What is fair trade?
Today, I went to a supermarket near my condo. I love grapes so I went to fruit section and I was searching for a Japanese grape. I looked at the price of the grape and I was shocked by the price. There was only a few grapes in the package but the price was 35 Singapore dollars! In Japan, it was about 7 Singapore dollars. I needed to pay extra 28 Singapore dollars just because it did not trade fairly. Fair trade is the trade that has done fairly for buyer, seller and retailer. In my grape case, if it has been traded fairly, the price should be about 8 to 10 Singapore dollars. I only need to pay about extra 2 to 5 Singapore dollars if it was traded fairly.
Why fair trade is important?
Reason number 1
Supermarket is the place where we can buy food and drink. But it is also the place where customers need to be happy. If someone is angry, everybody else would get angry too because they would see a bad behaved customer and it would make us angry. And the supermarket would lose customers. So customers need to be happy in the supermarket. Now, how they would be happy? The answer is service. A good service would make customers happy and bad service would make customers angry. So that’s why staffs are in the supermarket and that’s why price should be fair for everyone. If people see 28 Singapore dollars grape, they would not be happy, at least. Maybe they would not be angry but they would not buy the grape because the price is too high! From grape lover’s perspective, I would get angry because I can’t eat grape!
Reason number 2
Actually, the supermarket is losing money and customers. Let’s say the cost is one dollar. If we sell it at 28 dollars, the profit is going to be huge. That’s good for the supermarket. But if they don’t have customer that buy this, the supermarket would lose money because they can’t sell it so there will be no profit! But let’s say cost is one dollar and we sell it at 8 dollars. The profit would be 7 dollars. It seems worse price for supermarket because they lose 20 dollars compare to the high price. But actually, they are not losing money. Everyone can afford 8 dollars so everyone would buy the grapes. If we sold 4 of them, the profit is going to be higher than the high price, high profit. And if the price is low, many customers would buy this and it would be easier than high price to sell.
Reason number 3
If the supermarket is selling the cloths, this reason would not work for them but if the supermarket is selling the food and drink, there are expiration date so they need to sell all of their inventory before the expiration day. As I said before, high price is going to be difficult to sell and mostly, they would not sell all of their inventory before the expiration date. So they need to keep them in somewhere. But they need to pay extra fee to keep them in somewhere. That is going to cost so much.
Reason number 4
If people in Japan can eat same quality and quantity grape at 8 Singapore dollars, why people in other country, like me, can’t eat same quality and quantity grape at 8 Singapore dollars! That’s so unfair. There should be no change on the price or extra fee based on location. There should be extra fee based on quality and quantity!
***Summarise of fair trade***
What is fair trade?
Fair trade is the trade that traded fairly for sellers, buyers and retailers.
Why fair trade is so important?
Fair trade is important because of following reasons.
- Fair trade would make costumers happy, at least not angry.
- Supermarket can make more profit.
- There will be less expiration date issue and inventory issue.
- There should be no extra fee based on location.
