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Thursday, August 1, 2013

Shortages: 7 Products Often Missing in Argentina


7 comments:

Iain said...

I enjoy the blog, and visit at least once a week, but hate the video format articles, mainly because there's no easy way to skim the content. I'm not going to commit 17 minutes to this - it's just too much time for too little information. Can you post a script, or put three-minute video summaries up.

Anonymous said...

I agree. Plus, for your sake, videos don't make good SEO food for spiders.

SurvivalAndProsperity.com said...

Good material as usual FerFAL. Thanks for identifying those 9 products (by my count) that were missing or saw shortages in Argentina.

Anonymous said...

For those that don't have the time:
4 biggest things missing, or that have limits when they are in stock (with greatly inflated prices): sugar, flour, oil and milk.

The minor items that are usually missing/out of stock are: tea (specific to Argentina so I won't try and spell it) and toilet paper. Safety and security are also still severely hampered.

Any imports are either impossible or overly inflated, i.e. electric appliances. Parts for machinery won't come through customs.

Toys are missing. Locally produced ones are poor quality. But people will spend hundreds of dollars for a quality toy.

Larry said...

Ferfal's description of chimarrĂ£o mate (pronounced mah-tay) reminds me of stories from 1945 Berlin and their coffee. They had a fake substitute they called "ersatz coffee", which by all accounts was far inferior to "real coffee", but it was better than nothing.

Anyone who had real coffee had some serious black-market connections.

Martin said...

I watched your video and also read some articles about shortages in Argentina. For me its like a time machine which takes me back to 1980s. I'm polish and we had shortages (even worse than yours) during communism time. It realy amazes me that you guys are now busy with copying all the mistakes Poland made 30 years ago. We had prices control, central control of economy, we tried to replace whole the import with a domestic production and ... none of those worked. At the end of 80s polish economy collapsed. I'm sorry to say this but you are currently heading towards exactly the same direction.
The "funniest" part of your video was about toilet paper. The funniest, because toilet paper was always missing in the communist Poland. This fact was even used in many comedies from that time. There were also permanent shortages with meat. You can find below a photo of butcher's shop from the polish communism time:
http://static.polskieradio.pl/files/95e078ed-9ebe-4c5d-bb36-1aeed599c032.file
What is missing on this picture? -:)
I do not have also any good news for the argenitnian's future. What can the argentinian government do more? Looking at the polish past, the next step can be rationing goods and commodities. It was done at the begining of 80s in Poland and it of course ... did not work. Luckily for Poles, we've been busy with building a real market economy since more than twenty years. You should do the same I guess.

Anonymous said...

Hey Larry the funny thing is my parents grew up drinking this fake coffee as kids in Germany sometimes because real coffee tea and milk were somewhat expensive but this fake coffee was called Mucha-fuch and was made whatever was at hand and didn't taste that great it was sometimes made from barley or the roots of this one plant that you can sometimes find on roadsides.