There was a report from Punchbowl News on Tuesday that Amazon was planning to start showing customers how much tariffs are raising prices. 

Soon after, the White House called it a “hostile and political act” and Amazon put out a statement saying it wasn’t going to happen. 

Amazon is not the first company to consider being upfront with customers about the impact of tariffs. Chinese company Temu now lists “import charges” for customers when they’re checking out. 

These days, Mark Cohen, the recently retired director of retail studies at Columbia Business School, is getting a lot of phone calls from people he knows in the fashion business.

“They're calling me looking for an opinion as to whether they should mark their prices as being tariff-driven. And my answer is, ‘Yes, you bet,’” he said.

Because if you’re a customer and you go to a store to buy something you’re used to getting for $100 and it’s suddenly $150, “I think you deserve an explanation,” Cohen said.

Businesses are torn, however, between wanting to give that explanation and being concerned it might not go over well, he said. And they have reason to be.

“Because of the backlash that many retailers have seen in the recent past, retailers are conscious about not taking a political view,” Nitin Jain, partner and managing director at AlixPartners.

Just increasing prices may cause its own backlash.

Some businesses may have no choice, according to Arun Sundaram, senior vice president of equity research at CFRA Research. But others, like big box retailers, are looking to avoid it.

“They're trying to move sourcing out of China, for example, or work with different suppliers,” he said. “A lot of them have also been buying inventory in advance.”

The intent being to keep prices down — at least for now.