Food prices continue to rise and the authorities of the city of Sancti Spíritus try to curb inflation by pressuring private merchants to reduce their products. The official appeal, however, has not found an echo in a sector hit by the high costs of raw materials and taxes.
Susana and her husband sell cookies and were at a meeting called by the local authorities this Thursday. “They told us that we had to lower prices because it is an orientation of the Communist Party,” she details to 14ymedio. “But we can’t, until recently we were buying wheat flour from a MSME that sold it for 135 pesos but now we have to pay more for it”.
“We are against a rock and a hard place, because if we lower the price we have practically no income. Everything we earn we would have to invest in buying the ingredients for the cookies, that is, we would work for nothing,” he says. “Between the raw material and the taxes, they do not leave us any room for a reduction.”
“It is not only about the products that we must pay at high prices to keep the business afloat, but about the fact that this work requires a lot of sacrifice: getting up very early to knead, mold and bake the cookies,” he details. “Then, the time that must be dedicated to selling, hours and hours standing and in contact with customers who are often upset by the prices.”
“We are against a rock and a hard place, because if we lower the price we have practically no income”
“These meetings are being held with all the self-employed in Sancti Spíritus and the tone is not one of suggestion or recommendation, but of imposition,” laments Susana. “They don’t talk to us like people who have to go through a thousand and one difficulties to keep their business open and who also provide a service: our cookies are the school snack for many children in this neighborhood.”
This Friday, the Vicente stall, where sweets and candies are mainly offered, was abuzz because several self-employed workers came to the place to talk about the meeting the day before. The discomfort with the adjustment that is being asked of them seems widespread in a sector in which many believe that they are trying to blame them for inflation.
“They tell us that we have to lower prices, but when I go to the store at MLC [moneda libremente convertible] I am forced to pay dearly for the products that I need to make the trinkets that I sell here”, claims Vicente. “There are merchandise that I cannot find anywhere else and the supposed wholesale market that they were going to open for the self-employed has been a failure resounding”.
Customers feel caught between two waters. “Prices are forced to run and since the beginning of the year they have risen a lot, but if the government continues to pressure individuals, we will be left without the few cafeterias that are still open selling something,” admits a young man who paid 120 pesos for a small package of sweet biscuits in a private sales point, close to the center of the city. “Of course I want to pay less, but we can get to the point where even with money we can’t do something like that.”
The battle to regulate the prices of the sector on its own has lasted several years and at times it is reinforced, languishes before the reality of inflation or adds new official mechanisms to punish those who do not assume the capped prices imposed by the authorities.
“They tell us that we have to lower prices, but when I go to the store at MLC [moneda libremente convertible] I am obliged to pay dearly for the products that I need”
“We have to go to a confrontation of those prices that are increased in certain activities and by certain people indiscriminately to obtain high profits”, commented in January 2020 the Minister of Finance and Prices, Meisi Bolaños Weiss, in a broadcast of the Round Table program .
To ensure compliance with the measure, the Government released several telephone numbers for reporting vendors who do not comply with the order and also launched an army of inspectors who visit the shops and impose fines on the merchants, but none of these practices has provided fruits.
Now add local meetings and direct pressure on each merchant that, for the moment, seem to be causing more discomfort among entrepreneurs than beneficial results for customers’ pockets. The authorities’ next step could be much more radical, in a context where inflation appears to have gotten out of control.
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