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Duty-free store owners say they continue to suffer from the effects of the U.S. trade war, with stores at two checkpoints in southwestern Ontario reporting a 30 per cent year-on-year drop in business.
One of these stores is located in a tunnel connecting Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit. The owner says he's worried about what's next as he approaches the slowest time of the year in January.
“Unfortunately, if this continues, we may have to make some difficult decisions,” Abe Taktak said.
“Being a family business… we'll try to last as long as possible before we start downsizing a little bit. But at the end of the day… you know, I'm not going to sugarcoat it… I'm very concerned about how our business is going to evolve over the next few months.”
Taktak said he remains optimistic that business will pick up again, but he understands why people are reluctant to travel to the United States.
He hopes those who cross the border will consider stopping by his store, he said.
Duty-free stores, including those at the Windsor-Detroit Tunnel, are reporting significant declines in sales due to a drop in cross-border traffic in 2025.
Fall in US passenger traffic
Return trips from Canadians to the U.S. fell again in October, this time by 30.2%, according to Statistics Canada.
Since March, that number has dropped by at least 30 percent compared to the same period last year.
Ridership from Windsor to Detroit was down about 5.9 percent between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30 this year compared to the same period last year.
This is according to data from US Customs and Border Protection.
Passenger traffic from Point Edward, Sarnia, to Port Huron was down about 27 percent over the same period.
Tanya Lee, co-owner of the Blue Water Duty Free store in Sarnia, Ont., said she has also seen the same decline in sales as the Windsor duty free store.
The drop in traffic is hurting duty-free stores across the country, said Lee, who is also president of the Frontier Duty Free Association, which advocates for duty-free stores at Canada's land border.
“We had one store near Woodstock, New Brunswick,” she said.
“And we have stores in British Columbia that are teetering on the brink. And we have stores in Manitoba that have been really hit hard. They're telling us they won't make it through the winter, and it's heartbreaking because you can feel their pain.”
She said stores had already survived Covid-19-related border closures and were paying back loans taken out during Covid-19, but were facing even greater difficulties.
The Frontier Duty Free Association is asking the federal government for help in the form of repayable loans for stores in need, Lee said.
It is also asking for relief from bureaucratic red tape that store owners say hampers competition – such as laws requiring compliance with Canadian domestic labeling requirements, even though stores sell exclusively to the U.S. market and must sell products that comply with U.S. regulations.
“We’re really motivated,” Lee said of the campaign.
“We have no choice. We have to do it. There's too much riding on it… We've made a commitment to show up in Ottawa for any meeting we can get. We'll fly there, we'll walk there. We're going to… show up because our stores need it and we need to be heard. And I hope. I really, really hope.”
