"Do You Know Why We Have Such Crazy Prices?"

One of the thousands of the authorities' manipulations of "comparatively honest skimming money from the population ".

I ran into a classmate at the VK, had a conversation, offered to meet her and drink coffee.

We met in the city, and during the conversation she told me about a very interesting phenomenon, which explains a lot in the processes of special economic way of Belarus.

She works (she is a medic by education) in a customs clearance company. As a rule, the work of the private firm consists in selecting the necessary parameters for certain goods that do not fit the categories defined by the state. But there are times and that they just have to "negotiate" with the customs. And here's something interesting she said:

"Do you know why we have such crazy prices for everything? Because the state is not interested in the supply of cheap goods.

A client of mine urgently calls me to the customs, he is bringing apples from Europe, and this is a problem. Since the purchase price of apples is 10 kopecks per kilogram, and the customs simply refuses to let them pass, because there is an implicitly set lowest price threshold for any product.

The customs officer says bluntly that if the price is 10 kopecks, the state will not earn anything.

If you set the purchase price of 2.5 roubles, then we will perform customs clearing. As a result, it turns out that the entrepreneur pays more than the apples are initially cost. He adds the interest on top, which covers the customs clearance, transportation, storage, etc., and the price of these apples for the end consumer will be not the appropriate 25-30 kopecks, but 3-5 roubles per kilogram, in fact, imposed by the state. And this scheme concerns absolutely everything, any goods crossing the border of Belarus.

I think it's worth thinking about how the authorities are robbing us, as this is only one of hundreds of possible frauds with our pockets.

Andrei Voynich, European Belarus telegram channel