Every price on your list has a cause you can count. We count one a weekday and leave the blame to you.
Rung up. You’re on the list.
Sticker Shock will start showing up in this inbox. If you can’t find it, check promotions or spam.
Monday through Friday, we pick one thing you buy and track down what pushed its price. Sometimes that’s a harvest. Sometimes it’s a tariff. Each step comes with its figure and its date, and each edition ends with our call for your next store run.
The extra tariff on Brazilian coffee came off in November 2025.
An extra tariff took effect on goods from Brazil. Coffee was covered.
That much Brazilian coffee came into the U.S. in those five months. In the same months of 2024, the figure was 423 million. About half.
Coffee moved onto the list of goods spared from that extra tariff.
The world price of arabica beans fell from $4.11 a pound to $3.31.
A pound of ground coffee at the store went from $9.26 to $9.72. At the time, no month in Bureau of Labor Statistics records back to 1980 had been higher.
Smucker, which sells Folgers, uses futures (deals to buy later at a price set today) and fixed‑price contracts to manage price swings on a large share of its commodity costs. Higher prices alone added 22 percentage points to its U.S. coffee sales that year.
At a pound a week, April’s price adds up to about $506 a year.
Was the tariff worth it? We leave that question with you.
You may think the tariff was smart policy or a costly mistake. The numbers work for either view, and we never tell you which one to hold. If a rule is a link, we print its rate and the day it began. Nobody in office gets praised or blamed here.
Butter fell 22% in a year. That gets counted too.
In June 2025, a pound of butter averaged $4.87. By June 2026, it was $3.82. In May 2026, American farms had 184,000 more milk cows than a year before, and they gave 2.3% more milk. USDA expected butter stocks to build on that extra milk. At a pound a week, the drop is worth about $55 a year to you.
Get the numbers before the next shouting match starts.
Which price do you watch closest?
Rung up. You’re on the list.
Sticker Shock will start showing up in this inbox. If you can’t find it, check promotions or spam.
Sticker Shock is free and comes Monday through Friday, and each edition reads in about four minutes.