A few hours before the start of the month of Ramadan, Lebanese activists began circulating pictures of some types of Ramadan sweets, which are sold at fantastic prices, as the price of a kilo of “baklava” reached 400,000 Lebanese pounds, and sometimes half a million pounds (half an employee’s salary).
This comes as some sweet shops have stopped selling to customers using bank cards, and kept paying in cash to evade the tax imposed by banks on prepaid cards.
During the month of fasting, in which families resort to many foods to which cheese is added, such as pizza, chips and knafeh, citizens noticed a significant increase in the prices of cheese. The price of a kilo ranges between 200 and 400 thousand pounds per kilo, depending on the type.
The consumption of Lebanese Ramadan sweets is active in the capital and the Lebanese regions, especially those made of cream, on top of which are the Beiruti “Kellaj” and “Qatayef”.
And during this month alone, with the price of goods rising in line with the rise in the price of the dollar, “Sky News Arabia” toured some sweet shops, to see the prices, which seemed “fiery”.
Zina (a housewife) told Sky News Arabia: “It seems that we will crave sweets as we crave vegetables and fruits. It is not easy to prepare them at home, and they are not easy to buy after the high prices of basic materials, especially milk and sugar.”
Haifa (a worker in a sweets store) saw that “compared to the previous years of Ramadan, especially during the crisis, whoever used to buy several kilograms of sweets became satisfied with only a small amount.”
Moving to a sweets shop dedicated to kunafa, an official in the store said: “Our customers will buy sweets during the month of Ramadan. This month is a generous guest who comes once a year and sweets must be eaten in it.”
He explained that “the price of the kunafa cake is one dollar, after the cake was sold for two thousand pounds, it became 24 thousand, this means that its price settled in one dollar, which is the current price of the dollar in Lebanese pounds.”
An employee of the “King Sweets” store in the capital said that the price of a kilo of dates amounted to 250 thousand pounds, while the price of a kilogram of sweet cheese reached 200 thousand pounds, noting that these prices are recorded even in popular areas.
He added, “The sales movement was good with the advent of other occasions and holidays, such as Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, and people must buy during occasions unlike normal days.”
As for prices, he said, “We had to raise prices reasonably compared to the difference in the current dollar exchange rate. The dollar’s price increased by 900 percent, while the prices of our sweets only increased by 200 percent.”
He added, “The traders of raw materials do not deliver goods to us except in dollars or at the daily exchange rate, so it was necessary to raise prices to maintain the level of our products, whose quality and quality have not changed.”