Barbados Chamber of Commerce president Andy Armstrong has called on the Ministry of Commerce to once more look at publishing a monthly table carrying the prices of the 27 items in the basket of goods.
In the wake of comments from Minister of Trade and Commerce?Senator Haynesley Benn that merchants were ripping off consumers with inflated food prices, Armstrong said such a table would help consumers to judge if there was an increase in prices from month to month so that they could identify which supermarket was offering a better deal.
“Something like that would be a very good tool for making sure that retailers stuck within the right bounds and also encourage competition and keeping the prices down.
“With that, consumers wouldn’t have to go from store to store to know who has the best prices, they could see it there in black and white,” he said.
Armstrong told the SUNDAY?SUN?that most wholesalers and retailers were operating above board and he saw little evidence of unfair price hikes.
“I can’t speak to every single business. In any association, 95 per cent of the members may follow, but not everyone may,” he said.
The businessman said prices varied from supermarket to supermarket and acknowledged that some would be higher because of larger overheads.
“If a store has a nice big car park, with wide aisles, there are probably going to be charging more than a store than doesn’t have a car park or doesn’t offer the same kind of luxurious facilities.”
Yesterday, when a SUNDAY?SUN?team went shopping for the best deal, one supermarket sold a two litre bottle of mauby for $12.99 while another close by sold the same product for $14.45.
The unit price for beef stew at one supermarket was $19.53 per kg while another supermarket had it at $16.95 per kg.
Red seedless grapes were being sold at one supermarket at $19.84 per kg but for as little as $13.85 per kg at another outlet.
Armstrong reminded Barbadians that for any item that fell under the basket of goods, there was market control by the Ministry of Commerce, and there was legal redress against gouging businesses.
He said there were different suppliers of some products and there would be different costs of the same item.
“This is why in last Thursday’s Front Page story, one supermarket had stew beef at $14.99 per kg and another supermarket had the same commodity at $22.75 per kg.
“That would indicate that the one that had stew beef at the higher price bought it from someone who was charging more for beef.
“I don’t believe there is an issue of price gouging. There has been talk about mauby, but that is not an item that carries the environmental levy, so even though the environmental levy came off it didn’t help mauby because they never paid it before.
“Mauby does pay VAT,?so mauby would be one of those items which would have seen the VAT go from 15 to 17.5 per cent.?So that takes care of part of the increase in mauby which has a strong sugar component and the price of sugar has risen by 31 per cent last year,” he said.
