Time was, when all Polish fruit juices were outstanding - 100% fruit at farcically low prices. I remember back in the early '90s meeting a British guy in Kraków, working for what was then Beechams, whose thankless task was to sell Ribena to Polish mums. At the time, the product was being sold only in certain regions in Poland, and yet there was no way then to deliver TV advertising regionally. So mums and children across Poland were being subjected to ads for a product that they could not buy. But why would they want to?
Back in the early-mid '90s, the only blackcurrent juices generally available in Poland were, well, 100% blackcurrent. And much, much cheaper than Ribena, which had to be trucked half way across Europe. So for obvious reasons, it never caught on here.
Then economics caught a hold of the Polish soft drinks industry. Little by little, fruit content started dropping, the word sok (juice) started being edged off packaging and replaced by weasel words like 100% smaku (100% taste), and the packaging design and marketing became slicker and slicker, prices started inching towards those found on products in UK shops. The Tymbark brand, owned by Maspex, has for a long time had the best-looking cartons and labels, and Tymbark was what found its way into our home for many, many years.
But fight back has started. A year ago, Agros Nova, producer of the Fortuna brand, launched an ad campaign suggesting that your average carton of soft drink masquerading as 'fruit juice' has high sugar and low fruit content. Fortuna juices are 100% fruit.
Worked on me.
We now buy Fortuna cartons and Tarczyn bottled orange juice (also an Agros Nova brand, also 100% fruit). Eddie takes the 300ml bottles to school, plus they always have an interesting fact printed under the cap. Example. "The population of China today is greater than the entire number of people alive on the Earth in 1860". Or, "The world's biggest car park, for 20,000 cars, is in Canada." We get through dozens of bottles a week.
Do take a moment, though, to look at Fortuna's labelling. Its blackcurrent juice is actually "JUICE of grape and BLACKCURRENT WITHOUT additional SUGAR or sweeteners JUICE 100%". To labour the point, a circular blue sticker reads: "100% juices are exclusively fruit. According to the law, you cannot add sweeteners to fruit juices." What we are not told, however, is what is the blackcurrent content of this 100% fruit juice; the label merely says "100% grape-blackcurrant juice", suggesting that grape is indeed the main constituent of the product. Ribena, ready to drink in carton form, contains (according to its website), 6% blackcurrent juice. Plus an unspecified amount of added sugar.
A propos of shopping. My local hypermarket has put on a little display (above) reminding sated shoppers that it's 20 years ago this week that the heroic Prof. Leszek Balcerowicz introduced his shock therapy to Poland. He dismantled the communist economic system at a stroke, liberalising prices, stopping soft loans to loss-making state enterprises, and letting free enterprise fill up the shelves. (They looked a bit like the one pictured, except without all that meat on the right hand side.) Inflation fell from 800% a year to something a bit more manageable, unemployment shot up from zero to 13%. The losers from that shock have suffered to this day, but overall, the economy is in sound shape. Although public finances are long overdue for reform.
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9 comments:
Was it the very first time you saw empty shelves in Auchan?
The supermarket is half a mile away from our house, so my family do everyday shopping there (ordinary produces like bread, rolls, butter or milk are 50 per cent more expensive in the corner shop) and such sight is the order of the day on the meat shelves and those next to bakery.
My father has got to know some of the ladies working on the back and whenever one of them pops out he asks them for a meat he wants. It's not that they don't have it, they're disorganised and don't lay it on shelves.
I think the Christmas/New Year break caused quite a dislocation to the supply chain. Things were still not back to normal a week later.
Worth supporting your local spożywczak. Use it or lose it!
then lose it! Lots of lazy neighbours stock up there despite the exorbitant prices, so it won't go bust and waits for me round the corner, in case bad weather or unexpected guests come.
Bartek - the difference between a price-gouging neighbourhood store for the newly-rich and a spożywczak for Pan Ziutek and Pan Heniek lies in the availability of Dry Red Wine. If the shop doesn't sell any (like the shops in Jeziorki, Zgorzała or Zamienie)you can tell that the clientele are a bunch of rural tightwads that would not allow themselves to be charged exorbitant prices. Long live GS przy torach!
it's a quaint theory I have to say, though I had to read it through a few times to get it and I'm still not sure whether I caught on it.
Prices in the local small shops are basically comparable. My cornershop is not posh, only the prices there are posh (one can buy it those alcohol beverages which are on demand, i.e. vodka, beer and "sparkling" wine). Small shops will never be able to undersell supermarkets, because of economies of scale. The other story that their owners in neighbourhoods like ours noticed new residents expect a shop with basic goods, which is a stone's throw away and are ready to pay through the nose just because it's near and they don't have to walk a mile to buy bread or take their cars and drive to a supermarket.
Inhabitants or Zamienie / Zgorzała have no choice but to patronise in their shops, in NI, mostly in the part bordering on Piaseczno locals have a hypermarket within their walking distance, so the shopkeepers face the competition from the hypermarket. As it turns out, it's not destructive. In spite of 30 per cent higher prices most of neighbours buy in the local shop because they either can't afford to waste time going to the hypermarket, or they don't like and/or don't trust the big shops or are too lazy to walk a few hundred metres.
And in this microeconomic world everything works properly, there are no constraints, full information and competition only the consumers don't appear fully rational, but it's their choice (and preference).
Where's the GS przy torach? Next to Jeziorki PKP station? Once it get warmer I have to venture there for a reconnaissance! ;)
Bartek - did you read the article about Claret in the Christmas issue of the Economist? Different place (Warsaw, not London), different century (21st,not 18th) but same concept. The rich drink differently to the poor.
Can you imagine a worldly and wealthy person shelling out 27 zlots for an indifferent 'semi-dry red' from South Africa at the shop in Zamienie? Jeez - I'd rather go sober!
NI and Mysiadło have larger concentrations of the newly-wealthy who wish to display their new-found tastes in New World clarets, and so your shops will stock quality Australian, Chilean and Californian wines (at a 5 to 10 zloty mark-up compared to Auchan), but they will stock it. The 'GS przy torach' sells not a single bottle of dry wine. Just cheapo semi-sweets or sweets. But mostly cheapo vodkas and strong,sweet, Polish beers. These shopkeepers know their clientele!
prompted by your comment I had to. The difference lies not only in what they drink (though I think everyone needs to have something that could distinguish them from the others), but mostly in the way they drink. Drinking culture differs between the tiers of society. You wouldn't rather see a well-off guy knocking back a bottle of jabol and then throwing it up or pissing on a fence.
On the other hand one's real nature often comes to light after one gets drunk.
There's no real different in the percentage of alcohol-addicts between the groups of poor and rich. The rich just don't drink in front of beer kiosk, rather at home.
Would I imagine? A true worldly and wealthy person? Not. But a fellow with pretences to be, accompanied by poor manners - might be within realms of possibility.
That's the curse! A real wine connoisseur will buy wines in a decent shop in Warsaw, or rather even abroad. My cornershop still seems to have local ordinary residents, rabble and construction workers as its target clients (the share of the last group diminishes after the pace of development clamped down). So where's the GS?
What's known by the locals as 'GS przy torach' (suggesting the shop's existence pre-1989) is today Sklep Tomasz, on ul. Karczunkowska across the road from the bus terminus (pętla). The shop's OK for newspapers, fresh bread (before 09:30) and other staples; no dry wines at all, most expensive wędliny cost 21zł/kg. The shop in Zgorzała (SebDam)is generally better stocked; good meats, better wines.
The shop in Zamienie (Max) is nice and modern but doesn't sell newspapers, no decent wines (last week only dry wine was some dreadful miód pitny).
I know which one it is, just didn't know the name ;)
PS. shouldn't you be delivering English class at the moment?
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