Comment on Food price fears as Brexit import charges revealed
theinspectorst@kbin.social 6 months ago
Rishi: we have a plan for dealing with the cost of living crisis.
The plan:
Comment on Food price fears as Brexit import charges revealed
theinspectorst@kbin.social 6 months ago
Rishi: we have a plan for dealing with the cost of living crisis.
The plan:
tal@lemmy.today 6 months ago
There are a long list of concerns that I’d have about Brexit. This isn’t that high on the list, and I don’t think that it’s going to be that bad in terms of cost of living.
My guess is that the people getting whacked by this are basically stores that sell directly to consumers, probably more gourmet stuff. My guess is that that’s generally not the least-costly option. Like, instead of mail-ordering cheese from France, one can probably get it at a grocery store in the UK. The people getting whacked by this are people who care enough about a specific type of cheese to want to mail order it.
I know that The Guardian did a handful of interviews with a cheesemonger who was dealing with this going the other direction – selling small orders of gourmet cheese from the UK into the EU – and he was talking about how much of a problem this was going to be for him. googles Yeah, Cheshire Cheese. Anything that raises the transaction cost of crossing the border is gonna be bad news for people who do a lot of transactions. At the time, I was commenting on Reddit that what he should do is probably set up a distributor in the EU, then ship larger orders there, then ship from that distribution center to customers.
Following up, it looks like he did indeed do roughly that. Basically, he sold his company to a larger company, which had EU-based distribution:
theguardian.com/…/cheesemaker-sells-firm-to-overc…
I mean, don’t get me wrong. It sucks, and it’s going to reduce choice on both sides of the English Channel, and increase costs. But I don’t think that it’s comparable to, for example, the problems that it creates for British-EU-spanning automakers, which rely on a just-in-time-based supply chain.
And don’t get me wrong. I’m – in the US – in the same boat as people in the UK who want their specific French cheeses. One of my favorite cheeses is Red Windsor, which isn’t something manufactured in the US, so if I want it, I have to order it from the UK and get whacked by US import tariffs, and despite efforts from the UK (including vigorously-Stilton-trade-agreement-advocating Liz Truss), the UK didn’t set up a cheese FTA with the US. At least with the TCA between the EU and UK, there aren’t any tariffs. What the article is talking about is just a processing fee for imports, and you can reduce the impact for anything for which there is sufficient demand and doesn’t need to be customized on a per-customer basis by importing in larger quantities.
But at the end of the day, I can suck it up, go order it from a distributor and pay the price. And I really don’t need a very specific brand of British cheese, even if I like it and would prefer to have it readily-available. It’s a luxury. It’s a luxury that I like, yes, but it can’t really be said that I’m experiencing hardship if I have to eat a different type of cheese.
GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 6 months ago
For me, the reason it sucks is that it plays into the hands of huge homogeneous businesses, while making life very difficult for companies supplying nice products in low volume, DTC.
Instead of me being able to order a kilo of nice stinky cheese from a french shop (or small UK shop), I either have to hope one of the supermarkets starts carrying it, or hop on the ferry and go to Super U myself.
(Honestly, I can see myself doing more day-trips to france at this rate! Good excuse to fill the boot of the car with produce, assuming exemptions are in place for personal use)
tal@lemmy.today 6 months ago
I mean, there there are going to be other costs that dominate in that case anyway (if someone’s going purely for the purpose of purchasing cheese), but if you’re personally carrying the thing, is cheese duty-free?
googles
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty-free_shop
Hmm. Doesn’t really answer the question, as that’s not specific to the UK and the second bit is about people buying in the UK to take goods to the EU.
looks further
www.gov.uk/…/print
looks up the price of a Dover-Calais round-trip ferry ticket
About £190. I assume that that includes any cost of clearing customs, that there isn’t any additional fee.
So my guess is that traveling to the EU in person – while an option – to obtain up to £390 in goods is probably, even excluding the time and other costs, going to be more expensive than ordering it, even with the processing fee being discussed in the article. But if someone’s going to be going to the EU anyway for some other reason and just picks up the cheese on the way back, it could pay off relative to having it shipped in.
GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 6 months ago
In honesty, it’s also an excuse for a jolly.
“Darling, we’re out of your favourite cheese, I guess it’s time for a long weekend on the continent.”
French wine has always been a lot cheaper for comparable quality, anyone coming back from holiday with less than 4 boxes raises eyebrows!