Since the Minister of Finance budget prescription, I have heard two “threats” of a possible increase in prices, the first from a doubles vendor and the other from a Tobago fisherman, both based on the increase in the price of gas, and there may have been many more.
In both these instances and others, perhaps the threat of price increases may have some merit because of the ensuing spinoff in terms of expenditure, negligible as that may be, but underlying this threats is the presumption that T&T consumers will talk and fuss for a while but will eventually pay the price hike.
What is the reason for this phenomenon? In the US and other metropolitan countries if the increase of one penny is perceived to be unjust and exploitative consumers will simply not buy, with the inevitable consequence of the product remaining on the shelf to the obvious detriment of the seller.
Here, however, the tradition reflected in the maxim of a former politician that “money is no problem,” stemming no doubt from a gas and oil economy which brought in huge amounts of money to a population of little over a million, seems to have caught on with the wider population so much so that a peculiar mindset about prices has emerged over time.
You don’t, for example, query prices in a public place for it is beneath your dignity to do so, and it is a loss of “status” which the average consumer at a stall would hardly want to risk. This status associated with spending is reflected in other ways like the guy earning a modest salary using most of it to purchase an expensive whisky instead of the cheaper ones simply to impress his friends, and ending up beating his wife when he goes home with little or no money and she questions him about it. Or purchasing a huge car or an 80-inch TV when you are renting a one-room apartment.
It’s the classic Napoleonic syndrome of “small people trying to play big”! The issue of status with regard to spending is integral to our psyche as Third World peoples which is why the principle of the thing in refusing to buy if a price is unfair, or discharging your civic responsibility in protesting against unscrupulous sellers, makes little difference to us, as it does with people in more progressive societies.
The seller has the right to charge whatever price he chooses but you as the consumer have the equal right not to buy if the price seems exploitative, and if this happens as an overall pattern, out of this would emerge the kind of balance where fairness prevails for all. And this process can begin with you!
Dr Errol Benjamin