While perusing some coffee to buy from my favourite roaster that also is extremely transparent about pricing, this caught my eye:
$7.35 USD per lb including $0.65 USD per lb “reciprocal” tariff placed on Ethiopian imports. * This coffee entered the US before being imported into Canada.
Hm. Seems the niche importer they worked with to access these particular beans was American. Since we’re a small market, I suspect this kind of thing is going to be happening a lot.
I got an initial take from an LLM and apparently the company importing from Ethiopia and re-exporting to Subtext is eligible for a refund on the duty (a “drawback”) but a big, um, drawback of that is that it’s fairly onerous:
- Many importers use a drawback specialist or broker because the paperwork is complex; fees are usually contingency-based (e.g. 20–30% of the recovered duty).
- For small, irregular shipments, filing costs often outweigh the refund, so many small importers simply don’t bother.
- For large distributors or commodities with steady re-export flows, drawback is routine and worthwhile.
Curious if anyone has similar anecdotes or run across an attempt to quantify this sort of trade flow and effect of US tariffs? I wonder if the impact of this across every little thing adds up to a meaningful amount of inflation?
Fuck the US and buy from local roaster. Lots of roasters and they have same day or next day shipping!
This is from my favourite small roaster in my Canadian city. They’re one of the only ones that give this kind of detail, almost all others I would have had no idea any Americans were involved in the process and might have bought these without realising as you undoubtedly buy from Canadian businesses with some US suppliers. Which is why I figured it might be an interesting topic for a post.
The beans are never from Canada.
I know that! Beans come from Africa, latin American and so on. I guess there are importers in Canada, which then distribute local and the shops roast them.
Yes, sorry, I guess that was kind of insulting. That we’re not getting produce or tropical products locally seems to be something Lemmings regularly miss, though. Like, I had people claim to me they were buying all hyper-local food in the dead of winter, which, bullshit unless you have details about living on cans, bread and animal products like the old-timers talk about.
OP was using a local brand, who apparently have a supply chain that goes through the US and are having trouble moving it it.