Better buy cans
Luis Gomez, 62, pays 1,500 pesos for a box with 20 kilos of chayote. He sells it for 100 pesos, making a profit of only 500 pesos in the three days it takes to sell it. “Right now we have a super peso and with these prices it is not enough for anything,” he complains, saying that inflation affects almost all the products he sells. He says that peas have risen almost four times their normal price, from 40 pesos to 150 pesos per kilo. Luis points to the canned goods stand in front of his business, “people prefer to buy canned puree, I tell them to buy it myself,” he says about the tomato, which he now sells for 30 pesos per kilo instead of the 15 pesos of a few weeks ago, and which in his store is already ripe, a few days away from starting to rot.
The price increase has changed the landscape and the flavor of street stalls. The salsa is no longer as spicy, but it is not because of gentrification to please foreign palates, but because chile is more expensive. The absence of red salsa, which is based on tomatoes, is also noticeable. In some taco shops it is offered much less compared to the green and in others it is simply not served. The onion and cilantro usually share a large container where the taco maker takes the same amount for each taco, but now it is full of onion with a few small green dots, the small bunch of cilantro that they pay for to disguise its absence. “That is what we put in cilantro, and if it falls on the floor, we take it to the pawnshop,” says Luis Muñiz, 48 years old, who saw the price of cilantro rise to 400 pesos per kilo in recent months.
Raising prices is not an option
Despite inflation, many know that losing customers is more expensive than raising prices, so they hold out as long as they can. Jorge Videles, 53, is a waiter at the Acuario lunch and taco stand, which serves breakfast and lunch. Although he says he doesn’t know how much the prices of the restaurant’s products have gone up, he can tell when they stop using chayote in soups and replace it with carrot, squash and potato, or when they stop preparing dishes with cilantro, which can change the seasoning but prevents prices from going up. Jorge says that customers demand the price they see on the menu, and that even if they cover them with tape and write on them, many scrape until they reach the plastic and demand that price. “We have to keep them, because that’s what the menu says, and do you know how much it costs to change them?”
Trinidad Gonzalez, 62, has a juice stand where he has kept the price of a liter of orange juice at 35 pesos, although now he buys a kilo for twice what it cost him a few weeks ago. When he tried to raise the price of a liter of orange juice by 10 pesos, people complained and stopped buying it, so now he is considering stopping selling it until its value goes down. Next to Trinidad’s stand, Ana Reyes sells tortas, quesadillas, chilaquiles and other Mexican food where avocado is essential. Before, she bought a kilo of avocado for 15 pesos and now she gets it for 80 or 100 pesos, but despite that she has not raised the prices, “as soon as you raise them, people stop coming.”
There are exceptions to the rule, others have raised prices and have managed to maintain the same number of customers. Aldo Rodriguez has a fruit stand at the intersection of Monterrey and Insurgentes avenues. He went from paying 7 pesos per kilo of orange to 39, so he changed the price of his most sold item, half a liter of orange juice, from 20 to 50 pesos. He says that people complain about the increase, but that in the end they continue to consume.
Between expectation and resignation, the shopkeepers say that due to the lack of rain or too much rain, there are products like cilantro that have increased in price and they hope that in two or three months the prices will return to normal. For now, the mango season helps, but again the rains complicate things, “Who wants a mango with this rain?” says Aldo.
Source: elpais
