Some small business owners in the Chicagoland area said they’re doing their best to avoid passing on rising costs to customers amid looming tariffs.
Opened in 2022, the co-owner of Tasa Coffee Roasters in West Humboldt Park like many other small businesses have been dealing with increases in prices of goods.
“I’ve seen it gone up at least I’d say 20% from last year,” said Pierre Marquez, co-owner of Tasa Coffee Roasters. “We deal with only specialty coffee so that’s already expensive to begin with.”
Marquez said he’s doing everything to offset the costs to protect his customers.
“It’s difficult because we also have a community, we have to take care of and we really care about—being able to be there to serve them,” he said.
His coffee supply is mainly imported from countries like Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Ethiopia.
“When I heard about the new tariffs I decided at that point, let’s just get all the coffee all the Colombian coffee that we use in a year let’s just buy it now,” he explained.
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The shipment arrived Friday from a warehouse in the Midwest.
“It ended up being like $10,000 dollars’ worth of coffee and luckily we made it in time, but had I not it would have been an extra $1,000 that I have to cover the cost,” he said.
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The executive director of the nonprofit coffee shop Kusanya Café in Englewood also feeling the sticker shock.
“It’s something where we’re watching very closely, I think for us and how we’re going to react to it,” said executive director Phil Sipka, Kusanya Café.
Spika told NBC Chicago his latest shipment of coffee went up significantly.
“We haven’t purchased since November and so we just recently made a purchases and it was about 25% percent more than we usually pay about $2,000 more than usual and that was a big deal for us,” Spika said.
The owner of a Thai restaurant in Deerfield said he’s forced to make adjustments raising the price of his lunch special by $2 dollars since a lot of the products and ingredients they need are imported from Japan and Thailand.
“For example, like coconut milk per case and I buy many cases so we’re looking at from $48 dollars to $68 dollars per cases and with the pause I’m not sure if the memo gets to the warehouse or the vendors because the pricing has been increasing and it’s still going,” said Jimmy Thai Seriruk, Jimmy Thai Chef and Owner.
Seriruk is trying to navigate and budget for what’s ahead and believes his loyal customers will help them weather the storm.
“What’s going to happen in 90 days? We are still very fortunate because we do have volume and we have a strong customer base, but I feel its important to be able to share with them our predicament,” he said.
