Martinique: at the supermarket, the ordeal of high prices – 09/24/2024 at 7:48 p.m.

With a white cap on her head, Eveline pushes her half-empty shopping cart through the crowded parking lot of a large supermarket in the southwest of Fort-de-France. A pack of water, yogurts or even fruit, the retiree denounces, like many, prices that “strangle” the Martinicans.

“We are suffocated, we are strangled, we can no longer buy anything,” the 69-year-old woman complains from behind her dark glasses.

“In my shopping cart (…) there’s not much,” she says after loading her shopping.

Like Eveline, all the customers of this supermarket interviewed by AFP testify to prices that are often exorbitant compared to mainland France.

“I don’t eat meat anymore,” says Lise Castania, standing in front of her car. In the store, frozen steaks from a major brand are selling for 19.46 euros per kilo compared to 10.71 displayed on the Leclerc Drive internet platform in Montpellier.

Having arrived in Martinique from the Parisian suburbs about a month ago, the forty-year-old is “hunting for promotions”.

“Last time, there was a promotion on Nutella, I bought 3-4 pots. I stocked up for the children,” she says, assuring that she spends “300 euros minimum” on groceries each week compared to “maybe” 200 euros in the Paris region.

With the trunk of her car open, her hands holding a pack of 144 diapers – “the cheapest” – and two packs of water, Elodie, 32, mother of two, spent 42 euros.

A 6X1L pack of Evian costs 8.51 euros in this supermarket on this island of about 350,000 inhabitants, nearly 7,000 kilometers from Paris. The 6X1.5L pack of water from the local Lafort is 3.85 euros.

But buying local doesn’t solve everything, says Elodie: “Dessert bananas cost less” in France, while the plantations are often located in Martinique.

“It hasn’t become more expensive, it’s been like this for a long time,” says Cynthia, 42. She and her husband moved back here nine years ago. “It’s true that we’re very careful about prices now,” says the marketing manager.

“It may be utopian but we would have liked, given that we are French citizens, for us to be more aligned with prices in mainland France,” adds her husband Gaël, taking up the demand of the RPPRAC, the collective at the forefront of the movement of anger against the high cost of living launched at the beginning of September. A curfew has been put in place in certain neighborhoods and extended until Thursday to deal with urban violence.

If the stylist mentions the cost of transport for imports, he persists: “there are prices which are not justified”.

Questioned last week by AFP, experts cited the cost of transport, the question of weak competition among distributors but also that of the octroi de mer, a customs tax applied to imports.

“If we don’t want to get depressed, we must above all not compare (…) what we used to buy in Paris and here,” says Cynthia.

– “Increase awareness” –

The Kiprix website, created by Robeen Simeon, is used to compare prices between the Drive internet application of a Leclerc in Martinique and two stores of the same brand, in Toulouse and Montpellier.

In Martinique, according to an INSEE study in 2022, food prices were 40% higher than in mainland France.

Behind his round glasses and three-day beard, Robeen Simeon, a Martinique developer, scrolls through the products on his computer screen. About 9,000 are listed.

“Barilla pasta weighing 500 grams, Penne, is sold in Martinique for 2 euros and in (metropolitan) France it costs 1.02 euros,” he says, based in a co-working space in Fort-de-France.

He launched his platform in mid-September, based on an idea from his father, in the midst of the movement against the high cost of living, and says he has received a lot of encouragement from consumers.

While the 28-year-old acknowledges that with these comparisons, “depressing” the people of Martinique can be a fear, he hopes to “increase awareness”.

Residents of Guadeloupe and Reunion, where life is expensive, have asked him to “do the same thing for their islands”.

Its objective: to inform people about places to shop at the best price in order to “regain a little purchasing power”.