How
supermarkets profiting from shortage of coins
By MUNGAI KIHANYA
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
25 January 2009
You go to the shop to
buy something and the shopkeeper says he has no change; “Can you take
these sweets instead of the two shillings I owe you”, he offers. Many
people accept this and walk away without thinking much about it.
I was made this kind
of offer at one of the supermarket near the Central Bus Station in
That translates to
about 60 customers per hour or over 700 in a typical 10-hour working
day. The missing change is due to a shortage of one-shilling coins thus
customers were buying the sweets in exchange for between one and four
shillings. That’s an average of sh2.50 each.
Thus on a typical
day, one cashier at the supermarket was making about sh1,800 extra sales
because of the shortage of the one-shilling coins. In a month, this
comes to sh54,000.
Since the sweets are
offered right at the end of the purchase when the customer is in hurry
to leave, the supermarket may be able to sell them at inflated prices;
say, one shilling each, compared to 50 cents from a street vendor.
With that in mind, it
may be reasonable to expect that the supermarket is making a profit
margin is 70 percent. It turns out, then, that they could be easily
making sh38,000 per month from the sale of the sweets – enough to cover
the salary of the cashier!
It was this quick
calculation that made me stand my ground and demand my three bob in
cash! Other shoppers behind me on the queue thought I was being
unnecessarily difficult.
When the cashier
insisted that he did not have the coins, I told him to give me five
shilling: That way, I argued, I would go away with his two bob instead
of leaving him with my three. With my plan, the loss is less!
Furthermore,
considering that on average, customers were buying goods worth about
Sh300 to Sh500, the extra Sh2.50 gained represents about half a percent
of additional sales for the supermarket. Perhaps it is not worth their
while to fight for!
This must have been
the reasoning of the management at Uchumi Supermarkets on
***
I have to find room
for Barrack Obama! The new
The crowd was
estimated at between 1.5 and two million people. It stretched for two
miles – over three kilometers. That’s about the distance between the
Museum Hill and the Haile Selassie roundabouts along
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