Here’s Why Egyptians Need to Stop Complaining About Prices from International Brands
Photos have been surfacing Facebook and other social media platforms of people complaining about how International brands are ripping us off by placing fake tags over the original tags, but the truth is, it’s all a result of our not so beautiful economic crisis. Also, just in case you were wondering, no, they didn’t double the price of goods on Black Friday and then put a 50% discount on it to trick us into buying it.
What’s actually happening is that the prices of almost everything in our country doubled after the floatation of the Egyptian pound. When they sell you something with its original price they’re actually giving you a 50% discount. How? Because the revenue which is in US dollars will be less.
The image above was used by people to complain about how H&M claims to be offering a discount by selling this item for EGP 149, while its original price is EGP 119. However, if you look at any of the other prices in the different currencies and do a simple conversion with the current rates, you will find that the item now costs EGP 278, which makes the price a good bargain.
But according to pictures, Egyptians still didn’t mind this whatsoever and still headed to the shops and bought stuff like crazy, as this can clearly be seen by the photos of the great amount of people rushing to the stores and buying everything like they have all the money in the world. It’s all a matter of demand and supply, and the rise dollars doesn’t seem to be causing any decrease in demand which means that it will just keep rising till it reaches a point where we will be forced to stop importing stuff.
WE SAID THIS: It’s better to stop with our demand now while we still have the choice and limit spending to necessities which a EGP 1000 jar of Nutella is not one of them.
