Food prices are rocketing globally, headlines RZECZPOSPOLITA, and Poland can start expect to see this after the Christmas holidays.
Prices of some products have already been creeping up – we are paying more for tea and confectionery, dairy produce such as cheeses is up by one-fifth and butter by up to 40 percent. The run up to Christmas is holding down prices for Polish consumers: the newspaper quotes market specialists saying that because of strong competition Polish traders daren’t raise prices in December. But we can expect hikes by spring.
On its business pages, the RZECZPOSPOLITA commentator worries that increasing food prices may mean rising inflation impacting on Polish economy worse than in more affluent countries, as Poles relatively spend a larger part of incomes on food.
With still more than a month to go, the Christmas season also makes headlines in METRO, the paper distributed free in the Warsaw underground, and more precisely, the relation between Christmas and shoplifting. The paper cites a report by the British Centre for Retail Research, according to which shoplifters cost Polish shops about 2 billion zloty (half a billion euro) in a year, and half of this falls in the Christmas season. Thieves cut through security tags, change bar code stickers, substitute items in boxes and even use special bags in which they can carry out goods without setting off alarms. Cosmetics are the most popular loot: not only are they a typical gift but are easy to hide. Further down on the list are mp3 players and game consoles, reports METRO.
Money and flu in DZIENNIK GAZETA PRAWNA which calculates that if the flu epidemic continues at this rate, it may cost the already beleaguered social insurance office ZUS a vast 300 million zloty. On average, sufferers take 10 days off, meaning expenditures on sickness pay and not only. Fewer people at work also has bearing on production, which in turn will affect the financial results of some companies – and the entire Polish economy, writes the paper.
In turn GAZETA WYBORCZA worries over the finances of Polish Radio and the dire consequences for the future of the Polish Radio Choir, the Polish Radio Orchestra and the Orchestra “Amadeus”. Poles are not paying licence fees and while the authorities consider how to make them pay, Polish public radio openly admits that it is bankrupt, as the licence is its main source of funding. The paper writes that because it is a public broadcaster, there isn’t a legal framework allowing Polish Radio to fold – it just has to function without money.
Yet more about the economy in SUPEREXPRESS, which in its series devoted to the half-term of the government of Donald Tusk publishes a devastating opinion from professor Krzysztof Rybiński: “It’s a conglomeration of creative bookkeeping, pushing public debt away from the budget to the Social Insurance Office, manipulations with pension premiums, etcetera.” And he says: “both the previous and the current governments neither came up with an economic plan that could to any degree compare to what the post-communists put forward.”.
Both colour SUPEREXPRESS and FAKT frontpage President Lech Kaczyński, hospitalised on Tuesday evening because of an infection. SUPEREXPRESS takes note of a hanky at the presidential nose during Independence Day celebrations on a wet and blustery November 11, and writes that Lech Kaczyński was already then suffering from a severe cold. Nonetheless… “it’s not swine flu” reports with relief FAKT. (ek)