DR ERROL N BENJAMIN
LIKE WITH covid19 deaths and much else, we seem resigned to our fate about skyrocketing prices. An editorial in a daily last week, captioned 'Caring for the consumer,' focuses on this issue, talking about the people's plight and the need for immediate solutions. But will the powers that be listen? Do they ever listen?
My jaw-dropping experience of trying to shop for some basic household items the last weekend of January should tell a story and wake us up from our slumber: $370 for one fence post lantern when a pair was less than $225-$250 the last time I bought them; $320 to replace faulty tints on the car when six months ago the estimate was $150; $45 for a 3.2 kg of rice when last December it was under $20 for a 2kg; a packet of frozen chicken previously $33-35 has now gone to $58.
And taking a cursory glance at the ads on used cars, the innocuous looking 'ks' at the end of numbered prices spell doom for the poor/middle man, for whom, according to Visham Babwah, the industry was initiated. And I can go on and on.
Surely, price increases are inevitable and they often have to do with what the economists call the 'supply and demand' principle. If supply is short, demand increases and prices go up. The new word, however, which has become fashionable in the lexicon of supply and demand is 'freight,' which has always been a factor in the price issue but has now taken centre stage because of the pandemic. Every increase is now attributed to rampant freight increases.
The threesome of supply, demand and freight, inter alia, have always impacted prices but always it was taken for granted that here would have been a fair sense of proportion among all these players. But now with prices sky-high as they are, in some cases over 100 per cent, it begs the question of whether there are issues involved other than the purely economic. Is it possibly opportunism at its worst, making exorbitant prices appear to be the 'natural' consequence of the ravages of covid19 on the supply/demand/freight chain, when in fact such prices are brutally out of proportion to the actual expenses involved?
No one would deny the extra expenditure on the supply chain and the need for higher prices, but when 'mark-ups' degenerate into downright profiteering at the expense of the people, that is a cause for great concern, and it clearly illustrates how the seemingly legitimate business maxim of 'profit to max' can lose the social responsibility it is supposed to carry.
Which is precisely the problem. 'Sellers' presume to have this unbridled power over the customer but are consumers aware that they possess their own kind of power to hold unscrupulous sellers at bay? Official oversight would be a great first step for the consumer with an efficient monitoring system and penalties for those found culpable.
Such is wishful thinking, however, for there is virtually no working apparatus for such, and if even there were, self-serving public officials, as is common knowledge, are ever ready to sell-off the consumer t
