State Basket of 80 Products: We Don’t Need Price Freezing, But Public Price Comparison

Once upon a time, Večernji list had a section in Zagreb called ‘Price Basket‘. It was introduced back in the 1980s and was renewed under new circumstances somewhere in the mid-1990s.

It was published on Fridays, just before the big weekly shopping. Week after week, the prices of about 40 basic consumer goods in the largest retail chains were compared. Retailers were not particularly fond of this. They did not want to provide price lists. And when journalists started their own inspections, managers of some chains would chase suspicious customers who were writing down prices in a journalist’s notebook. So journalists switched to dictaphones. Regardless, the data was collected every week.

For each item, it was indicated where it was the most expensive and where it was the cheapest, and at the end, the total cost in each retail chain for such a Večernjak ‘basket’ was summed up.

The section became extremely popular and turned into a real city guide for Saturday shopping – from the general amount to individual, most favorable items. Retailers realized this too.

For a while, one chain managed to outsmart journalists, so just before Friday, on Wednesday or Thursday, they deliberately lowered the prices of some items from the Večernjak basket. Thus, the usually most expensive chain would be presented as the cheapest. Readers began to complain that the data from the basket – detected on Thursday and published on Friday – did not correspond to the state on the shelves on Saturday.

In this endless retail game of hide-and-seek with the public, journalists then decided to choose a different corpus of products each week. One week we compared the prices of 800-gram jars of jam, and the next week those of 400 grams; one week the basket contained apricot jam, the next week plum jam, the third week cherry jam…

Thus, the ‘inflationary’ comparison was lost, but the new ‘floating’ basket remained the best guide for weekly shopping.

This section has since been lost, and I remembered these stories in light of the current basket of 80 products, for which the government is seeking price submissions on a bi-weekly basis. So now the state is decreeing what retailers used to find out themselves.

Retailers Again Unwilling

Retailers are again mostly unwilling to disclose their price lists (except in leaflets for products that are on special promotions), but they will again find a way to outsmart. We can be sure that prices in stores will be cheapest on two occasions – the 15th of the month and the last day of the month, as these are the dates prescribed for reporting.

When I read this, I wonder what Andrija Mikulić and his team are actually doing. A thousand inspectors’ excursion into stores (why is only the top ten largest chains targeted?), and taking those 80 prices (and why not more?), should be the regular job of market inspectors, not only in stores but also in all service sectors, from hospitality and tourism to telecommunications.

By the way, the Ministry of Economy tracks the movements of prices of goods and services in Croatia on its pages in cooperation with the DZS, but it does not go down to the level of individual retailers, instead focusing only on selected products; so far, they have stopped at November, and it will be updated when statisticians publish the new monthly report for December.

Consumer associations have also tracked prices, primarily highlighting them in two currencies, most often under the guise of secret shoppers. However, there is no current information, like the former Večernjak basket, today, although there are significantly more advanced possibilities for realization, even on a daily basis, almost in real-time.

And state intervention? Well, if inspectors published all comparative prices, we wouldn’t even need freezing. Customers would surely go where it is most favorable with such a manual, and retailers would quickly adapt; no one wants to have the stigma of being the most expensive.