Fair Trade

September the third, 12.25, after long morning on the first day back after the summer holidays we’re all looking forward to lunch. Queue a massive rush to the canteen to buy food. We all queue up, finally get to the front and arrive at the till only to find that the prices have gone up... yet again!

Year on year this happens, generally the price of everything goes up by five pence from what it was the year before. Admittedly, on a one off purchase that isn’t too much but overall that’s five pence a day on every item you buy, and over the course of a year that all adds up.

Take a chocolate brownie for instance. When I was in year seven chocolate brownies cost thirty five pence each. The price this year is sixty five pence. That’s an increase of five pence for each year that I have been in school and now I’m paying nearly double what I was paying back then. If I were to buy a brownie every day (which I don’t, of course) I’d be paying an extra £58.50 to what I was paying in year seven. Surely that isn’t fair trade on the part of the school canteen.

The obvious answer to why this is happening is inflation. Prices are always rising because the economy expands. In the 2007/2008 period this made sense because inflation was rising steadily so prices should have risen in line with this. But, surely in our current economic climate with inflation in the U.K. hitting a record fifty year low the prices in our canteen, if there is a need for them to rise, should not do so to such a great degree.

You might be wondering, as I was, why the school don’t step in to limit the rise in prices or if that is impossible find their business from a different catering company. After all, the entire point of our free market society is to encourage competition between businesses and make prices more competitive for the consumer. The reason they can’t do this is a simple one. No competing businesses exist. In our area, the catering company have a monopoly over the school dinner’s market.

In the wider business world, monopolies in business are prevented by the competitions commission. They are an independent public body who monitor the pricing policies of businesses to avoid a situation where two companies collude to make products more expensive for the consumer. They also assess potential mergers of business and how that and their day to day running would effect competition. The aim of this is to avoid any one business gaining a controlling share of the market. The entire point of such an organisation is to prevent the formation of monopolies, in order to negate any potential detrimental effects on the consumer. To promote fair trade, so to speak.

So why doesn’t such an organisation exist to monitor the business of school catering companies? Honestly I don’t know. Probably because they are too small for anyone in a position of power to care about. Personally though, I intend to blame Jamie Oliver, it’s not really his fault, but I’m going to hold him responsible simply because it’s down to him that we can’t eat Turkey Twizzlers anymore. And I like Turkey Twizzlers, so I don’t like him. But that’s another rant for a whole other freeway article.

Maybe, one day, I’ll be able to do something about the ever increasing price of chocolate brownies. And then I’ll finally be content.

Here’s a little something for you to ponder.
Don’t you agree that it is unfair that only one company can produce the board game Monopoly?