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Friday 21 July 2017

Vinegar, salt and sardines


Via pri.org we discover the delights of shopping in Venezuela.

Rosalba Diaz pushes her shopping cart through what, at first glance, seems like a well-stocked supermarket in Caracas. But looking closer, she can see that many of the shelves are jammed with bottles of vinegar, boxes of salt and cans of sardines.

Diaz, 66, is an economist at a Caracas consulting firm, but she says her salary cannot keep up with Venezuela’s near 800 percent inflation. Last year, she stopped traveling and eating out. She has shopped at this market for more than 20 years but now, she says, many basic items are missing from the shelves — things like bread, rice, coffee and corn flour. And what is on the shelves is unaffordable.

“Food is so expensive,” Diaz says, as she pushes her cart. “I can’t buy heavy cream. I can’t even buy cereal or fruit.”

She checks out the onions, which cost 4,000 bolivars a kilo (about 50 cents at the black market exchange rate). That’s twice as much as last week, so Diaz says she’s only buying two.

8 comments:

Demetrius said...

A bit like it got sometimes in the late 1940's when the Ministry of Food was known on our street as The Ministry of Queuing.

Sam Vega said...

Thanks Hugo Chavez for showing that the poor matter and wealth can be shared. --@jeremycorbyn

Scrobs. said...

Sam, please don't give Corbyn ideas, he's got enough on his plate already...

Sam Vega said...

Michael, that quote actually was from Corbyn. He tweeted it about four years ago. He's a long-time admirer of the socialist paradise that is Venezuela.

A K Haart said...

Demetrius - I'm sure most people think it could never happen again without quite knowing why. Those who know about it in the first place that is.

Sam and Scrobs - it isn't easy to tell if Corbyn is a crazy old coot who never grew up politically or merely evil. I tend to go for the latter.

James Higham said...

Socialist utopia.

Scrobs. said...

Thank you Sam, I really must learn what that little @ sign means...

As I don't Twit, I get confused more than somewhat, so it was the 'old coot' then!

A K Haart said...

James - where all you have to do is get used to a diet of sardines.