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?
Can’t affect shit, if we ain’t buying shit.
I’m going out of my way, overpaying, to make sure my purchases are made on Canadian soil, from Canadian companies.
Sure, and this is a Canadian company roasting Ethiopian beans (as far as I know we don’t grow coffee). There are many things we don’t make here and even for those we do the supply chain likely intersects with the US.
Another example this had me thinking about is close to your goals: a Canadian baker making bread from Canadian wheat might use a mixer or an oven or whatever as part of that where the only way to get parts is from a US distributor because it’s too niche a thing to have a Canadian presence.
I’m not psychotic about it, like somewhere some place whatever I’m after probably uses US sourced materials or touches the US somehow. Can’t help that. Can only do so much, right?
You’re just not drinking coffee then?
Mostly just coffee and water. Water comes out of my tap. My coffee is locally sourced (we have a variety of local roasteries).
The roasteries are Canadian, the coffee is not. Coffee can’t be grown in Canada, which is the point OP was trying to make. We have to ensure that coffee is not being brought through the states, as theirs was.
Coffee can come from a variety of sources. Some of the local roasters have what I believe are basically futures purchased for coffee grown in the coffee belt regions.