|
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Cervantes: Sari-sari stores as barometer
By Ding Cervantes
SARI-sari stores are barometers of poverty depth in any barangay.
There are stores that sell both canned cooking oil and cooking oil repacked in small plastic bags enough just for frying an egg. And when such stores abandon canned cooking oil altogether to offer only oil in plastic, the poor has become poorer. And many stores are doing just that these days.
What such stores sell hints on the life of the community. Ask for a big tube of toothpaste but you're told toothpastes come in sachets, and so do shampoos and a lot of other items sold "tingi". Observing the sari-sari store behavior, you will conclude many people can't afford to buy their needs in more expensive quantities at one time.
How hard times have really become. But for those in the middle-income bracket, the economic pinch is never as painful as those who wake up daily to again find the poverty line way too high for them to jump over.
Sari-sari stores paint the drama of poverty. Such as when a woman from the squatter's area surfaces at 12 noon to buy a small pack of instant noodles and a piece of egg, conjuring up a scenario of her entire family of five partaking of such viand for lunch. There is more pain of soul there than hunger on the part of parents, and for their children, more hunger now and the pangs of abdominal pain later.
For folk who now ignore sari-sari stores and have been supermarketing through the years since neighborhood malls offered stiff competition, it would be difficult to empathize with poverty even if one had been through it at some point in their lives.
That's how humans have been, with a few exceptions. You rise from poverty and seek others of the new kind to associate with, the former peers in the lower status now shelved, even any memory of having been once poor dissolved like an effervescent tablet raising the spirits to a more comfortable social level.
Many years ago, the rich were respected because their material possessions were rooted in honor, whether their wealth was earned in one's lifetime or inherited. Things have changed these days. Not the apparent "respect" for the rich - this stupid instinct to kowtow to anyone who appears grandly wealthy - but how we associate wealth with honor.
We treat crime lords with honor, not yet for their crimes (I hope), but for the fact that they are very rich (and powerful). We keep on electing politicians whose multi-million bridges persist on collapsing, those already notorious for bleeding taxpayers by exacting their traditional SOPs from their favorite contractors, those whose wealth (despite their claiming to devote most of their hours awake to being a public serving politician) cannot be explained by their salaries and allowances.
There is good reason to suspect that many of those who own luxury vehicles these days are of the variety where honor had been earmarked only for a dictionary entry, nothing more. Aren't the best sport utility vehicles owned after all by politicians and people close to them, including their mistresses? One former official in Pampanga, for example, has been flaunting a beautiful mistress who now owns an SUV costing over a million pesos. She has been jobless before she went into the mistressing career. Her father is a simple farmer whose plea for better material life had always rested on prayers, though it cannot be said that his daughter's liaison was one prayer answered.
If at all there is one thing in the sari-sari barometer that calls for watch, it's when they no longer sell cooking oil in plastic bags, shampoos in sachets, noodle soups and eggs. That would mean the items are no longer in demand. Because poor folks no longer eat.
(October 5, 2004 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board.Click here. |
|
[return to top]
[home]
[network page]
|
LOCAL NEWS
BUSINESS
OPINION
SPORTS
LIFESTYLE
FEATURE
|
