Shortages of basic goods and long lines of consumers hoping to buy them have spawned a new profession in crisis-hit Venezuela: waiting in line to buy things for other people.
Krisbell Villarroel, a 22-year-old single mother of two small children in Caracas, makes a living by lining up to buy things she then sells to clients who pay her for the time she spends standing in line.
“Every day, I have to get up at two in the morning and call my friends to find out where things are for sale or what is for sale,” Villarroel told reporters.
Photo: AFP
“That is how I spend my day. I get out of the first line at 10:00am and then perhaps go to another to see what they are selling,” she explained. “In one store, I might get milk, sugar or coffee, but in another — flour, rice, diapers or shampoo.”
Villarroel said her customers are families who do not have the time or really the need to wait in line — business people who have their own lives and money to pay someone to do this kind of thing. Several restaurant owners in the Venezuelan capital told reporters they have employees whose only job is to wait in line at supermarkets and stores to buy food to put on the menu.
Venezuela suffers from shortages of nearly a third of all basic goods, inflation that ballooned to 64 percent last year and a recession triggered in part by a scarcity of hard currency that limits imports of essential goods. The government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said the country is at “economic war” triggered by the opposition and by businesspeople bent on destabilizing his administration.
However, many economists say the model Maduro inherited from his predecessor, late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, of currency and price controls has been a failure and accentuated the country’s dependency on oil as a main source of revenue.
In recent days, as long slow-moving lines formed at stores and some fights broke out, the government has ordered security forces to watch over state-owned and private supermarkets.
Some pro-government state governments have even banned people from lining up at night outside stores. For Venezuela, which gets 96 percent of its foreign currency from oil, this year is shaping up as a tough one, given the sharp fall in oil prices.
This could make shortages and rationing at stores even worse in the coming months.
Each day, Villarroel makes between 600 and 1,200 bolivars (between US$3.6 and US$7.1 at the black market exchange rate) per shopping assignment.
She earns at least 13,200 bolivars per month by reselling items to her customers. That is more than some university professors make.
However, it is hard to juggle this kind of work while raising small kids, whom she sometimes has to take with her to the stores.
“No one lets me cut in front of them. I have to be there and it’s hard because the kids are restless and get tired,” she said.
So at times she negotiates with informal vendors who make a point of always being first in line. She pays them for their spot and sells them part of her loot because, as she said, “everything has a price.” And waiting in line at night is risky in a crime-ridden nation with the second-highest murder rate in the world, at 58 per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the WHO. Krisbell insists she is not breaking the law.
“If this problem of the lines is resolved I would have to find another job in order to look after my daughters. I am raising them alone, and that is why I do it. There are many women like me,” she said. She said the blame lies at home.
“If I want 10 packages of cornmeal, why can I only have four? It should not be that way,” she said, referring to rationing imposed by stores.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the