Retail Profits in Specialty Tea

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tealifehk
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Wed Jan 10, 2018 1:02 am

Bok wrote:
Wed Jan 10, 2018 12:09 am
tealifehk wrote:
Tue Jan 09, 2018 11:05 pm
You eventually work out who is trying to rip you off and who isn't, and can then avoid those who are trying to fleece you! People are gonna be people, regardless of the industry.
I am not sure if the issue in Taiwan is only about money. A lot of people tend to think that Westerners do not know enough about tea, so they feel it is a waste to offer you their best. Furthermore enhanced by the general scarcity of certain high quality teas.

It takes time and effort to get closer to the vendor until you get offered better tea to taste. I have been slowly drinking my way up the mountain over the years…
In many cases it is definitely about money IMO. Lao wai tax as you said yourself!
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OldWaysTea
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Wed Jan 10, 2018 12:01 pm

My general opinion is that the profits must make a sustainable business. A niche business provides a service of getting something that would be otherwise more difficult to acquire.
Bok wrote:
Wed Jan 10, 2018 12:09 am
I am not sure if the issue in Taiwan is only about money. A lot of people tend to think that Westerners do not know enough about tea, so they feel it is a waste to offer you their best. Furthermore enhanced by the general scarcity of certain high quality teas.
In China I see this more often than people paying a higher price for the same product. People who I have seen get ripped off tend to end up paying the price for good tea and getting a lower grade product.
chofmann wrote:
Tue Jan 09, 2018 11:35 pm
We've definitely encountered these fake farmers. It helps to go to the vendor and make sure you actually visit their farms to get a better sense of whether or not they actually own the place.
I have noticed these as well. What are things that you think a single farm shop should do to help validate their credentials? I like Farmer-Leaf's videos of the farms and the manufacturing process.

There is a fairly well known online shop that sells direct from Wuyishan. In some ways their marketing is a variation on the fake farmer shop. Although they are real farmers, they portray themselves as being much smaller than they are. I've asked around and the response that I got is that they are connected to one of the largest tea enterprises in the city.
Psyck wrote:
Tue Jan 02, 2018 6:34 am
I think that retail profits in specialty tea has a negligible effect on the lives of the field and factory workers. [...]
I agree that profits in specialty tea don't have much effect on the tea workers of the world in general. I don't think that is a fair comparison though. Specialty tea farmers seem to be doing fairly well. The depth of my experience is in Wuyishan, where life seems pretty good for the tea farmers.
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Bok
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Wed Jan 10, 2018 11:01 pm

OldWaysTea wrote:
Wed Jan 10, 2018 12:01 pm

There is a fairly well known online shop that sells direct from Wuyishan. In some ways their marketing is a variation on the fake farmer shop. Although they are real farmers, they portray themselves as being much smaller than they are. I've asked around and the response that I got is that they are connected to one of the largest tea enterprises in the city.
That is not by any chance a shop with a beautiful Instagram presence? Their packagings and images are way to nice to be coming from a farm only enterprise… In my experience famers are good at growing their crops, but have rarely have good sense in marketing themselves (which is ok and to be expected).
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Psyck
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Thu Jan 11, 2018 7:51 am

OldWaysTea wrote:
Wed Jan 10, 2018 12:01 pm
Psyck wrote:
Tue Jan 02, 2018 6:34 am
I think that retail profits in specialty tea has a negligible effect on the lives of the field and factory workers. [...]
I agree that profits in specialty tea don't have much effect on the tea workers of the world in general. I don't think that is a fair comparison though. Specialty tea farmers seem to be doing fairly well. The depth of my experience is in Wuyishan, where life seems pretty good for the tea farmers.
You are right, my comment was regarding tea workers in general and not specifically producers of specialty teas. As you say, there is likely some correlation between the quality/price of the teas produced to the living standards of the producers. There will be exceptions of course, like e.g I suppose pickers of the costliest Darjeelings and the cheapest are the same.
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aet
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Thu Feb 08, 2018 8:11 am

Seller expenses:

Presumably the vendor lives in area or near to area where the tea is produced.

Travel expenses: If your tea doesn't grow behind the house , you still have to travel for it and its not a question of 10km , specially in China. Petrol, toll fees, accommodation and food ( u don't have place to cook your self , so restaurants )
You usually spend 1 or 2 weeks traveling over few farms. Some vendors spend 1 month on one farm ( when they actually do or supervise plucking , processing eventually pressing , in order to make sure stuff is what he needs )

Finding the tea source: You might not be lucky all the time to find the right supplier/ farmer/ producer at the first shot. You might spend few days going from place to place and negotiating price , searching for right quality etc. Your time, your money.

Waste: As you know that apart of the pu-erh tea and white tea, all other teas are not getting better with aging so u have to be sure to sell all before it's too long. When it comes to the "black" date you sell it for the costs price.( no margin ).
Other thing is , what most buyers don't know. If you buy some big leafs fragile black tea for examp. in 15kg box , the bottom of the box is being crushed by heavy weight during the transport or moving it if need , which causes that from 15kg ( which u paid for from farm or producer ) you actually can sell 12-13kg to final customer. If you have time , resources , you can make a tea bags from it, but it's additional costs . Machine is not chap for that or you have to pay people. Expenses depend on country. So we usually give away for free as gift to loyal customers , or those less crushed leafs ( still some full leafs ) offer with explanation for less than costs price.

Packaging: I not sure how you are paid per hour in your country but I can assure you that by packing 10-20 x 25g samples - taking out from boxes, weighing, writing /printing/sticking labels , packing all in box the way it doesn't get crushed by other heavy hard stuff inside like teapot or pressed tea ) ..works out something like 3-5$ per hour. doing it all in hope that customer will order decent amount next time.

Now, I'm not including the hours working on online shop , like photographing , adjusting images ( crop, size, white balance etc. ) - although it's all handy in PS or Light-room, describing, uploading products, marketing, posting , FBooking....etc, ...still your time behind the computer.
Emails to customers etc.
Sometimes You might spend half day just behind the computer to sort out few customers, orders , payments ... etc.
Those hours are not paid by customers , right?


Claiming: No matter how well u pack the item , it's still very possible that it will arrive broken, since delivery companies are "playing a soccer" with parcels. Ive seen guys offloading the truck throwing boxes as far as 5m distance. You , as a vendor, will refund or discount the broken item just for sake of good name of your shop. ( even if it's not your fault )

Lost parcel: U might not know this but if parcel get lost from China post , they will just give you ( to sender ) only 50% of shipping fee, not actually the value of package. Speak of EMS , u get nothing. I mean 0 , by nothing. And still , u have angry customer on other side , so you will refund money with BIG apology for inconvenience. If that happens to you few times in row, you definitely recalculate your margin.

Please note : there is no insurance with China post or EMS parcel, can't buy any. Just doesn't exist.

Staffs: Once you reach a level when you can AFFORD the employees , and I purposely wrote it in capital letters. Your time and expenses will go up rapidly. It takes time to train somebody who doesn't share same passion for tea like you and just goes to work because need money. Not well trained staffs can cause more claims, refunds, bad name.

Grow your biz: If you own tea business, how would you make money for buying the tea which you already have in assortment + a new tea? I still go to other work to do so.

Stone shop / storage : that's the question of location so it's very variable ( rent ) .

Not sure if that helps, but I guess, if you really want to know the vendors expenses, better try it your self. Just create simple website ( many free templates on internet ) , buy some wholesale teas and try to sell it for margin you think is reasonable. Than quit your full time job and see if you can make out for living. Im not trying to be smart here , but many tea vendors still have their day time job and have online shop like hobby which can make some + money.


Speak of China...more than welcome to come over and see how much cots what:-) Due to Chinese economy the export is going rapidly down, not even tea.
Prices of pu-erh for example gone up 3-4x in just 2 years. So for same price as before you logically get worse quality than before. Not gonna be better this year:-(

If you feel being ripped of, than just don't buy from that site, no point to generalize and making some assumptions about vendors if you are not vendor your self. Sorry for saying it like that.

Compare: buy one type of tea from different vendors for different prices , than can make an assumptions. But again, you don't know what are expenses behind of each vendor.

Speak of big chains as u mentioned in article, I have no idea. But I can imagine it goes trough many hands before it get into your cup.

Anyway , no hard feelings. Hope my opinion will help you to understand the other side and mainly..please do enjoy the tea! :-)
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Bok
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Thu Feb 08, 2018 10:23 am

aet wrote:
Thu Feb 08, 2018 8:11 am
Anyway , no hard feelings. Hope my opinion will help you to understand the other side and mainly..please do enjoy the tea! :-)
thanks for the insight!
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Victoria
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Thu Feb 08, 2018 12:08 pm

Bok wrote:
Thu Feb 08, 2018 10:23 am
aet wrote:
Thu Feb 08, 2018 8:11 am
Anyway , no hard feelings. Hope my opinion will help you to understand the other side and mainly..please do enjoy the tea! :-)
thanks for the insight!
Yes thank you for so much detail, makes one think twice about the logistics of a specialty tea company.
chofmann
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Thu Feb 08, 2018 1:17 pm

Victoria wrote:
Thu Feb 08, 2018 12:08 pm
Bok wrote:
Thu Feb 08, 2018 10:23 am
aet wrote:
Thu Feb 08, 2018 8:11 am
Anyway , no hard feelings. Hope my opinion will help you to understand the other side and mainly..please do enjoy the tea! :-)
thanks for the insight!
Yes thank you for so much detail, makes one think twice about the logistics of a specialty tea company.
The costs are higher than many seem to suggest, and it is extremely difficult to build trust (understandably) with people who aren't local. I'd say that probably 80% of our sales right now come from within 50 miles of our HQ (and another 15% from a single wholesale client in NYC), because we attend small markets where people can actually sample the teas and build trust.

As for the costs - I have seen many sites sell teas where I know they must have crazy margins. As we look at many farms, we can typically get a sense for where most good teas typically trade. For example, I don't think we've seen a single TGY cost more than ~$200 / kg (yes, I'm sure they exist, but they are very rare), and they are typically much less. Even at this price, I would expect the TGY to sell for ~$10-$12 per ounce (a reasonable margin), and likely much less, yet I have seen many retailers selling TGY for quite a bit more.

One thing that aet didn't mention in the costs is that business owners often need professional assistance. aet aptly mentioned the need for packaging, photos, marketing, social media, etc... but it is rare to have an expertise in all these things. A good founder can possibly handle one or two of them, but may require professional help for design (packaging, logo, site), photography, social media, marketing, descriptions, etc.
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Sat Feb 10, 2018 7:22 am

Discussion is interesting. I wonder how many of the vendors participating in it, make a living solely from being a tea vendor! One needs many transactions when people like to buy small amounts, & the cost of marketing to get more transactions is terribly high.

When I wanted to buy a tea from Jun Chiyabari directly but could not unless I bought 10 kilograms, I became a vendor. I learned that offering a wonderful tea at the lowest price of any retail vendor, does not = success. People seem to need the marketing effort to feel the tea offered is good. Marketing includes social media participation to build following & the accounts of personal experiences & relationships w/ farmers, & even "the land" including videos, photographs, ... to go with stories & information.

Here's a ? for fun. I've just returned from 4 weeks in Thailand. Half of my time there was spent looking for good Thai tea. I found none. Should the expense of that unsuccessful search be paid by raising the prices of the tea I already have in stock? The cost of my search added to the expenses already incurred to obtain my inventory would make current prices too low to break even.

I'm jet-lagged & lost my train of thought. cheers
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Sat Feb 10, 2018 12:03 pm

Ethan Kurland wrote:
Sat Feb 10, 2018 7:22 am
Discussion is interesting. I wonder how many of the vendors participating in it, make a living solely from being a tea vendor! One needs many transactions when people like to buy small amounts, & the cost of marketing to get more transactions is terribly high.

When I wanted to buy a tea from Jun Chiyabari directly but could not unless I bought 10 kilograms, I became a vendor. I learned that offering a wonderful tea at the lowest price of any retail vendor, does not = success. People seem to need the marketing effort to feel the tea offered is good. Marketing includes social media participation to build following & the accounts of personal experiences & relationships w/ farmers, & even "the land" including videos, photographs, ... to go with stories & information.

Here's a ? for fun. I've just returned from 4 weeks in Thailand. Half of my time there was spent looking for good Thai tea. I found none. Should the expense of that unsuccessful search be paid by raising the prices of the tea I already have in stock? The cost of my search added to the expenses already incurred to obtain my inventory would make current prices too low to break even.

I'm jet-lagged & lost my train of thought. cheers
As a vendor, I can assure you that we are currently not making a living solely off of tea. However, we also just launched in November, so we are still quite young. I work full time, while my wife (who is the founder), works 3-days a week currently, and the plan is to do tea full-time starting this summer. With our current trajectory of growth, that should be feasible, but it is hard to say definitively at this time.

Completely agree that lowest price doesn't equal success. Somehow trust has to be built, and that is very difficult to do since there is so little transparency. How do we improve transparency? We have thought about including more information about our farms, but that is our IP and feels like a bad idea. We have thought about directly stating our (low) margin on every tea, but while we think the margin is quite low, many customers don't really understand what these numbers mean and might think we are ripping them off. We would love to decrease our margins even further, but, as Tillerman pointed out, lots of expenses lead to nothing, and you have to make enough money (either through margins or volume) to offset that.

I am happy to disclose here (to a more educated audience) that on many of our teas ~50% of the sales price goes directly to the farmer (i.e. the raw cost of the leaves), leading to gross margins (as defined as price less cost of leaves AND shipping to us and packaging... all divided by the price) less than 50%. Based on my research of other vendors, I believe this is 'best in the industry', but I obviously the data is very incomplete. I'd love to hear from others if you believe I am wrong.

(Quick hypothetical example with numbers to prevent any math confusion....
1. Farmer sells us tea at $200 a kg or $5.70 an ounce. We price it at ~$11.40 an ounce, so that ~50% of the price goes to the farmer.
2. Tea costs us $5.70 an ounce, + $0.40/ounce shipping to the US + $1.00 for packaging = $7.10 an ounce. We sell it at ~$11.40, for margin of ($11.40-$7.10)/$11.40 or 38%. This $4.30 in profit has to cover our overhead, with any remaining going to profit).
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Sat Feb 10, 2018 1:04 pm

chofmann wrote:
Sat Feb 10, 2018 12:03 pm
I am happy to disclose here (to a more educated audience) that on many of our teas ~50% of the sales price goes directly to the farmer (i.e. the raw cost of the leaves), leading to gross margins (as defined as price less cost of leaves AND shipping to us and packaging... all divided by the price) less than 50%. Based on my research of other vendors, I believe this is 'best in the industry', but I obviously the data is very incomplete. I'd love to hear from others if you believe I am wrong.

(Quick hypothetical example with numbers to prevent any math confusion....
1. Farmer sells us tea at $200 a kg or $5.70 an ounce. We price it at ~$11.40 an ounce, so that ~50% of the price goes to the farmer.
2. Tea costs us $5.70 an ounce, + $0.40/ounce shipping to the US + $1.00 for packaging = $7.10 an ounce. We sell it at ~$11.40, for margin of ($11.40-$7.10)/$11.40 or 38%. This $4.30 in profit has to cover our overhead, with any remaining going to profit).
I think your efforts - giving the grower a reasonable return - is commendable; I wish more would do it! I too work on gross margins of less than 50%.

Several commentators have noted that they cannot earn a living selling tea and I have no reason to doubt this; it's a tough business done as much for the love of it vs. the profit in it. But the fact that the market is crowded with sellers is no justification for insufficiently rewarding the grower and/or producer. If the market price of the tea is X, the grower should be receiving X/2 at minimum.
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Sat Feb 10, 2018 4:27 pm

In purchasing anything, I want the truth about the product.

What is said should be what is: organic should be organic, fresh should be fresh, etc. Honesty about products is what matters to me as a customer & as a vendor.

Lack of profit for vendors & the unlikelihood of a vendor making a living from selling special teas, is something I mention frequently because I try to be amused by this situation of consumers concerned about what percentage of a retail price goes to a farmer etc., & places that responsibility on vendors (choosing to believe some & not others who give their stories of fair trade etc).

Will consumers who approve of the way a vendor purchases his goods & otherwise runs his business & life, reward him by buying enough tea from him regularly to keep him in business? Will they buy tea that is almost flavorless & very expensive because of a sustainable farming that does not uproot trees etc.? Or, will they ultimately buy what they like more....? How much does it matter.

As citizens of the world, the great challenges involve difficult confrontations to make the world stop its habits that lead to destruction. Drinking fair-trade coffee etc. won't save us.
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Tue Mar 13, 2018 6:52 pm

Similar to the Everlane model for clothes, we want to be as transparent with our pricing as possible. However, we believe that this method only "works" from a business standpoint if you can compare it to reasonable assumptions about the competitors.

Using Everlane as an example: They will clearly lay out all their cost inputs (materials, labor, hardware, shipping, etc.), reveal the 'true cost' of the item (lets say $50), and then compare the output retail prices for both their own store ($120) and an 'average' competitor ($200).

We want to do something similar for tea, but are having trouble properly and honestly estimating what a competitor would charge for our teas. Our basic idea is to highlight the price we pay for the tea, the cost of the shipping to us, and the amount we spend on packaging. These three items add up to our 'true cost', with any margin on top of this number being our gross profit, used to pay overhead and (hopefully) ourselves.

To this end, I would love to hear your input as to what you believe is 'common practice' in the tea industry.

Some specific questions that we have been dealing with:
1. What are normal gross margins for tea businesses (margin calculated as the difference of retail price less 'cost' divided by the retail price)? Our research has shown 70%-80%, but if anybody has other suggestions, please let us know!
2. If we pay a farmer $10 for 2 ounces of tea, should that be our starting point? The vast majority of the industry still uses 'finders', 'sourcers', 'distributors', or other forms of middlemen. How should we incorporate this additional cost, and what is the normal margin that a middleman charges?
3. In order to keep our prices as low as possible, we often attempt to negotiate heavily with the farmers. How should this be incorporated? We may be spending $10 for tea, but a competitor is paying $15. This compounds with their higher margin to vastly increase their retail price relative to ours.

Since we are being transparent, what else would you like to see?

Thanks for the help!
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Wed Mar 14, 2018 1:05 am

chofmann wrote:
Tue Mar 13, 2018 6:52 pm
Similar to the Everlane model for clothes, we want to be as transparent with our pricing as possible. However, we believe that this method only "works" from a business standpoint if you can compare it to reasonable assumptions about the competitors.

Using Everlane as an example: They will clearly lay out all their cost inputs (materials, labor, hardware, shipping, etc.), reveal the 'true cost' of the item (lets say $50), and then compare the output retail prices for both their own store ($120) and an 'average' competitor ($200).

We want to do something similar for tea, but are having trouble properly and honestly estimating what a competitor would charge for our teas. Our basic idea is to highlight the price we pay for the tea, the cost of the shipping to us, and the amount we spend on packaging. These three items add up to our 'true cost', with any margin on top of this number being our gross profit, used to pay overhead and (hopefully) ourselves.

To this end, I would love to hear your input as to what you believe is 'common practice' in the tea industry.

Some specific questions that we have been dealing with:
1. What are normal gross margins for tea businesses (margin calculated as the difference of retail price less 'cost' divided by the retail price)? Our research has shown 70%-80%, but if anybody has other suggestions, please let us know!
2. If we pay a farmer $10 for 2 ounces of tea, should that be our starting point? The vast majority of the industry still uses 'finders', 'sourcers', 'distributors', or other forms of middlemen. How should we incorporate this additional cost, and what is the normal margin that a middleman charges?
3. In order to keep our prices as low as possible, we often attempt to negotiate heavily with the farmers. How should this be incorporated? We may be spending $10 for tea, but a competitor is paying $15. This compounds with their higher margin to vastly increase their retail price relative to ours.

Since we are being transparent, what else would you like to see?

Thanks for the help!
Well, that's certainly a start. Here are some very quick thoughts:

#1. I think your research is pretty accurate; I agree that 70%-80% is standard, and if as you say (and again I think you are correct) most in the industry still use "finders" etc. then that margin is on top of already marked up prices.

#2. Yes, there is a cost to sourcing your own tea but if you're just going to replace the "middleman's" margins with your own there is not much point. (Getting far better tea is a whole different subject.) And don't forget that in the supply chain you too are a middleman - and the goal, for a consumer, is to eliminate as many of these as is economically viable (however some, surely, do add real value to the equation.) So, what's it worth? You're seeing already from the readiness of many on this board to deal directly with the grower that for them it's not worth that much. The retail delivered price here needs to be pretty close to that available to a consumer purchasing at origin - not a whole lot of elasticity here.

#3. One of my main arguments is that not enough of the consumer dollar is flowing upstream to the growers, producers and their employees. And rather than paying too much for tea, most consumers pay far too little. Tea is a really cheap beverage - far too cheap. Furthermore, the current available margin is being taken by the middlemen (including the retail vendor) and the grower and workers are left holding the stick. As such, I rarely have ever negotiated the price down at the grower level and in many cases have paid more than was asked because I determined that the tea merited it. But because my margins are low, my tea tends to be lower priced than most for comparable items offered by my competitors (and that's not always an advantage when many judge quality by price, not by what's in the cup.) By the way, my margin is 49% for most items (and are often less.)

It isn't easy getting this right and I know all of us still have much to do.
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Wed Mar 14, 2018 4:52 am

Tillerman wrote:
Wed Mar 14, 2018 1:05 am
chofmann wrote:
Tue Mar 13, 2018 6:52 pm

3. In order to keep our prices as low as possible, we often attempt to negotiate heavily with the farmers. How should this be incorporated? We may be spending $10 for tea, but a competitor is paying $15. This compounds with their higher margin to vastly increase their retail price relative to ours.

Since we are being transparent, what else would you like to see?

Thanks for the help!
#3. One of my main arguments is that not enough of the consumer dollar is flowing upstream to the growers, producers and their employees. And rather than paying too much for tea, most consumers pay far too little. Tea is a really cheap beverage - far too cheap. Furthermore, the current available margin is being taken by the middlemen (including the retail vendor) and the grower and workers are left holding the stick. As such, I rarely have ever negotiated the price down at the grower level and in many cases have paid more than was asked because I determined that the tea merited it. But because my margins are low, my tea tends to be lower priced than most for comparable items offered by my competitors (and that's not always an advantage when many judge quality by price, not by what's in the cup.) By the way, my margin is 49% for most items (and are often less.)

It isn't easy getting this right and I know all of us still have much to do.
Interesting , no, amazing, to read this by you two vendors.

I'll comment on the "attempt to negotiate heavily with the farmers?" and the response.

Farmers may (and most likely do) sell to various people at different prices. To get a price that others get even though one is not a fellow countryman, friend, old customer, etc., seems harmless perhaps or a service to customers of the vendor, BUT, a farmer may not be able to sell all of his tea at the lowest price & still make a living (Just like airlines cannot sell all of its seats on a plane at the lowest price and still stay in business).

However, with top-quality tea, I believe that the concern may be like discussing how many angels can fit on the top of a pin. Sooner or later the farmer will know the value of excellent tea and it will not be sold for less money than what he needs to make a living. I (in Taiwan) & the two vendors I am responding to, do not buy leaves before they are processed. (Correct me, if I presume too much.)

The awful conditions for teaworkers in India (well documented on the BBC) have not changed much. We cannot change that; so, fortunately that type of tea (darjeeling) I get from Jun Chiyabari in Nepal, a company not horrible....If I really wanted such tea & could not get it from a moral, vendor in Nepal what would I do? I am not sure.

If we are going to look for "getting this right" as vendors and consumers, too many questions arise. Should anyone buy anything from China, a country that stole Tibet, displaced and harassed many of its people, killing some, putting some in prison, etc.?

As I said before, there are a lot of ways to be a decent person. It is good to keep our eyes open, but there is no perfect answer and we should be able to drink a cup of tea without feeling guilty. As a vendor who does not grind and grind to get the lowest prices, I have benefited. Tea that had been locked away from me, became available, I was steered away from bad purchasing etc., that is, treated as a friend as well as a buyer.

But, let's face it, I am an awful vendor, because what matters most to most people are the photographs and the bullshit (maintaining a website well). I will be getting some dayuling and foushoushan and selling it cheaper than anyone. Tiny amounts, just a bit more than I will use myself will be available. I was treated as friend and feel I should pass the tea along likewise. If I must market.... the price must go up.... Is that a moral question also?

Cheers
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