Chip Cutter

So one example of all of this is Dariana Bridal and Tuxedo in Pennsylvania.

It's a bridal wear company that had seen bridal wear prices rise an average of eight to 14% after the tariffs took effect.

And one of the company's co-owners told one of my colleagues that his first thought was, oh my God, every customer on earth is going to demand a refund on their tariffs.

And so you can see that fear among business owners right now, just wondering what are consumers gonna ask

and how do we respond?

Thank you.

This is an interesting moment in corporate America where many big executives are looking to increase sales.

They want to increase profits, but they actually don't want to add any people.

And there's this experiment of sorts underway at the moment to see whether that's going to be possible.

And what's behind this is a belief that artificial intelligence, that AI will be able to fill a lot of the gaps, even if more people aren't added inside of an organization.

And you hear this from just a number of comments from large company executives.

So it was JPMorgan Chase's CFO telling investors recently that the bank now has, quote, a very strong bias against having the reflective response to hire more people for any given need.

The aerospace and defense company RTX boasted last week that its sales rose even without adding employees.

Goldman Sachs sent a memo to people inside the firm saying that it will continue to constrain headcount.

And then you have Walmart, which is the nation's largest private employer, saying that it plans to keep its headcount flat over the next three years, even as it grows.

And so...

Chip added that some companies say leaner workforces will make them more efficient by cutting down on bureaucracy.

Some actually say that they think they'll do better with smaller organizations.

There was a...

memo sent last week inside Meta, where the company's AI chief actually said that by reducing the size of our team, fewer conversations will be required to make decisions and that each person will be, quote, more load-bearing and have more scope.