United Kingdom

There are a long list of concerns that I'd have about Brexit. This isn't that high on the list, and I don't think that it's going to be that bad in terms of cost of living.

Small imports of products such as fish, salami, sausage, cheese and yoghurt will be subject to fees of up to £145 from 30 April, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

My guess is that the vendors getting whacked by this are basically EU stores that had sold directly to consumers, probably more gourmet stuff. My guess is that that's generally not the least-costly option. Like, instead of mail-ordering cheese from France, one can probably get cheese -- albeit perhaps not exactly the same type -- at a grocery store in the UK. The consumers getting whacked by this are people who care enough about a specific type of cheese to want to mail order it, and where the demand is small enough that grocery stores aren't stocking it.

I know that The Guardian did a handful of interviews with a cheesemonger who was dealing with this going the other direction -- selling small orders of gourmet cheese from the UK into the EU -- and he was talking about how much of a problem this was going to be for him. googles Yeah, Cheshire Cheese. Anything that raises the transaction cost of crossing the border is gonna be bad news for people who do a lot of transactions. At the time, I was commenting on Reddit that what he should do is probably set up a distributor in the EU, then ship larger orders there, then ship from that distribution center to customers.

Following up, it looks like he did indeed do roughly that. Basically, he sold his company to a larger company, which had EU-based distribution:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/nov/15/cheesemaker-sells-firm-to-overcome-brexit-barriers-after-losing-600000-in-sales

Its new owner, fellow family-run north-west England producer Joseph Heler Cheese, has maintained a presence in the EU as a result of its larger operations and distribution hub in the Netherlands, which Spurrell hopes will make supplying European customers viable again.

I mean, don't get me wrong. It sucks, and it's going to reduce choice on both sides of the English Channel, and increase costs. But I don't think that it's comparable to, for example, the problems that it creates for British-EU-spanning automakers, which rely on a just-in-time-based supply chain.

And don't get me wrong. I'm -- in the US -- in the same boat as people in the UK who want their specific French cheeses. One of my favorite cheeses is Red Windsor, which isn't something manufactured in the US -- just in the UK. So if I want it, I have to order it from the UK or a US distributor that imports it from the UK and get whacked by US import tariffs, and despite efforts from the UK (including vigorously-Stilton-trade-agreement-advocating Liz Truss), the UK didn't set up a cheese FTA with the US. At least with the TCA between the EU and UK, there aren't any tariffs. What the article is talking about is just a processing fee for imports, and you can reduce the impact for anything for which there is sufficient demand and doesn't need to be customized on a per-customer basis by importing in larger quantities and then having a British distributor dole it out to individual customers.

And even for me, it's not that bad. At the end of the day, I can suck it up, go order it from a distributor and pay the price. And I really don't need a very specific brand of British cheese, even if I like it and would prefer to have it readily-available. It's a luxury. It's a luxury that I like, yes, but it can't really be said that I'm experiencing hardship if I have to eat a different type of cheese.