There seems to be a spree of frolicking with prices of essentials, less essential and luxury goods people have become accustomed to using. With improvement in the economic condition, even the poor and marginal people have long started setting aside allocation for aromatic body soap, shampoo and tooth paste no matter even if those are cheap varieties of local origin. In families with growing girl children, the demand for toiletries and cosmetics goes up proportionate to their growth from childhood to teenage to adulthood if, of course, they are not married off earlier.
Coronavirus has made it incumbent on all segments of society to make arrangement for hand washing. The urgency of maintaining personal cleanliness and hygiene of the living quarters also warrants some extra expenditure on floor and toilet cleaning materials. But at a time when the low-income people have been struggling to manage two square meals ---quality notwithstanding, the few things considered essential for maintaining personal and family hygiene have suddenly become a luxury they no longer can afford.
When they have to sacrifice some of the food items in order to cut cost, it is plain to see that many of them are forced to do away with some of those items which have alternatives like tender branches of neem or other trees people once used for brushing teeth. Even managing such branches of trees is not easy for the low-income people living in the capital city. Their back-breaking labour such as carrying bricks, sands or cement on makeshift stairs or splintering bricks into chips leave them hardly any time and energy to go for searching such alternatives.
While it has been like a gold rush for traders ever since the injudicious price raise of fuel oils on an average of 50 per cent, people from the low-income group to middle class are reeling from the unrelenting volatility of the market. Apart from the rising cost of foodstuffs, all consumer goods necessary for living a modest life have registered galloping price escalation.
Arbitrary increase in prices of eggs and cooking oil has conclusively been proved. When the production cost has increased by just Tk 0.03-0.04, the egg syndicate manipulated the market to effect a higher price by Tk5.0-6.0 on an egg. In case of cooking oil too, no logic was there to increase the price of a litre by Tk30-40 overnight. But it happened.
The same is happening with every other item, rendering those to be luxury goods for the low-income people. In the black art of unilaterally skyrocketing the multinational companies hardly comply with any norm even in normal times. What is the logic behind hiking the price of a toothpaste tube of 200-250 grams by Tk 10-15 at a go? In case of prices of detergent, skincare soap, shampoo, face wash, after-shave lotion of foreign origin, it is anarchy all the way. If you are lucky and know some of the shopping tricks, you may get an item at half the price at a retail shop whereas if you are a novice shopper you have to pay even more than double the price at one of the super shops for the same item. This is commercial robbery in broad daylight. On this count, toiletries and cosmetics of local origin, albeit the disproportionate rate of price increase, cannot have price differences of atrocious levels. But the rise is still irrational and beyond the purchasing power of the low-income segment of society. The number of such people is growing with the market heating up further. If such a large number of people lose the purchasing capacity, imagine the consequence. The producers taking undue advantage of the situation will see the sale of their goods drop drastically. Not a good prospect. They are inviting stagflation as well as their business slump. Bad for them and the country's economy.
