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?
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.