Empty Shelves, Wild Inflation: What Is Happening In Belarusian Stores

Food prices are rising rapidly.

Since the beginning of the year, the Belarusian authorities have restricted the import of a number of European-made products. And since the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, including from our territory, the country has come under new sanctions. At the same time, the Belarusian-Ukrainian border was closed for imports and the route of goods from Poland became longer. Since the beginning of the war, the dollar has increased by more than 16%, and since the beginning of the year — by more than 21%. All this inevitably affects trade. The website zerkalo.io tells exactly how.

Food prices are rising very fast

All prices in this material are recorded from the words of readers who provided receipts and photographs of price tags as confirmation.

In different cities of Belarus, with the growth of the dollar, prices for products, primarily imported ones, also increase. Sweet pepper in stores costs an average of 15-17 rubles, but it is also found for 25. A week before that, it was about 12 rubles.

Banana prices are rising fast. In a bill from a Minsk store last week, the price for this fruit was 4.3 rubles, and now it varies from 5.5 to 7.

Along with rising prices, demand for some products has jumped. Most actively, the interlocutors say, coarse salt and sugar are bought up in stores. As a result, the shelves in some grocery stores turned out to be empty over the weekend. “In Navapolatsk yesterday (March 6 — edit.) it was impossible to find coarse salt in any store, only fine salt occasionally,” a buyer from this city told us. “They mostly take Ukrainian salt, which is used for seaming. They think that it won't be around for a long time now,” a supermarket worker in Rahachou confirmed.

In the queues in the stores you can meet people with a similar set of products. In addition to salt and sugar, the cart often contains several packages of cereals, flour, pasta, and butter.

Retailers compare product hype to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Meanwhile, the empty shelves in several stores are easily explained — there were no new deliveries over the weekend, and people were buying quite actively.

“I don't want to go panicking. But no one knows what will happen next. Therefore, I’d rather buy a few kilograms of buckwheat, pasta, buy tea, coffee, sugar and salt now. I will be calmer,” explains a resident of Homel.

A resident of Mahiliou on Saturday evening in the Troika store noticed an advertisement stating that some products are sold no more than three packages per person.

“Many buyers wanted to take a lot, for example, 10 kilograms of sugar. But at the checkout they didn’t sell in such quantities, referring to this piece of paper,” says the interlocutor.

In the store itself on March 7, where the journalist called as a buyer, they said that they had no restrictions on the sale of products.

Belarusians are actively buying up not only products. The demand for pet products has increased. On the websites of two large pet stores, buyers are warned about the increase in delivery times due to high load. At the same time, the interlocutors say, there are problems with specialized and dietary feed, which is imported from Western countries.

Over the past week, it has become noticeably more expensive to please a child, or service a car. For example, a children's balance bike on March 2 in the online store was 176 rubles at a discount (or 187.45 rubles without it), and on March 7 on the same site it was already 231 rubles.

In another online store that specializes in auto products, on February 18, our reader ordered engine oil for a car for 129.8 rubles, and on March 7 its cost was already 223 rubles.

On the eve, Minister of Antimonopoly Regulation and Trade Aliaksei Bahdanau said that MART “will stop any speculation in the food market.”

“Belarus is ready for different scenarios of developments, alternative options for supplies and replacement of products are being worked out. We are not a closed state today, only a small part of the world took up arms against us. There are other places as well. We work with those countries that want to work with us,” he said.