Manager's Grocery Store Has Already Begun Raising Prices To Prepare For Trump's Tariff Proposals — 'Living For The Find Out Portion Of FAFO'
Anger over grocery prices helped put the president-elect over the top. His supporters are about to be disappointed.
ViDI Studio | Shutterstock As you've no doubt heard by now, a big part of what propelled President-elect Donald Trump's win was voters' understandable anger about "kitchen table" economic issues like grocery prices.
Scores of independent economists, however, sounded warning bells for months that the president-elect's economic proposals would only worsen the problem, along with many other economic issues beyond just groceries.
That message seems to have fallen on deaf ears, however. Now, there are indications that voters are already getting a rude awakening about the impact of the president-elect's victory on the price of goods — before he's even retaken office.
A manager's grocery store has already begun raising prices to prepare for Trump's proposed tariffs.
There are no two ways about it — polling has shown that voters who pulled the lever for the president-elect were pretty astonishingly misinformed about pretty much every major issue at hand in the recent election, from crime rates to immigration and, yes, economic issues.
This has resulted in quite a lot of anecdotal lamenting from his supporters on social media now that they see, after the fact, what they actually voted for — especially with respect to Trump's plans to place extensive tariffs on imported goods, which includes pretty much everything we buy.
This is because tariffs are nearly always passed onto consumers. Supporters of the president-elect frequently counter that this will simply compel manufacturers to make products in the United States, but that is not how it works. They'll need to build factories and distribution systems first, including for the supplies to BUILD those factories, a process that would take years and cost enough money that it would put many manufacturers out of business.
Scores of independent economists sounded warning bells about this for months before the election, but it seems pretty clear at this point that virtually nobody in the electorate listened — or if they did, they decided the economists were simply lying.
A grocery store manager and TikToker Brittany Shaw, however, is one of the myriad examples showing that this is simply not the case.
The manager shared how prices of products like coffee and even laundry detergent have increased in price since the election.
Voters' regrets about electing Trump are so numerous that they've spawned an entire new side of TikTok called "FAFO TikTok," an acronym, of course, for the popular saying "[Eff] Around and Find Out."
Shaw referenced this in her wildly viral video, in which she wrote that she is "living for the find out portion of FAFO happening in real-time as a store manager."
Her video shows her applying, just days after the election, new price tags to products bearing higher prices than previously, like several different types of coffee, each increased by an entire dollar. The much-vaunted dozen eggs that became a talking point throughout the election went up to $5.05 at her store, too — though that's, of course, not a tariff issue; it's a bird flu issue (not that either candidate ever bothered to talk about it).
This is surely galling to many after consecutive years of increasing grocery prices — increases which in many cases have continued despite inflation being back to normal, due in large part to corporate price gouging known as "greedflation." (It's also just a fact of economics that once prices inflate, they rarely come back down without an economic collapse. It would probably have helped if Biden or Harris had ever bothered to explain this to voters before crowing about how good the economy is for two years straight.)
It's galling for another reason too, however: This is precisely what economists said would happen all along.
No manufacturer or retailer is going to simply eat the increased costs incurred by Trump's proposed tariffs out of the goodness of their hearts, nor are they going to invest the gazillions of dollars required to build the non-existent infrastructure to produce these products in the United States.
Coffee is a particularly perfect example of this problem: The only place in America where coffee can actually grow is Hawaii, and the state's entire coffee industry produces less than 1% of the world's coffee supply. Prepare to swallow a whole lot more of your paycheck with that morning cup of Joe, America.
Several companies and manufacturers have announced they are raising prices to offset Trump's proposed tariffs.
Shaw's TikTok elicited exactly the response you'd expect if you're not someone who voted for the president-elect. Disbelief was the general theme — not in the sense of regret, but rather in that his voters assumed Shaw was either lying or misinformed.
But her grocery store is far from alone. As the CEO of auto parts retailer AutoZone put it on a recent earnings call, "If we get tariffs, we will pass those tariff costs back to the consumer," and scores of other companies have made clear they plan to do the same thing.
Steve Madden shoes. Columbia Sportswear. Stanley Black & Decker — all have announced they will be passing the additional costs incurred by tariffs, as well as their impact on supply chain logistics, directly onto the consumers who just elected a president because they were convinced he'd lower the costs of goods. Economists say even stores like Dollar Tree will likely raise prices.
This is all likely to be worsened by Trump's proposed immigration policies and mass deportations, which could have a drastic impact on our supply chain due to the high proportion of workers in fields like agriculture, food processing, and distribution who are immigrants.
This will all amount to an extra $46-$78 billion flowing out of people's wallets every year, according to The National Retail Federation. Judging from the fact that Shaw has since posted another video showing more products, like laundry detergent and candy, going up in price since her first viral video, it seems likely we'll be hewing to the high end of that estimate.
None of this is at all surprising to anyone who was paying even the slightest attention during campaign season.
The fact we seem to be already diving headlong into it before the president-elect even takes office just further underlines what American voters seem to have a really difficult time comprehending: Elections have consequences, and that goes double when you don't bother to do even basic due diligence before filling out your ballot. Eff Around and Find Out indeed.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.