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?
Food, but not primarily for cost savings as most regular used things things don’t last longer than a year, which cost wise won’t bridge the gap.
55 lbs of 00 flour in the chest freezer, still have about 25lbs of AP flour in there. 1 30lb bag of Jasmine Rice, 1 25 lb basmati. I still have a ton of beans and and dry pasts in mylar/oxy absorb sitting in barens cans for long term storage. When covid started, I had 1 million calories in storage. I don’t plan to go back to that, but I intend to be able to hunker down for a long time.
For work, I’m pushing to purchase more laptops before tariffs.
I’ve considered stowing fuel with a stabilizer but even if prices double on fuel, I don’t use enough of it to make a difference.
It would be a good time to buy any lithium ion batteries and finish off those ali-express/temu orders.
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.
As I said, not for cost saving, but more for not needing to go out when people start panicking, or being stupid
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?
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
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.
Mmhmm, 12ga and xm855 “flour,” got it.
One doesn’t need to panic buy items that they keep in stock at sufficient levels. :)
Wow that will last you 13 months at most what a waste of energy.