“50 cents a pound on the dock and still $11 a pound in Costco. What gives? Who gets?”
I worked four summers in a cannary off of Bristol Bay, AK in the 80’s. Two years there were strikes by the fishermen as they felt the price was too low...both years the fishermen settled and received a higher price.
OK, that’s my background — as for the $11.00 Costco price? Canneries/fish processing plants are VERY expensive. The cannery I worked in had five lines and each line was $3,000,000 each back then. My second year the cannery opened a ‘flash-freezing’ plant (frozen fish in small to large bags) and that was an expensive venture as well - it is the freshest way to receive frozen fish.
There was a fish ‘processing’ company about 1/2 mile from the cannery I worked at (Bumble Bee). They contracted with the best fishermen on the bay — the fish would be unloaded by the fishermen onto a small scow, the fish iced with salt water ice and flown by helicopter to Anchorage where it was flown to Seattle and Portland. THE freshest Sockeye salmon available. All of that is expensive!
I cannot help but to side with the fishermen who have $400,000 boats and $500,000 licenses but these things do go in cycles just like the annual fish runs have 2, 3, 4 and 5 year cycles (when several cycles overlap there are tens of millions of fish to catch) — it still gets into the economics of the annual situation.