This seems pretty important to crowdsource and talk about, so I’m gonna go ahead and risk violating the no politics rule from a few days ago, because I don’t see a better community to ask this. My defense for it not “being politics” is, I’m asking you to keep it to purchasing decisions and how the details of how the tariffs are likely to work, as opposed to who did what. This thread has the potential to save people lots of money if it gets big!
Tariffs are gonna make things more expensive for Americans; what are you planning on buying now instead of later, or stockpiling a little of?
US produces sufficient amount of food to be self sufficient, ie fast majority of foods is made within US for US consumption… i doubt any base food will be affected anyway, that’s not what tariff policy is about here.
While US is self sufficient in fuel, US pays global market rate. But again, we are not getting hit with tariffs here either.
A large percentage of US manufacturing is food processing. Manufacturing has been struggling to fill open roles for years,1 and as a low-skilled job with tons of openings lots of migrants, both citizens and not work in manufacturing since the pay & benefits are hard to beat for not requiring any degrees. Its a similar situation with farm work. If the Trump administration actually performs significant deportations and cancellations of visas like he promised, food availability will be affected as farms and food producers struggle to keep up with demand
1 Here’s the JOLTS data showing as much as 200k unfilled manufacturing jobs. I can’t easily directly link my query, but here’s a screenshot of the data with enough info to replicate my query
Noting like a job where your shitty boss’ cost cutting gets you killed by heavy equipment! Wonder why they can’t find anyone?
Yeah, but that just means that the cost of processing food is going to skyrocket. Whole chicken costs will go down while chicken wing costs will go up.
I can also see states leaning on their prison populations to supply some forced labor.
Again… owners need cheap labour US in migration policy aint changing no matter what trump said… we already had him and nothing changed.
Manufacturing jobs actually pay pretty well. Like I said, it’s hard to beat the pay and benefits of working in manufacturing if you don’t have a degree.
The reason they struggle to fill these roles is because most people don’t want to work in industrial facilities working physically taxing jobs, often at odd hours filling second or third shifts and risking that the facility doesn’t sufficiently value safety leading to a serious injury or death
As I said, not for cost saving, but more for not needing to go out when people start panicking, or being stupid