How the Fuck Did We Let Coffee Become a Casualty of War?
The weaponization of ritual, the price of silence, and the empire behind your morning cup.
I was eleven the first time I got high.
My grandmother made it for me; espresso, cream, and a spoonful of melted chocolate. A homemade mocha from her French press, strong enough to make my vision tighten and my heart race. I didn't wince. I loved it. I remember the way the bitter bite of the coffee mixed with the sweetness of the chocolate, it tasted like the illusive adulthood I thought I could handle. Like intimacy. Like being let in on something sacred.
That summer of 1999, before entering sixth grade, I drank coffee every day. Sitting beside my grandmother in the kitchen her late-husband built with his own hands, I'd watch her press the plunger down slow, with reverence, like a ceremony. The ritual of it felt ancient, personal; a connection to something real in a world that increasingly wasn't.
Then came the transition, from handcrafted to mass-produced. We'd drive into the city for errands, to scour antique and thrift stores, her spreading religious truths to any one that would listen, and we'd always end at a Starbucks with me feeling skeptical. The smell was a distraction. I liked the Mermaid logo. I liked the way people held their paper cups like they were holding something important. I liked feeling like I belonged to the club of purpose. This was the beginning of the seduction, not by coffee itself, but by what it had been engineered to represent.
I started ordering mochas when I was thirteen. Lattes with extra shots by fourteen. At sixteen, I'd show up late to first-period with an iced coffee in a colored Starbucks cup like it was a status symbol. I reveled in the ritual of preparing my coffee. The connection to myself. It was a reliable form of self-awareness between exhaustion and activation. It was something constant to wake up to in a world that didn't always make sense. It was feeling high, with a crash that could be managed and ignored.
By college, I had a daily budget for coffee that rivaled my textbook costs; a perfectly normal American addiction that no one questioned, depositing my minimum wages straight into corporate coffers. I didn't know it then, but I was addicted to something stronger than caffeine.
Now, in 2025, when I sip from a mug decorated with lavender drawings I got from World Market pretending it was made by an artist and not a corporation, making coffee with green beans I roasted with help from my step dad, sweetened with homemade elderberry syrup my best friend made from the trees on her farm, with oat milk when I no longer trust the safety of milk, on a property that feels alive compared to a past life that left me feeling dead, and the perfect blend of bitter, sweet, and creaminess tastes more like nostalgic mourning than oncoming comfort, I think about what we never realized was being built behind the counter. The machines that didn't just grind beans, but ground us into a state of dependence.
We thought it was a choice. But it's never really been. Not since corporations realized that our morning ritual could be monetized, commodified, and eventually, weaponized against us.
The Warning: From Farmers Market to Economic Erasure
It was another Farmer's Market day, where my best friend and I met up after an intense session at the gym for lunch. We had just finished our plates from the Eritrean stand we always go to, another reminder for us to check in what's going on in the other parts of the world. As we threw away our compostable plates, I wandered over to a small coffee vendor tucked near the edge of the booths. Locally roasted, small batch beans. A place that steams their milk to the proper temperature and doesn't serve splenda.
I asked for an iced cardamom latte, and while she poured a slow stream of espresso over cubes, I asked the barista who was also the owner of nearly three decades if she sold green beans to customers. I told her my stepdad who used to own a coffee shop down the street from where we stood and after I got him a one-pound home roaster, that we roasted together sometimes on the weekends filling the porch with smoke and stories.
I pulled up the sleeve on my jacket, revealing a tattoo on my forearm of a delicate drawing of several interwoven plants where each represents someone in my family: my kids, my husband, my mom. My stepdad is the coffee branch, inked with little green cherries, not yet ripened. A living tribute to the man who had become permanently inserted into my life that summer I visited my grandmother and she served me a coffee that would hook me to my step-dad in unexpected ways. It was one of the few things we shared like religion - a perfectly poured espresso with a top layer of golden foam.
As the coffee shop owner complimented the details of my tattoo, she laughed. Not a cruel laugh, just one that said you clearly haven't been paying attention.
"Good luck getting green beans after the tariffs," she said, still working the grinder. She explained how the costs of her beans have skyrocketed, how she's struggling with reliable distribution, how she's barely able to keep enough beans on hand for her business to stay afloat let alone sell green beans for profit, citing not enough people roast their own coffee to make it worthwhile for her to part with such a precious commodity.
I smiled and nodded, trying not to let her words land too deep. But they did.
I looked down at the cup in my hand. She had swirled the espresso into oat milk with this gentle precision, like she was making art she wasn't sure anyone would appreciate. I took a sip, and it was perfect: earthy, cold, quietly comforting.
As she handed me the tap-to-pay, I placed my card on exchanging an unspoken fear that the number of times this will happen again in the future are finite, as she reflected off to the distance that we should enjoy the coffee while we have it, because some day, it either won't be there, or people like her won't be able to afford it.
I walked away, my best friend linked in my arm, and considered the drink I had for years taken for granted. This wasn't just about price increases. This was about erasure. The quiet disappearance of the people and places we rely on, disguised as economic policy. That woman's hands were the last link in a chain that was already being snapped by men in suits who've never had to work a booth in the sun, who don't care what a roast profile means, or what gets lost when the cost of beans becomes unsustainable.
I came for a coffee. I left with a warning.
The Battlefield: When Tariffs Become Weapons
Days before, watching headlines for "Liberation Day," I didn't realize how as Trump stood behind a podium draped in flags and declared a sweeping tariff blitz on more than 180 countries, my coffee was growing cold.
Fifteen of the world's top twenty coffee-producing nations were hit. Tariffs ranging from 10% to 46% dropped like drone strikes on the supply chain. Vietnam, the largest supplier of robusta beans (the ones used in espresso blends, instant coffees, most working-class brews) got the harshest blow: 46%. Brazil, our largest overall supplier, took a 10% hit, even as it reeled from record-breaking droughts. Colombia. Indonesia. Even Switzerland, a key processing hub, got slapped with a 31% fee. The EU: 20%. It was less a policy than a purge.
Coffee was already on edge. Climate change had torched arabica crops, futures markets were surging, and roasters were scrambling to secure beans. The industry was walking a tightrope, and this tariff war just cut the rope.
"Reciprocal tariffs," the administration called them, as if economic retaliation were a form of patriotism. As if punishing farmers in Ethiopia or baristas in Seattle somehow made America stronger. The coffee industry had a different name for it: existential threat.
Within weeks, there were rumors from friends of friends that local roasters were considering smuggling green beans across the border to keep their businesses alive.
The irony wasn't lost on me. For decades, cartels had hidden narcotics in coffee shipments; drugs tucked inside beans meant for American consumption. Now, the beans themselves were the contraband. The substance we were all addicted to but suddenly unwilling to pay the true cost for. Our morning ritual had become a controlled substance; not by the DEA, but by men in boardrooms who'd never roasted a single bean in their lives.
The administration framed it as a bold move to protect American business. But here's the thing: we don't grow coffee. Not at scale. Hawaii, where my step-dad lived for a period of time and used to roast coffee, and Puerto Rico account for less than 1% of what we drink. More than 99% of our coffee is imported, and most of it arrives as green beans, only to be roasted, bagged, poured, and ritualized by coffee shop owners like my step-dad and the woman at the farmer's market. It's not an import we compete with. It's an import we depend on.
This isn't a minor industry. It's an ecosystem. In 2023 alone, we imported $8.2 billion worth of it. That supply chain supports 2.2 million U.S. jobs: roasters, café owners, truck drivers, farmers market vendors, small-batch wholesalers, bag manufacturers, milk distributors, mug makers. For every $1 spent on coffee imports, we generate $43 of value in the domestic economy.
The National Coffee Association warned that these tariffs would "significantly increase consumer prices and disrupt established supply chains." They've formally begged the government to exempt coffee from these tariffs. They've said it clearly: coffee isn't like steel or semiconductors. There's no domestic production to incentivize. No "bad actor" to target. No hidden win here. Just pain passed down the line.
So who was this war really for?
What Liberation are we seeking? From affordable mornings? From small-batch cafés and family-run roasters? From connection… the kind made over kitchen counters, early morning walks, whispered orders to the barista who knows your name?
The Consolidation: Betting on Collapse
This isn't about coffee. This is about consolidation. And consolidation always has winners.
I avoid Starbucks like the plague. Not because I'm precious about beans, but because I can't stomach the taste of performative integrity.
Their coffee is shit; overpriced, overbranded, and dressed in the same faux-wholesome cloak that Whole Foods wears while being owned by Amazon. These aren't community-minded havens. They're curated facades for extractive machines.
In this tariff war, Starbucks has pledged not to raise prices. CEO Laxman Narasimhan publicly committed to freezing costs through 2025, even as green bean imports get taxed, climate volatility tightens supply, and distributors scramble to survive.
But make no mistake: they're not doing this for you.
They can absorb the blow because they're backed by Vanguard and BlackRock, who own a combined 15.8% of Starbucks. The same asset managers who own Walmart. The same ones who control how most Americans "invest" without realizing it's all cycling through the same elite group of people at the top of the financial food chain.
I check my own retirement account sometimes and feel sick. The companies I've been avoiding with my conscious purchases (the ones I critique, resist, boycott) they're right there in my portfolio. I'm betting on my own demise, funding the very mechanisms I claim to oppose. We all are. That's the trap. The illusion of choice while our money works against us.
Starbucks won't make noise. They'll hold the line. They'll posture as customer-first, all while winning quiet favor from a government looking for corporate compliance.
That silence? It's not apathy. It's strategy.
The contrast landed hard when I saw Walmart announce it would raise prices to account for tariff strain, only to be publicly threatened by the Trump administration.
Absorb the shock, or else.
And they will. Because they can.
Walmart and Starbucks aren't rivals in this war. They're dual assets operating on two fronts of the same playbook. One resists publicly to negotiate power. The other complies quietly to consolidate it. Either way, Vanguard and BlackRock win. They don't just hold shares. They shape policy. They vote with management. They attend boardrooms with more sway than any founder ever dreamed. And they don't lose.
But the people who do?
The small-batch roaster sourcing beans direct from Honduras.
The café already operating one bad week away from insolvency.
The vendor at the farmers market, whose margins are now shaved thin enough to bleed.
When the market destabilizes, when prices spike, when supply shrinks, when policy chokes distribution, Starbucks and Walmart don't panic. They plan. Because for them, volatility isn't risk. It's a business model. And it's working exactly as designed, because we've seen it before.
In 2008, when BlackRock bought up thousands of foreclosed homes with money pooled from our retirement accounts. In 2020, when they leveraged pandemic stimulus to expand their grip on infrastructure, water rights, housing, and farmland. Now it's 2025, and they're coming for what we thought was too small to matter: the café on the corner. The community spot. The ritual.
The pattern is the same whether it's coffee, housing, healthcare, or education. Create crisis. Watch the small players collapse. Buy up what remains at pennies on the dollar. Consolidate. Raise prices. Repeat.
The more I looked, the more it became clear: this wasn't about protection. It was about permission to collapse what's small, local, and interdependent so that something bigger, colder, and more controllable could take its place.
This wasn't a trade policy. This was a battlefield. And the beans were just the first to fall.
The Extraction: How Coffee Became a Casualty of Empire
For a brief moment, I thought I could opt out.
After the conversation at the farmers market, I started researching if I could grow my own beans on my property, lining the hillside with rows of glossy green leaves, building a greenhouse to simulate the right humidity, maybe teaching my kids how to harvest cherries from their own land.
It didn't take long for the fantasy to collapse.
California isn't hot enough. Not for long enough. Not at the elevation coffee needs. I found one experimental grower in Santa Barbara trying it with mixed success. But the cost of infrastructure, the unpredictability of climate, the risk of a single storm or frost wiping out a season? It made more sense to give up.
Coffee doesn't grow here. And even if it did, I couldn't afford to make it work without becoming exactly what I'm trying to resist; a scale-dependent, subsidy-seeking, extractive operation that looks more like agribusiness than community nourishment.
My personal fantasy crashed against the same reality that small farmers in Guatemala and Ethiopia face every day, only they can't walk away when the numbers don't add up. They can't pivot to tech jobs or remote work. Their livelihoods disappear when markets decide their labor isn't worth protecting.
The truth is, we're trapped in a loop of dependence and denial.
We think we're choosing between Starbucks or the indie café. Between dark roast or single-origin. But that's not a choice. That's a moodboard. A menu curated by capital.
Because when tariffs decide which beans cross borders, when climate decides which crops survive, when Wall Street decides who gets access to wholesale markets… your coffee isn't a choice anymore. It's a consequence.
This is not a case of supply and demand. This is soft power in action, weaponized through shipping lanes, commodity markets, and multinational influence. Coffee is just the case study. It's the thing we're still allowed to love, until we're priced out of loving it.
In 1773, it was tea. A government taxing a daily ritual while pretending it was offering protection. Americans knew better. They dumped it in the harbor and called it what it was: tyranny.
Now it's coffee. And the empire isn't across the ocean, it's in boardrooms. It's on shareholder calls. It's inside asset portfolios and behind green aprons.
We're being taxed without representation again.
But this time, we don't protest.
We pay. We sip. We comply.
A $7 cup at Starbucks isn't expensive because it's rare. It's expensive because they've made it so, strategically, systemically. The same way insulin costs $300 a vial. The same way rent in my city doubled in five years. The same way college now costs more than my parents' house did.
This isn't market forces. This is extraction.
So the next time you hand over your card, ask yourself:
Where did all the other cafés go?
Where did the neighborhood roaster go?
Where did the single-origin importers and third-wave baristas and family-run espresso counters go?
They didn't fail. They were extracted.
Every "closed" sign is just a power transfer. Every foreclosure, every distributor drop, every empty storefront another win for the ones already too big to lose.
Coffee isn't unique. It's just visible. What's happening to our corner cafés happened to our bookstores, our hardware stores, our pharmacies. It's happening now to our doctors' offices, our schools, our water supplies. The community disintegrates while the commodity remains… more expensive, less accountable, increasingly inaccessible.
This isn't about whether you drink coffee or not. This is about what happens when even our most human rituals, comfort, conversation, morning, become collateral in a game we never agreed to play.
When coffee becomes unaffordable, when choice disappears, when all that's left is Starbucks that only the elite can afford, we won't be asking how the fuck we got here.
We'll be wishing we'd recognized the pattern sooner.
We'll be wondering which ritual they're coming for next.
We'll be realizing, too late, that our daily fix was never the real addiction.
The real addiction was believing we still had a choice.
Like What You’re Reading?
Before tariffs turned coffee into contraband, before the quiet collapse of local cafés became background noise, I stepped off the assembly line of performance and into a 100-year-old farmhouse in the woods; haunted not by ghosts, but by truths I’d been trained to ignore.
In that piece, I traced the patterns of surveillance, militarized obedience, educational decay, reproductive control, and economic extraction that now shape every corner of American life. I stood in a barn with my hands in the dirt and realized the war I thought I left was still following me, through satellites, legislation, and algorithms trying to rewrite my future.
If this essay was about the cup in your hand, that one was about the ground beneath your feet.
Same collapse. Different coordinates.
How the Fuck Did We Get to 100 Days of Clarity?
I stand in the heart of our property, 100 days into a new world both radical and inevitable. Horses grind hay in the dimly lit barn, teeth crushing stalks in rhythmic waves that echo through night's stillness while somewhere, a child born a citizen is being deported, men who glamorize abuse rise to power, and women I once clicked wine glasses with celeb…
About the Author
I’m Alisa Sieber; a writer, veteran, and relentless question-asker, exposing the patterns of power, control, and resistance that shape our world. My work blends personal reckoning with systemic critique, challenging the narratives we’ve been told and demanding we ask harder questions.
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Reference & Further Reading List
Coffee is one of the most popular drinks in the US. Tariffs could make it more expensive
Kinsey Crowley, USA TODAY (April 10, 2025)
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/04/10/coffee-tariffs-expensive/83029424007/Who Owns Starbucks: The Largest Shareholders Overview
Kamil Franek, kamilfranek.com (2023)
https://www.kamilfranek.com/who-owns-starbucks-largest-shareholders/Live Data: U.S. Tariffs on Coffee Producing Countries
Garrett Oden, Fresh Cup (April 3, 2025 / Updated April 18, 2025)
https://freshcup.com/coffee-tariff-tracker/Here Are the New US Tariffs on Major Coffee Producing and Exporting Countries
Nick Brown, Daily Coffee News (April 3, 2025)
https://dailycoffeenews.com/2025/04/03/here-are-the-new-us-tariffs-on-major-coffee-producing-and-exporting-countries/Trump tells Walmart to ‘eat the tariffs’ as Walmart says prices will rise
Economic Times / Wall Street Journal coverage (April 2025)
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/global-trends/trump-tells-walmart-to-eat-the-tariffs-blames-china-for-price-hikes/articleshow/121238328.cmsWalmart, Starbucks respond differently to tariff pressure—but share the same owners
The Street, FOX4, The Sun – multiple sources (2025)
https://www.thestreet.com/restaurants/starbucks-ceo-sounds-the-alarm-on-tariffs-price-increases
RE: Your comment about the investments of your retirement account. I have handled my own retirement account investments for 38 years now, in part because I did not want to own even a small part of businesses I do not want to be involved in . I don't have a Facebook account because I disapprove of their encouragement that truth is subjective and should be subject to manipulation, and so I also don't invest in META, etc.