Price elasticity of demand (=sensitivity to price changes). If the seller is afraid that higher prices will significantly impact sales (people won't buy the product or buy alternatives), it might accept a lower margin in order to maintain the volume.

Also market competition can be a factor: if competitors are not raising prices (or by smaller amounts), you might lose market share.

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closewith 3 days ago | parent [-]

The drop in demand for staples you're talking about is quite literally the poorest people eating less, using fewer basics, lowering their quality of life further.

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somenameforme 3 days ago | parent [-]

As of 2016 (first search result) 90% of food/beverage is domestically produced = no tariffs. [1] The big goal with the tariffs, outside of gaining leverage on other countries, is to motivate domestic production and alternatives. Without tariffs it simply isn't realistically possible to compete in many industries because other countries have cheaper labor and less costly regulations.

Of course the practical problem with this playing out in increased domestic production is that it's reasonably likely that in 2028 the tariffs will get rolled back, and any company that was depending on them to survive will die. That's a large amount of uncertainty for any industry where there's a significant income investment required to get going.

[1] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-...

	▲	closewith 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Domestic food supply is still subject to tariffs because many of the inputs are. Agricultural machinery, parts, chemical feedstocks. Not to mention that tariffs on directly imported goods reduce the lowest earners' ability to pay for domestic products. If the goal was onshoring too benefit the population, it would be coupled with a strong wealth redistribution to the least wealthy to allow them to buy domestic goods. But that's not the goal.
	▲	tart-lemonade 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>90% of food/beverage is domestically produced = no tariffs That's not true, even for items which undergo relatively little processing like milk: 1. Cows need feed, and in the US this is mostly corn. This corn is mechanically harvested, shucked, and transported. 2. Cows are milked by machine. 3. This milk is then transported to a larger processing facility where it gets filtered, clarified (fat removal for 2%, skim, etc), pasteurized, homogenized (fat is evenly dispersed), and bottled in a blown plastic jug. 4. After bottling, the milk gets palletized and trucked to grocery distribution centers, which will re-palletize it for shipment to individual stores. At every step of the way, we use machines that require frequent maintenance and whose supply chains rely extensively on imported parts. On-shoring all of this would be expensive and risky both because Trump flip-flops so often and because our next administration may just reverse the tariffs.