Shopping in Kinshasa

Since we’re onto such mundane and crass things as money, here is one about shopping in Kinshasa.

There are four or five ‘big’ supermarkets here, clean, modern and selling a plethora of imported goods, as well as a few rare local products. For those who followed my first chilling encounters with supermarkets in Armenia, this is incomparable, much closer to the quality found in European supermarkets, except for fruit and veg which are best bought in the market. Of course, the prices in these deluxe supermarkets are nothing like Europe, from where a lot of the stuff is imported. Try multiplying them by two or three! The good news though, is that the pricing system is so complex that you end up shopping blind, happily throwing goodies into your shopping trolley, blissfully unaware of the extortion you are being made a victim of. At least until you get to the cashier and she announces in a monotonous tone, without batting an eyelid, that you owe her some $200 for a measly list of articles that will barely see you through the week.

The pricing system. It’s quite ingenious really, if you’re the manager of a supermarket in a country with a potentially unstable currency. Just very frustrating for the customer. Items are basically given a code that corresponds to their price. For the sake of illustration, let’s say a jar of jam is tagged as B407. Each supermarket uses its own coding system, of course, just to add to the excitement.


So you’ve just pulled off this jar of jam from the shelf, and it’s marked at B407. To have some idea of what this is worth you have to (1) look for one of these bits of paper taped sparingly on the shelves from place to place, (2) make sure you have the right one because the codes don’t all fit on the same sheet, (3) search down the list for your code (B407), (4) find the matching price (83660 FC), and (5) make the complicated conversion to US dollars (divide by 430), then again to your own currency. Then you discover that the example I chose was rubbish, because even in the DRC a jar of jam is definitely not worth US$194.50. Nonetheless, the point I was trying to make remains valid: it’s a crazy, convoluted way of doing something perfectly simple.