In Accra, Ghana, markets are the one-stop-shop for locals and visitors alike, but that does not necessarily mean one-price-fits-all. Bias, at a micro-level, abounds, and could mean difficulties for the economy of the developing nation.
Accra’s Kaneshie Market is a three-story complex: bright yellow and jaundiced. A mammoth among markets, micro-economics swarms within. It is infested with things living, dead, and inanimate, ranging from soap, salt, tilapia, fabric, peanut butter, pig feet, papaya, and then some. Transactions of buyers and sellers can be heard across tables, the dozens of which are piled high, littered identical with merchandise.
Traversing through the obscure walkways, Western conceptions of economic speculation: of buyers reading prices before purchases, sellers reading demand corollary to supply, become extinct. It is the buyer, not the good, which is speculated by the seller; love, or hate, at first sight.
According to experience, bias, rather than regulation, determines profit margins in the Ghanaian marketplace.
Within Ghana, domestic trade is allocated the largest percentage of credit (24.10%) by deposit money banks, as calculated by the Bank of Ghana Statistical Bulletin in 2009. This is more than import trade, services or manufacturing.
And for the dozens of markets like Kineshie, which comprise the majority of Ghana’s domestic trade and employment (80.4%, according to the Ghana Statistical Service; last updated 2009): bargaining is culture. This means that the largest amount of credit allocated in this developing nation is invested into a sector where capita is not fixed by price tags or stamps, but by word of mouth. Value can inflate or deflate at will, by the flip of the tongue.
Not unique to Kaneshie by any means, haggling over everything from goat’s heads to notebooks is a commonplace. In an ideal situation, a potential customer walks past a neatly displayed table, a particular article peaks his/her curiosity. He/She stops to make an initial inquiry as to the cost, which is subsequently finagled over (upwards and downwards and occasionally backwards), by both buyer and seller, until a mutually accepted price is established. The seller rolls her prize into the folds of her pelvic cloth, and the buyer leaves with his/her item polythened: both happy with their equal share.
But reality on the micro level is different.
With prices not fixed, fluctuation is implied, and thus, economics is subjective toward the seller’s behalf.
“I think that is prejudice, it is definitely prejudice,” says local Godwin Ofori-Attah, director of the Microfinance and Community Development Organization, “because if you [as the vendor] look at me and feel that, because of the way I look, the way I dress, [then] I have money, it is prejudice.”
Having worked in Kaneshie for over nine years, Godwin was educated in Ghana, but spends weeks at a time traveling around the world for business meetings and conferences. Locally, he engages the market climate on the ‘small-small’ scale, educating and organizing susu boxes for market women to deposit and store a percentage of their incomes.
But despite this expertise, even Godwin has felt the judgment of his own customers: “most of the time, the market women look at you and weigh you, they say like, ‘well I know this person can afford like, this price,’.” Rarely does he venture into the moisture of the marketplace for his groceries, rather, he sends his female coworkers to negotiate for him.
For Godwin, the pandemic gets physical: “when it comes to men, men do not have time to be bargaining…so men are always quoted a higher price [than women].”
Being a female, however, I do not feel immune from the price hikes. It is not sexism I feel, but an-ever-so slight racism.
Lighter than most vendors in the market, it has become a personal economic frustration to find that a loaf of sweet bread, usually 50 pesewas for a local, has been quoted as ₵1.5 GHS for me (a 300% price increase). Godwin agrees, remembering a time when one of his interns wanted to get his hair weaved, and was told a price more than 100 times the norm.
It is true that the ignorance of foreigners has been and always will be taken advantage of, but I have been living in Ghana for the past four months. I know what the value of bananas, pencils and fish should be. Furthermore, I am well versed and practiced in the various quirks like “ntosoɔ” (too soh) or “dashing,” in which a little more is given, topping off your purchase, at no extra cost.
Aware of buyer’s manipulation, however, I am still cheated. Because of my dress, my look, my skin…the price of any tabletop commodity swells.
“As soon as they see [you], they know that ‘oh! [you] came from the West, or [you’re] somebody who could have money’,” says Godwin, between good natured bouts of “they-told-me-so” laughter, like hearing the experiences of an obruni (the term for foreigner in the local Twi), reinforced the legends of his youth.
But this prejudgment, sexist, classist, or racist, was current. And not exclusively to me.
“They [the market vendors] think that if they charge me a certain way, I will just go with it,” says California native Ashley Millhouse, who has spent the last three months in Accra as a part of the New York University study abroad program. “Honestly, the markets are just a flood of the senses…It isn’t worth the time and the haggling; I would rather go to a store where everything is in one place and the price is the same for everyone that goes there: obruni or local.”
No longer shopping at local markets or kiosks, Ashley now buys her packaged produce and marked goods from formal retail stores, like Koala Market and Shop-Rite (eerily similar to the squeaky-tiled American ShopRite).
But home goods seller, Theresa Quaye, would disagree. In her opinion, the price adjustment philosophy is not practiced in Kaneshie; it is a “bad habit” germinating elsewhere.
To her, the burgeoning formal sectors of Accra pose no threat: “they don’t disturb our business, no, they don’t do that. We, too, we don’t disturb them.” Her business philosophy is based on friendship and trust: “you have to be nice to your customers so that they bring more people to come and buy and then you get money…”
But even friendliness may subjective: “some people can also pretend, they can act,” says Godwin, who has fallen victim to pay-more-in-sympathy tricks, too.
Unregulated prices give the sellers the power in the hundreds of markets like Kineshie.
And although there are some honest vendors, like Theresa, their existence, according to Godwin, is “isolated:” “even if someone quotes you the direct price, somebody will feel that, ‘well, the price should be less, and I will have to bargain.’ So it has become a culture that the sellers or those who sell in the market, always quote you a higher price.”
Godwin, who doubles as a private microfinance consultant outside the market, says that the biases might in fact be affecting the economics of the shopping center and the developing economy of Ghana: “it is not helping the economy, because there is no fixed price…when a commodity becomes scarce…automatically the price will go up, and when the price goes up, then only the rich people can afford, and the poor people will be left out.”
Not only would this increase social division, but the bargaining and biased market culture would attract future sellers to the informal sector, wherein regulation is nonexistent and taxes are often evaded.
Some buyers, too, would be lured by the belief that goods are cheaper in the marketplace (not considering the condition, quality, or sanitation of such things first).
This can have potentially harmful effects in the long term, according to Godwin. While sellers may read males/females, obrunis/friends, or cars/trotros differently, an influx of the stereotypical ‘more expensive customers,’ would only bandage poverty: “more tourists would stimulate…but the danger is that it would make the tourists mistrust because they will always feel like they are being cheated.”
What can be done to eliminate the prejudice and price fluctuations of the micro-market economy, according to Godwin, is a regulation of prices.
“If we can change our attitude, and educate our market women to call a ‘spade’ a ‘spade,’ and always insist on the normal price [then that would prevent mistrust and cheating.]”
Financial literacy and governmental control would have to be gradual, however, and not without its difficulties, but it might clean up the catacombs of the markets like Kineshie, to a more user-friendly, but still putrid, atmosphere.
But it would also geld the place. While government regulation would likely eliminate the gumming flies and lack of electricity, it may also mean imbedded taxes, higher rental fees, monopolized businesses, and perhaps even job loss. Not to mention an overhaul of the nation’s economy system.
“[With price tags] you will get a little money,” says Theresa, still faithful beside her kiosk, ‘meanwhile the government will tax you big money. No, I don’t want price tags, I want to bargain with the person.”
Shopping in the market would not longer be a way to connect and satisfy needs as well as social networks. Like in the West, it would risk becoming a chore.
Such is the price of progress. Prejudice in Kaneshie, although a microbe of what it could be, still contaminates the Ghanaian national body. Solving it would deliver a civil right, but also remove what is perceived as ‘right’ by some of the civil society.
“Even though I personally do not like going to the market, I don’t think market should be regulated,” says Ashley, on her box of Special K, Red Berries. “I think being overcharged is part of the experience of coming to Africa. In being overcharged makes you realize and understand that you are different or a minority, and that is vital.”
— Yasmin Ogale, Nov. 14, 2010
