Copyright The Boston Globe
Shohel Ahmed, 48, a tall man with a trim beard who has owned Bonoful Grocery since 2009, shuttles inventory to the store most days from wholesalers in the warehouse districts of Queens. “New shipment coming, and they increase all the products,” Ahmed said, with some frustration. He has raised prices in turn. He pointed at one type of rice, for example, that now costs $23 a bag, up from $17. But there are limits to what his customers will pay. “We cannot put too much price, because the community say no,” he said. President Trump’s broad and hefty tariffs have boosted food prices across the board, extending a period of high inflation from after the pandemic. But the pinch is especially sharp for the immigrant diasporas from countries where tariffs are the highest. Bangladesh bears 20% duties under the “reciprocal” tariff schedule that the White House imposed in August. New York City’s Queens County has the largest population of Bangladeshi immigrants in the country, about 62,000 spread beyond Astoria into Jamaica and Ozone Park, where several grocery stores supply the tastes of home. “The first generation of the Bangladeshi community, it’s their historic habit — they can’t change all of a sudden,” said Abu Taher, who runs Time Television, a Bengali-language station in New York City. “Second generation, they can change.” For centuries, New York has absorbed immigrant communities with their own cuisines and flavors. Grocery stores catering to them have anchored neighborhoods including Flushing, a hub for people from China (average tariff rate: 58%), and a Staten Island enclave of arrivals from Sri Lanka (20%). “For many New Yorkers, those provide a sense of cultural identity and connection,” said Kate MacKenzie, director of the city’s Office of Food Policy. “That is really important, perhaps more so than a sense of food security, finding belonging.” The effect extends beyond New York. In St. Louis, emigres from Bosnia (tariff rate: 30%) are feeling it, as are Indianapolis’ immigrants from Myanmar (40%). America’s largest concentration of people from India (50%) lives in the Bay Area, where dozens of South Asian grocery stores have raised their prices. The first line of defense in the tariff wars are distributors. They have been drawing down credit lines to cover tariffs in the 30 or 45 days before they get paid by their own customers and trying to find countries with lower tariffs that can export similar goods. Daniel Demeshulam is the CEO of Bedemco, which imports from all over the world and sells to domestic manufacturers and retailers. There are alternatives for some commodity goods such as cashews, which predominantly come from Vietnam (tariff rate: 20%). But he has had to stop buying golden raisins from South Africa (30%), for which there is no perfect substitute. “Everyone is having to borrow more than they had, and with interest rates where they are, it’s going to squeeze us more and more,” Demeshulam said. Even though he passed some price increases on to customers, the tariffs have wiped out his profits. “We’re losing money on some deals just to keep the business going,” he said. Brad Koshar runs Jorday Foods, a New Jersey-based importer that supplies grocers, restaurants, food banks and schools with foods from Europe, South America and Asia, including the Middle East. He has had to stop importing from India because, he said, customers wouldn’t accept high enough prices to account for the 50% duties. That means a wide variety of snacks and spices are no longer available. “Small retailers, specialty retailers are suffering because there’s only so much they can pass through on a cost increase,” Koshar said. In Astoria, Ahmed’s small grocery has generated enough income for him to buy a house in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens for his four children. But it hasn’t been profitable over the past year, as his clientele has bought only what it really needed and has been bargain-hunting for the rest. Ahmed has thought of a way out: becoming a distributor himself. He used to import directly for his store but got out of the business when dealing with health regulations became too onerous. Now, cutting out the middleman seems like the only viable way to keep prices in check. He traveled to Bangladesh in November to get started. On a recent sunny Saturday, the tiny store was busy with shoppers peering at prices and examining their receipts. Among them was Ahn Karim, 40, a cheery Astoria resident with a young son in tow. He came to the United States in 2010 and works as a building inspector for the city; his wife is a teacher. Their modest incomes have been stretched in recent years. Karim shops in Jackson Heights for better prices on produce, but for the kind of fish he remembers from home, he prefers Bonoful Grocery. It’s now $8 a pound, up from $4 earlier this year. “Tariffs are terrible,” Karim said. “At the end of the day, we pay for this price, not the government. They put it on the customer.”
