THIEF RIVER FALLS, Minn. - APRIL 8, 2025: Employees at DigiKey’s Product Distribution Center in Thief River Falls, Minn. fill orders for electronic components using an automated storage and retrieval system. As one of the world’s largest marketplaces for electronic components, DigiKey is facing challenges in the current tariff environment. Dan Koeck for NPR
A small U.S. town grew a big company. Can it weather the tariff blizzard? – NPR
2025-04-24T09:00:00Z
A rural Minnesota town is home to the biggest tech giant you’ve never heard of. Now it’s riding out an unprecedented kind of storm.
A small U.S. town grew a big company. Can it weather the tariff blizzard?
toggle caption Dan Koeck for NPR
THIEF RIVER FALLS, Minn. — Every few nights, Teri Ivaniszyn jolts awake, her mind racing. She never expected to be a tariff expert, but here she is, keeping a notepad by her bedside for groggy 2 a.m. math on how her company can stay in business.
“I wake up in cold sweats about tariffs,” Ivaniszyn says. It’s a new thing, and she laughs about it.
Her employer is the biggest tech giant you’ve likely never heard of. DigiKey is a bit like Amazon, but for millions of electronic parts shipped to engineers worldwide — all from a single warehouse here in rural Minnesota.
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The warehouse sprawls under the vast northern sky among miles of rain-soaked grain fields striped with shelterbelts of spruces and poplars to shield the soil from wind. DigiKey started out by hiring farmers’ wives, offering pay stability and health benefits, and it has grown to 3,800 U.S. jobs employing half the county’s workforce.
“We’re kind of a contrarian, in that we ship around the globe,” says DigiKey President Dave Doherty. “But every additional shipment into China, or into Germany, or into Japan, or Taiwan, or Bangladesh creates jobs in Thief River Falls.”
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But first, the things DigiKey sells have to come to Thief River Falls, and that means tariffs.
About a quarter of DigiKey’s wares come from China. Since 2018, the firm has spent half a billion dollars on tariffs from President Trump’s first term in office. There have been ways to recoup some of that money, but now those rules keep changing. Everything is changing.
“What’s coming next? How are we going to handle it?” — Ivaniszyn, who handles DigiKey’s trade compliance, runs through these questions when she can’t sleep. “The yo-yo effect that we’re having: It’s on, it’s off, this is in, this is out.”
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So far this year, a 10% tariff on Chinese goods was followed by another 10% — and then other levies on steel and aluminum. The White House tariffed all the world’s imports — then put most of those tariffs on pause, but not the tariffs on China, which soared to 145%. Electronics got excluded. Semiconductors were put on watch.
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DigiKey gets products from manufacturers with elaborate supply chains. They might fabricate silicon for semiconductors in the U.S. but ship the wafers to China to be assembled, tested and packaged. Things might make a pit stop in Malaysia or Taiwan. At U.S. Customs, the supplier gets the tariff bill — and, often, sends it along to DigiKey.
“It’s so complex,” Ivaniszyn says, and then throws her hands up. “Just trying to explain some of it, it’s like — give me one more different way to do it.”
A homegrown giant grows the town
The reason DigiKey sprang up in a town of 8,800 people is Ron Stordahl. A ham radio enthusiast, Stordahl in the late 1960s sold an invention called a “Digi-Keyer” for transmitting Morse code. He had to get components traditionally packed in bulk and meant for manufacturers, not individual people.
Selling his leftover parts, Stordahl found an untapped market of engineers, students and hobbyists who wanted to buy just a handful of capacitors or circuits from what could be a reel of 1,000 or 5,000. His new Digi-Key Corp. would purchase these reels, break the pack and sell parts in small quantities, first through a mail-order catalog several inches thick and then online.
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“You know, you go to Walmart and they offer a case of soda and you can’t decide — ‘I really only need seven cans,'” Doherty says. “With DigiKey, you can get the seven cans.”
Every day, DigiKey ships an average of 25,000 orders from Stordahl’s hometown to a million customers in nearly every country. These days, customers include labs or firms that are as large as they get: medical, industrial, telecom and aerospace.
As DigiKey expanded, Thief River Falls got a cargo hangar at the airport and a longer runway for larger planes. It now has seven hotels and daily passenger flights to Minneapolis. While many rural communities are shrinking, the surrounding Pennington County has been growing. Locals who leave often return.
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It helps that DigiKey’s next-door neighbor is a snowmobile factory, run by Arctic Cat. But snowmobiles aren’t selling like they used to: Winters are snowless; inflation and interest rates are high. The factory is slated to shut down in May, unless the parent company finds a buyer for its powersports business.
“So you have a community that just lost one of its top two employers, and now you have the surviving employer heavily hamstrung by these tariffs,” says Tim Carroll, DigiKey’s vice president of digital business. “So we’re trying to figure out: How do you make sure you’re doing right by the community that grew DigiKey up?”
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Among the fields and two rivers, a foreign trade zone
The roads approaching DigiKey are dotted with severe signage from U.S. Customs and Border Protection: “WARNING: Vehicle is subject to search.” That’s because the company’s warehouse is considered a foreign trade zone (FTZ), under federal watch.
This FTZ designation means some foreign products can come here duty-free, as if they never entered U.S. soil. DigiKey pays the tariff only when it ships that imported thing to a U.S. shopper. If the shopper lives abroad, DigiKey is off the tariff hook altogether.
It’s a tariff-avoidance tactic long used by big importers. But for DigiKey, this was a gambit in response to Trump’s 2018 tariffs.
“Honestly, we didn’t know whether we’d get our bang for our buck,” says Ivaniszyn.
Setting it up was a yearlong, paperwork-heavy affair. Running it is even more so. And only a fraction of DigiKey’s imports can ship to its FTZ, because suppliers must satisfy all the very particular requirements of the process.
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But it has become a necessity, Doherty says. It saves tens of millions of dollars a year, not just in tariffs but related fees. DigiKey wants to almost triple its FTZ-supplier ranks this year. And lately, more companies are asking Ivaniszyn about the process, thinking of opening an FTZ of their own.
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A tariff to-do list for you, and you, and you
Ivaniszyn unfolds a sheet she has pulled from her pocket. In blue ink, she has hand-sketched a spreadsheet of just this week’s tariff changes, one column wedged in on a hurried slant.
Tariff chaos is pulling dozens of DigiKey employees off their usual tasks. The online team has built a toggle for the website that lets shoppers see only nontariffed options. Customer service reps are trained to answer tariff-related questions. Pricing, accounting and inventory-planning teams are crunching tariff-altered numbers. Ivaniszyn’s tariff team has doubled in size. Fatigue is building.
“Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna have a great day today updating systems to charge customers tariffs,'” says Carroll.
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People are also having to intervene in once-automated tasks. Thousands of orders that used to auto-flow directly to the warehouse floor for same-day shipping now often miscalculate tariff costs. The systems break. Phone calls and emails ensue.
And sometimes, DigiKey is left holding the bag.
“Customers, or some of them, are just not paying the tariff,” says Ivaniszyn. “And then you have customers who can’t receive the tariff into their systems — their systems don’t take the tariff. It’s an accounting nightmare.”
Could it be time to move?
Today, a supplier of power components is visiting DigiKey from New Jersey, and Ivaniszyn is rolling out her tariff slides. One item on the agenda: duty drawbacks.
It’s another way that DigiKey has been recouping tariff expenses. (“Duty” as in tariffs; “drawbacks” as in refunds.) Companies whose shipments simply pass through the U.S. on the way from one foreign place to another can ask the government for a tariff reimbursement.
Half of DigiKey’s sales are international, and these rebates help. Since 2018, the firm has recouped about 60% of its $500 million spent on tariffs, either this way or by charging U.S. customers a portion of the tariff paid for their goods.
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But many of the newest White House tariffs no longer allow duty drawbacks. And that’s becoming DigiKey’s biggest disadvantage against European or Asian rivals. Will foreign customers simply shop locally if DigiKey starts charging them for U.S. tariffs? Will domestic customers — say, companies building energy or medical devices — move operations abroad to do their shopping overseas?
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One seemingly obvious idea could be for DigiKey to press its suppliers to carry more of the tariff burden. But that’s a nonstarter.
“There is no tariff that any manufacturer could truly absorb,” says Tom Wichert, the New Jersey supplier visiting from TDK-Lambda Americas, which manufactures in the U.S. and abroad. “I mean, we cannot absorb it. There is not a profit margin in our industry to absorb tariffs, absolutely not.”
And so DigiKey faces its own existential dilemma: Any bigwig consulting firm would likely tell DigiKey to open warehouses in Europe and Asia, to bypass the United States.
“You have to ask yourself questions,” Doherty says. Plenty of his peers have done it. DigiKey hasn’t, yet. “We’re the lifeblood of northwest Minnesota,” he says.
The warehouse in the eye of an economic storm
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The DigiKey warehouse is not the town’s tallest building — that’s the grain elevator by the train track, with flocks of pigeons kiting overhead — but it is the largest.
The tour guide cannot say how many football fields would fit in its 2.2 million square feet. But he says the first floor could accommodate 61 regulation-size hockey rinks. Everyone in town knows someone at DigiKey.
“If you’re not working here, your family member is working here,” says Mike Lorenson, an IT manager at DigiKey and the town’s recently elected mayor. A recently retired woman set the record with 41 extended family members among the employees.
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Inside, black crates whiz by on conveyors like the hectic interchanges of a futuristic metropolis. People who pack orders wear grounding strips around their shoes to protect static-sensitive components. They wield tweezers and magnifying glasses, rolling out and measuring semiconductors spooled on reels like ribbon at a fabric store.
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Trump’s key argument in favor of tariffs is that they’d force more manufacturers to return to the United States. That’s a big question of money — but also time. Wichert, the supplier, says he has seen a few industry peers open American plants after the 2018 tariffs; it has taken three years, five years or more. The new tariffs are instant.
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Wichert’s boss, in a letter to staff, offered an analogy for navigating the trade war:
“Imagine you’re in a football game and it’s blizzard-like conditions,” Wichert says, summarizing it. “The winner of the game is the one who can manage through the conditions the best. Right now, we’re in blizzard-like conditions.”
The way Lorenson sees it: If anyone is used to weathering blizzards, it’s northern Minnesotans.
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