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?