Rima Grace

And then there's what it actually feels like to live with rising prices.

To get out that side of it, we called up someone who's setting prices day to day.

Here's Ashley Morgan.

She runs the gift and DIY store Unglued in Fargo, North Dakota.

I would say right now that business is kind of average for us.

We had a lower March than last year, but our January and February were better.

I think that is partly because we had a random, you know, a couple snowstorms that always affects it.

I don't necessarily think it's because of consumer spending being down for us.

We do do workshops and those were actually up quite a bit for us.

And so it's more of the retail side for us was down.

What we saw in this last month is one of our main jewelry makers did need to increase their current prices of things in our shop 10 to 25 percent.

And that is like the first time that's ever happened for us.

We also have been we typically purchase DIY kits like do it yourself kits as wholesale for people to make here or take home as a gift.

two of our suppliers of that, one of them doubled their prices in this last quarter, which is also new for us.

And then another one also increased their prices a fair amount.

And so for us, that meant that we did find other options where the prices are still more of that point where our typical shopper would pay it because we're very aware that we're not going to get this kit and double our price because we just know it's not going to move in our store.

So as long as we can find other options, we are searching that out.

In this next year, we're planning on producing just a couple of our own unglued products for the first time to kind of fill in some gaps of things like a Fargo cribbage board and things like that that we can produce, which hopefully it helps us control just a few things that we think will be some big winners with a price too for our end user, which is the shopper that comes in.

We just actually had our crew quarterly meeting.

So these days I'm feeling really good about like our crew and the really cool makers we get to work with.