I rather doubt Walmart is going to increase the price of only Chinese made goods 25%. I think everything goes up 25% and they pocket the margin as long as they can get away with it.
It doesn't work because it's basically illegal to be poor in America, or rather to live like a poor person in a developing country. Because of theories about gentrification and such we just banned everything like SROs, company dorms, etc.
It worked for a little while in the 2000s because earlier flight from cities had left a lot of empty housing open to gentrify, but none of that is left.
There's a few classes of people left like supercommuters and people who live in RVs in the Amazon warehouse parking lot, but not going to run a big factory like that.
But memes about suicide nets aside, Chinese factory workers are there by their own choice, because it's better than their alternatives, and we've eliminated such choices by simply making it illegal to have the low cost of living it requires.
This was done to make the poor underclass go away (homeless people) but it also makes this type of working class (factory workers) go away. Luckily for us, we have a service economy with email jobs for them to work instead.
Well pack it up, that, the Evangeline legend and the Katrina episode of Boondocks round the tale out. Nothing else to see here.
(Actually, the slave labor camp is Mississippi these days [1])
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9354922;
https://web.archive.org/web/20201108140152/https://in.news.y...
The problems I described are mostly in blue states, although Texas has different problems that somehow result in basically the same issues. Like Houston doesn't have zoning, but still ends up with sprawl due to other restrictions.