If you walk into Town Center Music in Suwanee, Georgia, in the suburbs of Atlanta, you’ll see all sorts of guitars hanging from the walls. If you ask, you can probably get someone who works there to take one down and play it for you — or let you try one yourself.

Aaron Brown has owned the shop, which sells and repairs instruments and offers music lessons, since 2012, and has worked there even longer. It’s the kind of place people stick around.

“I have one guy that's been here for eight years, and then I've got another guy that's been here for 20 years,” he said. 

Which is why he feels awful that he probably won’t be able to give them pay increases this year like he usually does.

“Between the numbers that I'm seeing of money coming in and just the uncertainty of everything,” he said, “I've just kind of told everybody to hang tight for this year.”

It’s been a rough seven months for Town Center Music, since President Donald Trump announced the first sweeping global tariffs back in April. Brown imports most of what he sells, and has had lots of inventory held up in ports in recent months. His suppliers have also raised prices, so he has, too. 

“Due to tariff confusion and just tariffs in general,” he said. “I lost out on what I calculate to be upwards of $15,000 in sales.” 

Inflation across the economy isn’t helping business, either. 

“I sell products that only a small number of people believe that they actually need. This ends up being a sort of fun thing for a lot of folks, or an extra,” Brown said. “And so anytime prices go up outside of here on things people do need — clothes, food, things like that, gas — we are going to take a hit in sales.”

Because of that, he just doesn’t feel like he has the money to give his staff a cost of living increase this year. He’s also holding off on hiring a sales person he needs, to replace someone who left — a position he paused interviews for back in April, right after the president announced those first sweeping, global tariffs. 

This is happening across the economy. Hiring has been cooling for months, and now wage growth is, too. Median income growth as of September was just under 5%, according to a recent report from the JPMorganChase Institute — or 2% in real terms, adjusted for inflation. For some workers, the Philadelphia Federal Reserve noted in the most recent Beige Book, “wage increases are no longer keeping pace with price increases — especially as firms adjust both workforces and prices in response to tariffs.” 

“Tail end of last year, and early this year, I think that's when you really kind of saw the labor market shifting,” said Andrew Stettner, director of Economy and Jobs at The Century Foundation. From one where companies couldn’t find enough workers and were raising wages to compete, to one where there’s very little hiring happening at all.

“In general, when there's more workers available, companies are going to feel less pressure to increase wages,” he said. “And that's the moment we're in now.”

Wages for those in lower paying jobs, in particular, “are actually growing more slowly than wages in other parts of the economy,” Stettner said. That’s a notable shift from the last few years when, coming out of the pandemic, wages were rising fastest for the lowest-paid workers. 

It’s typical, when the labor market starts to cool, for workers in the lowest-paying jobs to be hit first and hardest, along with “folks who may be looking for work, may be trying to figure out how to get a foot in the door, and haven't been able to figure it out,” said Elisabeth Jacobs, associate vice president of the Work, Education and Labor Division at the Urban Institute.

Right now, wage growth is slowing the most for workers in their mid-to-late 20s, according to data from the JPMorganChase Institute.

There are a lot of factors at play, including increasingly restrictive immigration policy, artificial intelligence, and for some companies, something of a correction after the hiring sprees of the post pandemic lockdown period. But according to Jacobs, tariffs are the big one.

“We have good reason to think that they will put a drag on the labor market,” she said. “That is not good for low-wage workers — fewer jobs, lower wages, vicious circle kind of situation.”

Tariffs put a lot of pressure on small businesses, in particular, which tend to have more trouble absorbing higher costs. 

“Small businesses are a huge part of the economy. They are particularly a big part of the economy that employs folks working for low wages,” Jacobs said. “So all of the pressure that small businesses are feeling from tariffs, that is not good news, both for the workforce as a whole, but particularly for folks who are earning low wages.”

Aaron Brown is feeling that pressure at Town Center Music in Suwanee, Georgia.

“I like to take care of my folks here,” he said. “They work hard, and I want them to take in some of the reward of that. But right now it's… I just don't… don't know.”

Brown is not comfortable sharing how much he pays the people who work at the shop, but, he said, “no one's making a lot of money.”

He’d like it to be more. But because customers don’t have the money right now, he doesn’t either.