Sir,
If I hadn’t been into a hypermarket last Friday afternoon, I don’t think I would have been writing these lines in response to your article last week about prices. It should, I believe, be borne in mind that it is the shoppers who have given the retailers licence to charge as they will. All they had to do was underspend. Market forces have always influenced pricing, and such forces are generated by the buying public.
My experience on that hypermarket visit, as an example, was seeing a product by a well-known UK producer of frozen food products, which was clearly originally labelled at one British pound. The price in Nicosia was just under CY£2! Indeed, an overstick label had been used to conceal the UK price but fortunately those labels were peeling off.
Now, as your reporter Mr Leonidou mentioned, in a democracy and particularly within the EU there is no price control, but equally shoppers could exercise restraint. It doesn’t need a degree in rocket science to know that the British pound in Cyprus has an exchange value of CY£0.82 or thereabouts Add to that estimated freight, documentation charges etc and insurance uplift of no more than 5 per cent (if that), and one finds a cost in the region of CY£0.86, not forgetting that the trade price of the product was never really GB£1.00 – there would have been a substantial trade discount and possibly too a quantity discount. I therefore suggest that food traders here are quite accustomed to a shared gross profit uplift nearing 100 per cent. Compare that with the acknowledged EU mark-up of around 15 per cent maximum and all should be clear. I left the product at the checkout and apologised for any resulting Inconvenience. I also left the store and went to Larnaca.
Even if it were possible to legislate in respect of pricing, and it isn’t, the only panacea, and an absolute one at that, is to stop buying, difficult as it may be. The world will not come to an end if the housewives in the so-called overpriced areas leave the hypermarket with a half trolley rather than the gargantuan quantities I saw being transferred to cars.
For those high prices to attain lower reasonable levels, just stop shopping; alternatively, discover as I did, that Larnaca is possibly a more economic proposition than Nicosia and it was well worth the 15 minute drive to find lower prices at a Carrefour owned establishment. I also compared some 20 or so prices with a friend in Switzerland where there is a Carrefour hypermarket and to my horror discovered that they were, in respect of some everyday products, some 40 per cent cheaper than Nicosia. That Switzerland, a non-EU area, is the most expensive place in the world is an absolute myth, it seems that food shopping there results in a trolley full at a very much lower price.
May I commend your decision to print Mr Leonidou’s revealing article and I now suggest that you put him on the next plane to either Zurich, Amsterdam or Brussels to check out and compare prices, he could be there and back in a day. Following further exposures, perhaps when he next writes, prices may have fallen but only with the endeavour and restraint of the shoppers. It cannot happen by just whinging and trusting or hoping that the government will do something. Only an emptier cash register will bring results.
The slogan now then must surely be “Think and compare first and then buy but only if you have to”! Perhaps you could print that on your front pages for a month or so and do a really good deed to your readers.
A former chairman of a manufacturing and distribution company within Europe, Nicosia
