Vermont Tiger

Not so fair

by Art Woolf

You can't go into a coffee shop or grocery store without seeing signs and advertisements for fair trade coffee.  You buy a cup, or a pound, and feel good about yourself.  You're helping some poor coffee farmer in some faraway country, right?

Probably not.   Two recent studies, summarized here, say different. 

The fair-trade business is filled with contradictions.

For starters, it discriminates against the very poorest of the world's coffee farmers, most of whom are African, by requiring them to pay high certification fees. These fees -one of the factors that the German study cites as contributing to the farmers' impoverishment -are especially perverse, given that the majority of Third World farmers are not only too poor to pay the certification fees, they're also too poor to pay for the fertilizers and the pesticides that would disqualify coffee as certified organic.

Their coffee is organic by default, but because the farmers can't provide the fees that certification agencies demand to fly down and check on their operations, the farmers lose out on the premium prices that can be fetched by certified coffee.

Taxing Questions

by Art Woolf

It's not easy to figure out how taxes work.  In New York, the sales tax applies to meals, but not food.  So what's a bagel?  Turns out that if it's sliced in a bagel shop, it's a meal and it's taxed.  If it's not sliced, it's food and is not taxed. According to the article in the Wall Street Journal

Kenneth Greene, the owner of 33 Bruegger's Bagel franchises throughout New York, says the state demanded that he start charging taxes on all bagels, except for those that remain intact and are consumed off premises,

But it gets more complicated:

It's unclear whether the state's crackdown will spread beyond Bruegger's, which operates nationally and in upstate New York.  "I hope they don't come after me for that," said Florence Wilpon, a founding owner of Ess-a-Bagel in Manhattan.

So if you're selling bagels at Bruegger's (a Vermont-based company, by the way), you pay a tax.  If you're selling at Ess-a-Bagel, no tax. 

In the early 1990s, then Vermont Tax Commissioner Joyce Errecart had to decide whether bagels were a food or a meal.  As I recall (I can't find any online sources), her decision was that fewer than three bagels were a meal (sliced or not) and subject to Vermont's meals tax.  More than three and it's a food product and no tax.

A Thankful Tiger

by Chris Campion

I would like to wish every Tiger reader out there a happy and safe Thanksgiving.  This year, I’m again thankful to have a family that is supportive and forgiving.  Their support has enabled me to achieve things that would have been unthinkable for me 7-8 years ago.

Happy Gobblin’!

Chris

Protecting the Vermont Brand

The label says "Produced for Bove's of Vermont."  The sauce is produced for Bove's of Vermont.  What more truth in labeling can there be?  But Bove's of Vermont will have to pay a six-figure fine.  Yikes!  We wish Vermont would get as tough on real crime as it is on business.