, about 6-in-10 Americans polled have said they disapprove of the tariffs, according to the Pew Research Center, and a majority of the population has taken a skeptical view of the president’s overall handling of the economy.
Marshall, in an interview Friday, said kids aren’t playing with analog toys as much as they used to, given growing interest in video and digital pastimes. For some vendors and suppliers, the tariffs will be a final nail in the coffin.
“We source American-made toys as much as we can, and one of our American suppliers is going out of business — Two Bros Bows,” he said. “Kids don’t play with analog toys like they used to, and they’re not buying American. We’re the last toy store in St. Paul. If all those things go up by 200%, it’s going to be really hard to stay in business.”
Board game company
Based in St. Louis, Missouri, Stonemaier works with Chinese firms to manufacture the popular card-driven board game “Wingspan,” which would be heavily impacted by a 145% tariff on imported products from China.
For the board game company, that amounts to a $14.50 tax for every $10 spent manufacturing the game, which adds up to a looming payment of nearly $1.5 million, according to a written statement from Stonemaier.
“We will not stand idle while our livelihood — and the livelihoods of thousands of small business owners and contractors in the U.S. — are treated like pawns in a political game,” said Jamey Stegmaier, co-founder of Stonemaier Games, in the statement.
Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit include XYZ Game Labs, Rookie Mage, Spielcraft and TinkerHouse Games, as well as Quent Cordair Fine Art, the KingSeal kitchen supply company and 300 Below, a cryogenic processing company.
Similar cases
Similar cases have been filed by the New Civil Liberties Alliance in the Northern District of Florida, Tranel Law in District of Montana and the Liberty Justice Center in the Court of International Trade, according to the Pacific Legal Foundation.
“This might put us at risk,” wrote Adelsheim and Marshall, the Mischief Toy Store owners, in their open letter Friday. “Who knows how Trump and his minions will respond … We’ll be doing everything we can to keep things as normal as possible.”
The Grand Avenue shop owners were previously associated with Peapods Natural Toys, which closed in 2015 after 16 years in operation in St. Paul.
“We’d also like to make it clear that we’ve always supported American-made toys and we stock them when we can,” they wrote. “Those of you who remember Peapods will know that we specialized in Made in the USA toys, held a Minnesota Toy Fair to promote local toymakers, and even founded the Handmade Toy Alliance to support small batch US toymakers. The steady loss of US and EU toymakers was one of the main reasons we closed Peapods back in 2015. Tariffs cannot and will not reverse this trend.”
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