Thousands of Barbadians are taking advantage of Government’s online portal which compares the prices of retail items.
During a recent interview, acting director of the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, Bertram Johnson, said the Price Check had an overwhelming success so far. As of March, he said they registered more than 80 000 visitors and more than 713 000 hits. At the beginning of this month, he said they already registered more than 4 000 visitors.
Price Check has been online since October last year, allowing Barbadians to see and compare the cost of items at various supermarkets.
“This actually started back when we were the Price Control Division, where we monitored prices and became the hub for price information. After the rebranding in 2004 to the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, we thought about how we could better serve the public by providing information to them on a timely basis, at least in terms of the data points that we collect. This really came to the forefront in a sense when we had the dislocation in terms of global supply chain challenges around COVID period . . . and in 2024, we consulted a data analyst expert and came up with Price Check,” he said.
Compact
Johnson said they monitored more than 300 items, including 47 which used to be part of the compact between Government, retailers and the unions.
“You can browse by category and once you pick an item, let’s say tuna, you can see a list of prices from various supermarkets, from [cheapest] to the most expensive,” he said.
The director said the platform was open to all, so retailers could also see what the competition was doing and might price themselves more competitively as a result, adding the island’s retailers had been nothing but cooperative.
He said the reason they continued to specifically monitor the items previously under price control was for policy purposes.
“Those 47 items represent those commodities that most persons will buy. In monitoring that, what
we found, even after the compact, the retailers continue to hold prices close to the 2022 price, which is commendable, so people still benefit from a lower price.
“That’s good for policy purposes because it gives Government the tools that if they have to consider other policy prescriptions that they can reference something that they use. And it is useful for even future policy making that we monitor how those 47 items are performing to date, whether they have escalated, gone back to pre-compact levels,” he said.
As for the future, Johnson said they were planning to include healthier items in conjunction with the Ministry of Health and the Heart and Stroke Association of Barbados. He said they were also creating a mobile app.
“We believe that the web-based application was limiting . . . so we are very advanced in creating a mobile application. That should be coming within the next month.”
In addition, the director revealed plans for a features page, where specific items would be highlighted according to the season, a deals page with items on special and a small business page featuring entrepreneurs and organisations such as FundAccess and the Small Business Association.
Johnson said the long-term goal was to become a regional or even international leader in the field, where other countries looked to Barbados to duplicate what the island was doing.
(CA)
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