Although Easter and May Day do not have the same consumer dynamics as New Year’s and Christmas, during the combined spring holidays we can expect increased consumption by 30 to 40 percent – Veljko Mijušković, assistant professor at the Faculty of Economics in Belgrade, told RTS.
He adds that we can expect price increases in certain categories of meat as well as catering services and tourist arrangements as well as other things on which citizens focus their free, holiday time.
He adds that retail sales have already started and that merchants will tempt us with discounts on current products such as eggs and dried meat products.
Mijušković states that we can talk about the fact that there will be some stabilization of prices at the moment when that demand peak falls.
“I do not expect that there will be any drastic price variations, but it may happen that there will be a shortage of some categories of items. Now the merchants are reporting that there is a shortage of charcoal due to the barbecue that will be organized and that its price is quite non-standard, that is, we cannot talk about an expected average price, but it varies significantly from facility to facility,” says Mijušković.
We shop excessively for the holidays
As much as food prices are a painful topic of the domestic economy, the rule that applies in our country is that you must have something for the holidays. While preparing a rich meal, we are also ready to take on debt. We buy too much, and we throw away excess food, even though there are more and more hungry people.
“According to data from the Food Bank, about 770,000 tons of food are thrown away in Serbia annually. It is expected that food waste will increase with the amount of consumption in this period, which is about 40 percent. If we know, according to some data, that one Belgrade resident, for example, produces 300 grams of waste, now it will be at least 450,” Sanida Klarić from the humanitarian organization Food Bank told RTS.
She pointed out that since the coronavirus pandemic, the number of companies donating food for the poor has dropped significantly.
“The food bank had somewhere around 50 donors, and they were big donors, and that gradually decreased so that now we are about half of that number. However, an action has now been launched to abolish the tax on food donations so that companies have an interest in donating,” Klarićeva said and pointed out that the Food Bank receives donations in the form of rice, flour, canned goods and other packaged food.
He says that they further distribute those goods to about 220 organizations that take food to those who need it most. He adds that it is not only the unemployed, people with disabilities or elderly households, but also families in which some of the members work, but their incomes cannot cover the increasing costs of food, are in need of donations more and more.
