In Niagara Falls, NY, the Rodriguez family has lost half its revenue. In Blaine, WA, the Hagens are slashing staff and operating hours. And in Port Huron, MI, the Radatz family has already hit the breaking point, closing their doors for good after 30 years.
For decades, parcel services like CBI USA, Hagen’s of Blaine, and SCC Parcel Pickup thrived on a seamless cross-border linkage, serving Canadians who bypassed international fees by shipping U.S. orders to the border and driving across for pickup.
Then Donald Trump returned to office.
The Canadian boycott of American travel and goods, started in early 2025 in response to Trump’s tariffs and attacks on Canada’s sovereignty, has left these legacy businesses fraying. Today, their struggles underscore the structural erosion of a shared binational ecosystem, showcasing how geopolitical tensions manifest on the ground.
The broader pullback of Canadian tourism has been well-documented. Canadian spending in the U.S. dropped 24% in the third quarter of 2025. U.S. road trips by Canadians this March are down 35% from two years ago. And for three months straight, more Canadians have returned from overseas by air than from the U.S. by car.
Last year, total U.S. exports of services to Canada stopped growing for the first time since 2015, excluding the 2020 pandemic anomaly. But this flatlining goes deeper than a drop in vacation spending.
These border businesses, whose revenue technically falls under the “Travel” category of services, provide Canadians with a U.S. address to receive and retrieve retail orders. Because Canadians—de facto locals in this ecosystem—represent the entirety of their customer base, defining this industry’s struggle as yet another part of the tourism slump fails to tell the real story of its unique vulnerability.
“These parcel pick up companies are purely catering to Canadians, not to the U.S. domestic demands,” said Laurie Trautman, Director of the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University. “So they are disproportionately impacted by what’s happening between the two countries.”
PORT HURON: THE BREAKING POINT
The Radatz family operated SCC Parcel Pickup in Port Huron for three decades. Ron and Laura Radatz took over the business in late 2019 from Ron’s mother, Donna, who founded the company in 1995.
Every day, dozens of the company’s Canadian customers would drive across the border to pick up everything from tires and electronics to online clothing orders, saving not just money on fees but also time—as cross-border shipping can take up to several weeks longer.
The new owners, however, didn’t get to fully enjoy this long-established rhythm. First, the pandemic hit, putting their business on hold for nearly two years. Then, a series of prolonged closures of the Blue Water Bridge for resurfacing stalled their post-pandemic recovery.
SCC Parcel Pickup persevered through every hurdle.
It didn’t survive 2025, though.
“It all dropped to nothing last year,” said Ron Radatz, 48. “When, after all the tariffs and all the claims Trump made, Canadians stopped coming over, it was a nail in the coffin for us.”
Last June, SCC Parcel Pickup announced its closure. The company’s Facebook page was quickly flooded with heartfelt farewell messages from Canadian customers, who even organized a “Saying Goodbye the Canada Way” fundraiser.
“It was heartbreaking to close after that long,” said Radatz. “But we got to the point where it just wasn’t worth keeping it open and dumping money into.”
Economists note that businesses like Radatz’ are bearing the brunt of the current political standoff.
“Border-state economies are hit the hardest” by the Canadian boycott, said Gary Hufbauer, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “They have to endure, by far, the biggest and the most painful impact.”
For the Radatz family, that impact comes with a bitter realization.
“I don’t think our lawmakers care about small businesses,” said Ron Radatz. “I mean, they claim they do, but in the end, it’s only about big business.”
“It was a good run,” Radatz said in closing. “Thirty years is a good run.”
HOLDING ON IN NIAGARA FALLS
In 2025, Canadian travel to the U.S. fell 21%, draining an estimated $4.4 billion from the American economy. Trautman, whose Border Policy Research Institute regularly surveys Canadian visitors to the U.S., noted that most of them are “not just crossing for one reason.”
“When Canadians come, they fill up on gas, they take advantage of popping down to the grocery store, etc.,” said Trautman. “There are definitely a lot of spillover effects here.”
Annette Rodriguez sees these spillover effects every morning, driving by the Fashion Outlets Mall in Niagara Falls on her way to the office.
“The mall is dead. It’s so quiet there,” said Rodriguez, 60, the owner of CBI USA. “It’s actually very sad to see. Restaurants also took a big hit. Our customers always went to restaurants and to the mall after picking up their packages.”
In 1987, Annette’s husband, David, launched CBI USA to provide Canadians with a professional “Amerifriend” and a local U.S. address. Operating under the motto “our address is your address” and relying almost entirely on word-of-mouth, the business is now approaching its 40th anniversary.
The Rodriguez family estimates CBI USA’s revenue is down 50% since the tariffs were announced last year and the boycott began. They cut back on staffing from ten to seven—all of whom are now exclusively part-time—and reduced operating hours.
“It’s been more than a year now that the border towns are suffering,” said Rodriguez. “It’s a big, big blow. We didn’t think it would go on for a year. Honestly, I was okay with it at first, because I thought it was for the greater good of our country, and that it would bring money. But now I just don’t know what they [the Trump administration] are doing.”
Despite the squeeze, CBI USA has refused to consider closing the doors Annette and David Rodriguez opened to Canadian customers in 1987.
“We’re fortunate to have a lot of faithful customers,” said Rodriguez. “They told us, ‘We’re still coming, we’re still going to order.”
For Canadians living along the border, like Marta Leardi-Anderson, who serves as the Executive Director of the Cross-Border Institute at the University of Windsor, these trips were never about “tourism” in the traditional sense.
“Some people might call it tourism, but it’s not how we see it,” she said. “For example, it’s a 15-minute drive for me to go to a ball game in Detroit, or go there for a cup of coffee, or go meet family and friends for lunch. We are integrated not just economically at the deepest level, but also as a community.”
For many years—save for the pandemic—that integration was so seamless it was almost invisible.
“I’m not so sure that until recently people generally understood how deeply integrated our countries are,” Leardi-Anderson said. “It’s really quite something when you step back and look at it.”
“So I have all the confidence in the world that small and medium-sized businesses can realign to keep the economies on both sides of the border going,” she added.
BLAINE: THE ART OF PIVOTING
Gloria Hagen started Hagen’s of Blaine in 1977 as a used bookstore, selling paperbacks for a dime. It soon evolved into a package-receiving business, eventually passed down to her son Steve and his wife Kelle in 1992.
The couple still remembers their glory days during the dawn of internet shopping. Between 2012 and 2015, Hagen’s of Blaine was processing about 1,600 packages a day.
“Today, we get, on average, 125 packages a day,” said Steve Hagen, 57. “The Canadian boycott has cost us about 40% of the revenue. And that’s on top of already making half of what we did before Covid.”
While the historic shift was visible at all border gates last year, Blaine suffered the largest year-over-year drop in inbound personal vehicle crossings from Canada: 25%. Whatcom Council of Governments data points to a 61% drop in annual Canadian parcel-pickup trips to Blaine between 2018 and 2025.
Since January last year, the Hagen family has had to halve its staff down to four and slash working hours.
“We just keep pivoting to make things work for the current environment, current time,” said Kelle Hagen, 56. “And, honestly, we kind of get tired of pivoting.”
Despite the shrinking volume, Hagen’s of Blaine is looking forward to celebrating 50 years in business in 2027.
“Obviously, like any other business in Blaine, we’re not in great shape,” said Steve Hagen. “We’re a border town, so everyone took a hit. But we pretty much adjusted to the new reality. We’re paying bills.”
That “new reality” is here to stay, argues Trautman of the Border Policy Research Institute.
“The low levels of Canadian travel to the U.S. are going to persist for at least a couple of years,” she said. “What we see today is the new normal.”
For the Hagens, this economic shift feels more like an undeserved penalty.
“It’s really unfortunate that people who made all these decisions are not affected,” said Steve Hagen. “But all of the small businesses in the border towns are being punished instead. Our countries were like family for a long time, and we’re kind of not like that anymore.”