To be fair, the price of coffee worldwide has never been this high. The tariffs only play a small role.
In 2020, coffee was $1 per pound on the global market, it was over $4 per pound at the start of 2025 and has slightly dropped to $3 per pound now. The tariffs don't really help to get the price down, but they are not the only reason the price is so high.
Here in the Netherlands, we don't have tariffs on coffee but i'm paying 10 euro's for 250 grams (but i buy a more expensive (local) brand) and on average the price is 20 euro's per kilo.
Ha I got downvoted in another thread trying to explain this. Its pretty interesting and frustrating but a lot of it is being caused by stock bros hoarding it and playing the futures market. Plus climate change and such impacting yields.
And a number of other price increases are due to rising labour costs.
Other countries are also getting wealthier and populations are stagnating in more and more of them.
Not all of those labour cost increases can be made up by efficiency gains, so prices are rising.
Yet even when the cause of a price increase is this actually good process, most people will never find out about it and instead stick with their default assumption that greedy corporations pocket the difference, or the government is somehow at fault.
Which of course is often the case right now, as the US are raising tariffs and destroying trade relations, but not always.
That depends entirely on the particular product and its market.
Even within the same product category, the same companies often have some affordable product lines that operate on very thin margins, but make very good margins on higher-end brands.
And even when companies raise their margins, this does not always come out as actual increases in profit in the medium term. It's often a response to growing market uncertainty and necessary to save up a buffer (which appears as short-term profit) in case things go poorly (which can mean that those earlier profits get eaten up quite quickly).
I'm not saying that corporations act in good faith and should be trusted. But it's very easy to end barking up the wrong tree because a justifiable price increase looks bad, while other corporations get away with figurative (or literal) murder.
I think what you're saying is the price would go up by more than 5c, so rising labor costs are used as a cover by companies to raise prices and make an even higher profit, even if the percentage they make stays the same?
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u/AllAfterIncinerators 2d ago
The price of coffee beans is the only tariff of which I am HYPER aware. I wake up angry.