Last week, before the rain, I stopped at three San Pedro coffeehouses to get the general sense of proprietors and customers alike, but particularly proprietors.
Mateo Toro of Distrito Coffee is concerned about the price of coffee in the wake of the Trump administration’s tariffs.
“Prices are going through the roof for everything, but especially coffee beans, that’s the core of what we do,” Toro said. The newest downtown San Pedro coffee proprietor said he experienced other price shocks before, but nothing as drastic as the threat of Trump’s tariffs.
Toro noted that farmers back home in Colombia aren’t going to be interested in growing specialty beans for a while.
Two days before Sacred Grounds received its 60-day notice to vacate, potentially permanently, Chef Ronald George Tracy expressed similar concern for the specialty coffee beans.
With all the talk about the impact of tariffs on meat, produce and coffee, Peter Roberts at Emory University out of Atlanta, Georgia, doesn’t see much movement in the retail market for coffee, at least not due to tariffs directly.
“I think that a lot of speculators are looking at each other and playing games,” Roberts said. “If you look at the pre- and post-game stock price during that episode [GameStop stock manipulation of 2021], it ends up a little higher. So the dude that was claiming … it’s market fundamentals, he was right, but if you look at the movement in between, [it’s] like a huge roller coaster.”
Sense of Unease at Costco
My mother recounted a trip to Costco last week (as of the publishing of this story on Feb. 20) at 1:30 p.m. because she knew Costco had the cheapest eggs in town. “Two dozen eggs for $7, that’s cheap right now,” she said. So she went there again, attempting to get the same deal. But of course, when she arrived, there was not an egg to be found. And the refrigerators holding the quarts of milk were almost as empty.
She looked at the meat and seafood department and found two packages of lobster tails, six packages of Tilapia and a very limited selection of beef.
“The only thing they have plenty of is chicken. Well hell, you got chicken. Why aren’t there any eggs? Where are the damn roosters?”
I was only able to answer one of my mother’s questions.
Increased egg prices are due to Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza or bird flu. The issue is such that there has been renewed talk about whether the U.S. should vaccinate commercial poultry flocks against the virus.
The co-chairs of the House and Senate Chicken Caucuses in a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture noted that vaccination in any poultry sector – egg layers, turkeys, broilers, or ducks – will jeopardize the entire export market for all U.S. poultry products.
The letter pointed out that “broilers,” or chickens raised for meat, are an entirely separate industry from the egg-laying sector, with distinct supply chains, geographic footprints, housing structure, bird lifespans, biosecurity practices and trade portfolios.
During the current outbreak, of the total birds affected, more than 77% have been commercial egg-laying hens, 12% commercial turkeys, and 8% commercial broilers, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The other impacted species have been ducks, backyard poultry and game birds.
My mother has said she’s angry right now, because she can’t say for certain if the price of food is due to price gouging or not. She made the point that Trump has started making good on his campaign promise to go on a mass deportation spree.
“Do you know who is importing the food by truck? Latino drivers, Latino pickers and Latino farmers,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going on but something’s going on.”
It is this sense of unease that has caused my mother to tell everyone she knows to prepare.
“I don’t like beans because beans don’t like me, just to keep it that simple,” she said. “We need to stock up … pinto beans, red beans, black beans, lima beans and whatever beans, along with rice and cornmeal if you know how to make hot water cornbread.”
Make America great again? We certainly are having to go all the way back.