American Science & Surplus is a Milwaukee staple for many science enthusiasts and DIY-ers. It sells products ranging from miniatures to lab equipment to gardening supplies.
Former store manager Kim Stenglein now owns the Milwaukee location. Stenglein bought the store after the previous longtime owner, Pat Meyer, put it up for sale — which many people feared meant the end of the business.
Stenglein spoke with WUWM’s Eddie Morales last December as part of WUWM’s Economic Check-in series. They connected again this spring to talk about how a challenging economy is impacting the store.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Eddie Morales: Are you still dealing with some of the same concerns since we last spoke? Have any new issues popped up?
Kim Stenglein: I'm still working on reordering some of the merchandise that we had been carrying prior to the sale of the store. And each one of those orders I'm finding significant cost increases to myself that are having to get pushed out onto the customer pricing as well. Tariffs, yep.
There's been some companies that I've ordered from that we were previously ordering from outside of the United States. One of the biggest companies that sells electronic soldering kits, which I really wanted to bring in, comes from Belgium. I paid as much to get them here as I did for the kits. So, I can't order from them again because they're not affordable kits anymore to the customers. In order to sell them, I did kind of eat a little bit of those tariffs.
New concerns that you asked about too — gas prices. I just paid for a pallet to come from California — $459 just to get one pallet of merchandise. All that had to get absorbed into the cost, which I wish I didn't have to do that, but that's just how you have to operate. I think that same pallet I ordered five, six months ago, and I want to say my cost was about $200 less. It's hard because you want to be nice. You want to have good pricing for your customers, but that $459, I just can't eat that. It has to go into the pricing. So I was, right before you walked in, working out all that new pricing for this one vendor.
Has that changed your interactions with customers?
Sure, of course it has. We have a lot of regulars who have been buying the same item for years at the same price. And now they're like, "Oh, this has gone up a lot." It seems very obvious to us, but to the consumer, all they see is, wow, that price went up $2 since the last time I bought these a month ago. Finding that polite way of saying, "Yep, our price went up too, so I can't just keep charging the same as we did before."
We hear that often. It's disheartening to hear, but we understand it. Trying to explain it to the customers in a way that they understand that we're not just lining our pockets with this extra money we're charging them. We're getting charged extra.
You've talked about stepping up and becoming the store's new owner and how that wasn't something that was on your radar. How do you feel about that decision now?
I don't regret it at all. It's been a lot. It's been a lot more than I was anticipating, but I don't regret it. Challenging still is establishing with vendors and possibly finding new sources for merchandise. Learning about things like payroll and where can we try to keep our costs down to keep the store profitable and sustainable.
How do you feel about sustainability for the store and the way that the economy has affected the store?
People are struggling right now to put food on the table and fill their gas tanks. So I know that our store is, I don't want to say luxury, but in general, most people come here for fun, not out of necessity.
I think maybe that hit me a little bit just because it is scary knowing that people don't need to come here. People want to come here and needing to make sure that I have the products that they want to get is, it feels a little heavy. But making sure that we have the items in stock that people do need. People do need their switches and they do need things to make their kids' science projects.
