OUR DAILY BREAD

Consumers should be wary of  believing that Thursday’s announcement by National Flour Mills (NFM) that its flour prices would go down on Monday would be followed by a similar decrease in the prices of flour on supermarket shelves.

Or that the decrease in the prices of both flour and bread would match NFM’s decrease. Merchants in Trinidad and Tobago have traditionally disregarded Newton’s Law that what goes up must come down. And this even when the prices at which their goods and services have been purchased have indeed come down, and sometimes dramatically. In January, when National Flour Mills increased flour prices by 22 per cent, following on an increase worldwide in the price of wheat, bread at the supermarkets jumped by more than NFM’s 22 per cent! The argument advanced for the additional increase was that of overheads. Will there be another increase in overheads, which this time around will have to be absorbed by NFM’s announced decrease?

The domestic consumer has a degree of patience seemingly far in excess of that of the Biblical Job. Indeed, many Trinidad and Tobago consumers put forward as their reason for accepting increases in the cost of foodstuff, the altogether odd argument that they “cannot eat the money”. Clearly, what is missing here is a Consumers’ Association, which would sensitise consumers on not only the need to shop wisely, but as to the landed cost of goods, in much the same way that a now defunct Consumers’ Association, founded by the late Vera Braithwaite in the early 1960s, had alerted them. Mrs Braithwaite, in an effort to reach the largest number of housewives and others with data on landed cost in relation to shelf prices, and how to seek positive bargains, had produced a highly informative publication, aptly called “The Consumer”. Since then, the consumer either because he/she is uninformed or not sensitised to issues of concern to him/her, has adopted, in the main, a passive or almost laid back approach or was prepared simply to grumble about the rising cost of living.

In turn, because of the traditional reluctance of the business community to roll back prices either at all or to the extent of the decrease in the landed and/or supplied cost of goods, we are constrained to take with the proverbial pinch of salt the offer by the Supermarket Association of Trinidad and Tobago (SATT) to reduce the retail prices of named goods should Government review duties on certain basic items. SATT, however, has been presented with an excellent opportunity by National Flour Mills to demonstrate to the nation’s consumers that there should be no doubt that it means what it says. It can do this by passing on the full extent of NFM’s decrease in flour prices to the consumers. And should Government partially reduce duties on even some of the items noted by SATT, then should the supermarket owners correspondingly reduce shelf prices, this would be a valid argument for Government to accede to their demands. But we will not hold our proverbial breath. January’s increase on NFM’s increase in flour prices is too fresh in consumers’ minds for them to believe otherwise.