The Tribune

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business

Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

A BAHAMIAN wholesaler says it has been unable to sell $100,000 worth of butter, which has been sitting in its warehouse for five weeks, because the Price Control Commission has yet to approve a revised selling price.

Heath Pritchard, vice-president of Asa H Pritchard, told Tribune Business this highlights the inefficiency of price control regulation and how perishable goods can spoil and go off before they even have a chance to reach food stores and the end-consumer.

Suggesting that the Government is thus “putting the cart before the horse” with its proposal to expand price control by 38 product categories, which is due to take effect from tomorrow, he questioned how the Commission will be able to handle the increased workload when it struggles to provide timely responses to present wholesale requests.

Mr Pritchard explained that the butter, which took seven months to get to New Providence due to global shipping delays, has a landed cost 15 percent higher than the current price control limit. In such situations, wholesalers write to the Price Control Commission to request a higher price that compensates for the increased cost but still aligns with the mark-up/margin permitted by law. However, the timeframe in which such approvals are provided is simply taking too long.

Mr Pritchard said he and other wholesalers have made these concerns known to the Prime Minister, and were assured that the Government would respond to them within two weeks. However, he revealed: “I called the Price Control Commission last week Monday and they told me they were tied up in meetings about these new price-controlled items and they wouldn’t be able to get to my matter until another couple of weeks.”

“They are brushing all of the old stuff aside and they are making me wait, and I am going on six weeks to two months before I can sell a single case of butter. They’re trying to show us what’s going to be for us on 1,200 items under price control. They are just putting the cart before the horse.”

Wholesalers have been trying to work with the Government on the new price control items, but feel the implementation timeline - and deadline by which they have to make the changes - is too tight without faster Price Control Commission approvals for changes to ‘schedule A’ goods such as butter, grits and mayonnaise.

“If I were to sell a case of butter, I would literally lose money and not many people understand it because they don’t have to deal with it. They don’t understand how significant it is because we lose about 6 percent of the sale on price control because our break even is so high, which is just the cost of doing business,” Mr Pritchard explained.

“Here they are trying to force what’s going to be 1,200 items plus for Asa H Pritchard, and here we are going on six weeks of sitting on inventory. We’ve got two containers sitting in our warehouse where we can’t sell a case because our landed cost is higher than our approved selling cost from the last shipment we brought in.”

Mr Pritchard warned that the combination of price control expansion, which will cover more than 5,000 items, and delayed approvals could force wholesalers to stop importing certain products because the losses they will incur are just too great.

“This has to be a smokescreen for the Bahamas Power & Light (BPL) rate hike. I think they said to themselves what was the fastest way to pass a Bill in parliament to relieve the pressure on the public, and it was price control,” Mr Pritchard said.

“Come Tuesday we don’t know what we’re going to be selling and at what price we’re going to be selling it at. It’s going to be a disaster. If they had said that this was coming in January, we would have been able to iron out the details, we would have been much more receptive to it, and we would have figured it out, but you expect us to flip the switch without even providing tariff codes?”