Your Least Favorite Holiday Food Tradition.
The Reasons Behind It
As December approaches, you can’t help but start to feel conscious about the holiday season. The sights, the sounds, the smells all give away the fact that Christmas is near.
In my experience growing up in Africa, way before the weather became dry and chilly, or way before the Christmas songs, something my Mum did almost every year used to remind me that Christmas was close.
I’m talking about the several sacks of caprice that sat in our pantry and the one or two baskets of tomatoes, that took up a large chunk of our freezer space, not to mention the poultry birds frolicking in cliques around our compound several weeks before Christmas. You’d think my Mum was a caterer but she wasn’t, you’d think we were hosting a party the next day but we usually weren’t. As a typical African Mum, she was simply doing the prudent thing — making these bulk purchases weeks in advance as a hedge against the usual rise in food prices during the holiday season. Does any of this sound familiar?
As a matter of fact, I find that one of the things a lot of us have come to expect during the Christmas season besides a wider waistline is higher food prices. It seems to have become a holiday tradition. But why is that? You may have been wondering. Luckily, I’ll get into the reasons shortly, so keep reading to find out:
Some of the reasons are:
- Increase in demand for Christmas specific foods: Take a typical Ghanaian home for example, imagine a Christmas without jollof, fried rice and salad, fufu, goat meat, chicken or turkey in that home. Hard to imagine right? I mean, would that even be Christmas? These are some of the most widely consumed foods during the festive season, staples on our holiday tables, and because of this, the demand for these foods increases during the holiday season. And from economics, we know that once demand increases, so does the price.
- Supply shortages: Buying food in bulk before Christmas just like my Mum used to do and many of us do today, also contributes to the holiday price hikes. You’re probably thinking… “but I buy in bulk early to avoid buying at higher prices later so how does that end up being the reason that prices go up?” I know, it’s somewhat ironic but what buying in bulk earlier could do is create food shortages closer to Christmas. And when there is a shortage of a product, the value of the product increases, then the price follows suit. So basically, your effort to avoid buying food at higher prices may be contributing to inevitably increasing prices.
- Increase in demand for fuel: Christmas is a time typically spent with loved ones and family, and oftentimes this means traveling several (thousand) miles to be with them — or them traveling to be with you. Whichever way and for whatever reason, there’s always an increase in the movement of things — animate and inanimate during the holidays. This increase in holiday travel makes the demand for fuel higher, which in turn leads to an increase in transportation costs. This affects the prices of food because oftentimes, food has to be transported between states or even between countries to get from farm to market. So if transportation costs are high, the price of the goods will increase.
- Predatory Middlemen: This is an unpleasant reality but some instances of food price increases during the holidays may be as a result of the activities of middlemen who impulsively jack up the prices of food items arbitrarily. This causes the end seller to add all the extraneous costs to the selling price of the commodity in order to make some profit.
There’s also the farming aspect to this holiday price hike tradition and sometimes it’s not about what happens during the holidays but what happens long before then…
In some cases, it’s the prices of inputs such as seeds and chicks at the point of production months before the holidays that affects the selling prices of these products during the holidays. Input sellers know that farmers and traders will sell at higher prices during the holidays so they sell the inputs at higher prices to farmers around June/July so as to not be left out of the profit sharing.
So if you’re out shopping this holiday season, and the price of a food item is higher than it was during your last visit, these are some of the likely reasons for that.
Leave a comment below to let us know your thoughts on this topic and how you deal with food price hikes during the holidays.
