Groceries

Before coming here, we heard all kind of horror stories about how difficult it is to get your basic necessities, and images of people queueing for hours to get into some empty shop that has two or three bulk items and nothing more. Reality is quite different, though it is sometimes a hassle.

First of all, you can find most anything you could find in a normal supermarket, meat, vegetables, whatever.

Just to give an idea of prizes:

• a beer: 0.5€

• feta cheese: 1,5€

• 200g of butter: 3€

• a package of spaghetti: 2,5€

• 1l of fuel: 1€

• 400g of mince meat: 1€

• the rent for our two bedroom flat with garden: 300€/month

• electricity and water: haven't received the bill yet but everyone tells us it should be around 10USD/month

• telephone bill for one month: 0.4€ but it still isn't working

• SIM card for mobile: either 0.10€ at the official rate or 60€ on the black market

Some items are surprisingly hard to find though, and I can't find any logic behind it. For instance, we've now been looking for the past three weeks and in like 6 supermarkets for salt, which we can't find. Other rare products include sugar, rice, cooking oil and meallie meel (used as often here as we do potatoes). But lots of people travel to South Africa or Botswana to buy those products there and bring them in. Also, there even exists a mailing list dipleague which is used between all people (mostly expats though) to look for such items and offer things for sale (sadly, many people also leaving the country and selling household items).

How Zimbabwean economics work: the moment your company offers something for sale, you have to increase the price daily. Now what with products for which you don't simultaneously order consume and pay for your item? You can think of deliveries that take a couple of days, but also work. I agreed to pay my house maid 250M Zim$ for the one day of work per week that she comes to do the laundry, but if I should pay her at the end of this month, that would have meant she would get only 1.5€.

An example, the access to Wi-fi Internet in public areas: the so-called ZOL Hotspots: beginning of May, you could buy a card for 24h of internet at 350.000.0000Zim$, which was at the time the equivalent of about 2USD$. This makes it about 0.08USD for one hour. Last week, the company adjusted its prizes to 1h for 300.000.000Zim$, which is about 1USD for one hour: in short, the price went time twelve! But, in a couple of days or weeks of the current depreciation rate of the Zim$, and it will once again be worth almost nothing. Other areas in which this applies: telephone mobile rates, plane tickets, monthly subscriptions to newspapers, etc.

So one is constantly faced with waiting for the moment it is cheapest to buy something and worries that the prizes will be adjusted before you do. It makes life maybe more complicated and challenging but you must admit it is fascinating to watch. At least from the position of somebody who is paid in Euro's and not in a local wage of course...