- Importers raised the price more than needed (i.e. blame tarifs to increase their profit margin)
- Price increases took one year to fully reflect to the customers, and persisted nearly one year after the tariffs expired.
- chicken-tax-like loopholes implemented wherever possible (for wine apparently it's raising the ABV to more than 14%)
Less store hours. Higher prices. Inflation. People in school got a terrible education and it affected my workforce. (But hey 1% of people died, as predicted if we did nothing at all... )
It only reinforces the importance of competition over protectionism.
I used to be a walmart fan, but my local store is cheaper now. I didn't bother to look at prices until things were getting silly.
Nope. Compare the death rates of Sweden vs its neighbours in the Nordics (the closest comparisons we have with similar weather/culture/etc.). Or if you don't care about minimising variables, in the US between states that did lockdowns and mask mandates and those that didn't. In every comparable (e.g. excluding rural vs urban) case, there were more deaths in "doing nothing" than implementing the same basic public health axioms that have held true for centuries.
> Inflation
That was also helped by Russia invading Ukraine, which increased global prices of multiple important raw materials. But yes, inflation after a period of deflation/economic contraction/restricted travel and consumption was to be expected.
> People in school got a terrible education and it affected my workforce
It's definitely a bigger issue for them than it is for you. And yeah, it sucks for them. Would have been pretty terrible to tell teachers (who overwhelmingly skew older) they should risk their lives just to keep kids occupied too.
> It only reinforces the importance of competition over protectionism.
What has that got to do with COVID?
As a New Zealander, I like to chuck out our achievement of a negative death rate. Covid lockdowns resulted in less New Zealanders dying than usual.
But, like elsewhere, economic and social harm were both high.
When something doesn't happen because enough measures were taken, then it wasn't worth it because it didn't happen?
You're at a football stadium with 100k people. A thousand of them die suddenly. Do you feel safe?
> Less store hours. Higher prices. Inflation.
At this point, that's just greed. They figured out what the market would bear.
I think given the amount of ideas floating around, it is occasionally good to revisit things that are "known", just in case some underlying assumption changed, especially for economics which is harder to get right as it deals a lot with what human want and do.
So, yes, it is correct in a practical immediate sense that "the exporters pay the tariff" but that excludes many relevant issues like how prices evolve (which are paid by the consumers), what the government does with the money (it could share or not) and what others decide to produce (to avoid tariffs). But definitely many people didn't thought of all that ...
⸻
1. Cleveland doesn’t get two bios.
So if you want a comparison in USA it needs to be something that is regulated by the US government, like hydroxacloroquine.
As a result the US system was designed to prohibit restricting trade between states and encourage restricting trade at the national border through tariffs. The goal was to encourage internal trade and production that builds national wealth and skills. The government was to make profit off of international trade through tariffs. That structure encouraged government to protect the economic engine domestically to continue profiting from international trade.
If by "lots" you mean 2: alcohol and licensed labor. There are other things that could be easier, but they're not true barriers. Like differences in building codes.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/ontario-nova-scot...
This all came out of the signing of the original FTA in the 80s. The established players at the time were basically given a permanent advantage as part of negotiations around that. (For 30 years only those two companies could run their own retail stores for example).
Through acquisition and obfuscation they've built up a whole trading card stack of wine labels, that make it look like there's far more diversity here than ther e is. The story in the Ontario wine industry is a lot like how our tech sector works -- Vincor is Google, and smaller wineries are startups, and the "exit strategy" is to get bought up by them. Otherwise you'll probably perish.
Even the VQA "quality" descriptors are written to favour their own established businesses.
(Some chipping away at this recently at least. I hate Doug Ford but he's the first government to really undermine these monopolies in the last 40 years because by opening up retailing at grocery stores and gas stations etc. And VQA has become a little less restrictive about things like varietal choices etc in the last 5 years.)
Wish I knew less about this subject. I used to fantasize about operating my own small winery. Something that's not possible in Ontario unless you're well connected, extremely rich, or masochistic (or preferably all of the above).
>The researchers estimate that the increase in the retail price to consumers was about 6.9 percent. This was on the $23 pre-tariff retail price, so it amounts to $1.59, which, in dollar terms, exceeded the tariff revenue collected.
Is seemingly contradicted by goldman sac's report, which claims consumers only paid 55% of the tariff increase.
https://www.idnfinancials.com/news/57938/goldman-sachs-us-co...
Also the tax burden will fall on different places depending on the markets and the good in question.
Does anyone collect them?
With this study there's plenty of leads to follow. Does the ABV have an impact? What about the base price? France vs Italy?
"we find that tariff increases are associated with an economically and statistically sizeable and persistent decline in output growth" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7255316/
"Overall, the evidence implies that tariff increases depress economic activity and trade once their indirect and general-equilibrium effects are taken into account." https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34852/w348...
Hey, but the vibes of the consumer, right? Except the vibes of the consumer is at an all time low ( https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/02/04/a-year-into-...) With a notable exception being republicans, i.e., the death cult who screamed "No New Wars!" and "Kamala will start WW3" and are not sucking off daddy Trump's Iran war.
The problem with Trump's tariffs is that everyone knows they are relatively short term. At most, they'll last until the end of Trump's presidency, and even that's assuming that they don't get struck down by the courts, or Trump flip-flops on them like he does everything else.
Without the ability to credibly ensure their ongoing existence, tariffs fail their only real purpose of incentivizing domestic manufacturing, instead acting as a regressive tax on your population.
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-is...
https://www.nber.org/papers/w34620
https://www.kielinstitut.de/publications/americas-own-goal-w...
This one has even more egregious findings:
> Pass-through at the border is incomplete, yet consumers paid more than the tariff revenue collected.
Wonder how many other industries used tariffs as an excuse to further juice their profits. (Edit - turns out this study is looking at pre-2021 data, so we don't even know what they've done this time!)
As someone adjacent to the wine biz, few things worth noting:
- Their data source is a major wine importer. The economic realities of the majors versus the smaller, boutique importers, or even the larger independent ones, are very different, because of their market position, reach, their clientele, the type (mass-market) product they carry, etc... in addition to the simple financials of having padding and ability to plan long-term. Anecdotally, most of the smaller-to-mid-size importers I know have actually cut their margins, and are hanging on by a thread. For anyone smaller than the two or three very biggest players, the tariffs have been a drag on business at both ends, and for some have been existential. It's driving consolidation as well, which is never good for consumers. Imagine doing a study on the software industry and only talking to Microsoft.
- In the US we have the three tier system (producer -> importer -> distributor -> retailer) and each of those take a cut, obviously, resulting in higher costs. So those tariffs compound at each layer. There are a few exceptions where you can be a "direct import" retailer (e.g. K&L in CA) but these are a small piece of the pie. Don't even get me started on the costs of shipping, the byzantine legal compliance, etc.
- As for the 14% thing; I'm skeptical of their insinuation of causality. Relevant to this study, 2018, 2019 were exceptionally hot growing seasons in most of europe, a trend which has unfortunately continued, which naturally lead to higher ABV, even as critical trends move in the opposite direction.
(I've no doubt the supply chain was a mess for a hot minute, but years later?)
examples include eggs for $2.99 in some places (!), and other competitive categories like unbranded meat and cheese, pasta, and more.
prepared foods seem to be slower, I'm assuming because labor costs continue to rise.
I also have anecdata, my grocery bill has not come down from pandemic times. Things like eggs are definitely more expensive.
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/19/nx-s1-5539547/grocery-prices-...
> What's the item? Groceries
> How has the price changed since before the pandemic?
> Up 29% since February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The statistic you cite does not necessarily contradict what the parent comment is saying. "Up 29% since February 2020" is an absolute change since a specific point. The parent comment is saying prices have "come down" i.e. since their peak. It can still be up overall, so long as it's not up as high as it was at one point.
EDIT: To be clear, the parent comment might still be wrong, or might be right only within a biased sample (i.e. their own experience). I'm only making the point that the statistic you're referencing does not outright disprove what they're saying. Prices can be up since six years ago AND down since two years ago (random time periods chosen for illustration only).
At no point has the US entered deflation so far this millennium.
So if retailers tried to lower prices to pre-COVID levels then they would fail. The Fed would see the falling prices and cut rates until 2% inflation was achieved.
Just like food prices didn't just jump one day, they won't just drop one day. We target 2% inflation, so they'll still go up, but slower.
Going up slower than wages means better affordability.
Prices only go up, all that's required is a plausible excuse.
This is what happens when you shape your entire individual and cultural identity around "number go up"
Taxes make after tax prices go up and reduce profits due to reduced quantity.
No reason to go searching for a "plausible excuse" or some greater critique of culture.
In this case, it ended up that the retailer raised prices, probably because the retailer can just sell domestic wine for cheaper (close substitute). Retailer profits still didn't increase because of reductions in sales (~12% iirc). This is textbook econ 101. Substitute, profit maximization of a firm, supply and demand etc.
Tariffs only work if the price increases are passed on. To work, they need to change consumer behavior, which means they need to increase prices.
jjgreen•2h ago