The Fair Trade Commission pledged to reinforce price checks to prevent monopolistic behavior as prices of dried seafood widely consumed during the Lunar New Year holiday surged at Taipei City’s Dihua Street (迪化街).
The commission reiterated that an unwarranted across-the-board hike in prices before the Lunar New Year holiday constituted a violation of the Fair Trade Act (公平交易法) and that any violations would be subject to fines of up to NT$25 million (US$859,000).
The price of dried shredded squid, a popular snack among consumers, was double the NT$160 per kilogram price charged over much of the previous year, said the owner of a dried foods store on Dihua, a popular spot in the city for ingredients used in traditional Chinese dishes.
The shop owner, identified only by her surname Wu (吳), also said that the price of premium dried sea cucumbers imported from Japan had increased from nearly NT$8,300 per kilogram to more than NT$13,400 per kilo because of rising demand in China and decreasing production.
Prices of dried vegetables such as dried mushrooms have also risen by 20 percent to 30 percent, Wu said.
Price fluctuations 10 days before the start of the Lunar New Year holiday, the most important traditional festival in Taiwan, were also reported at traditional markets around Taiwan.
The Chinese-language United Evening News said customers had complained of hikes in the prices of fresh vegetables, fruit, pork, chicken and eggs on the second to last weekend before the holiday.
Fast food chain McDonald's is to raise prices by up to NT$5 on some products at its restaurants across Taiwan, starting on Wednesday next week, the company announced today. The prices of all extra value meals and sharing boxes are to increase by NT$5, while breakfast combos and creamy corn soup would go up by NT$3, the company said in a statement. The price of the main items of those meals, if ordered individually, would remain the same. Meanwhile, the price of a medium-sized lemon iced tea and hot cappuccino would rise by NT$3, extra dipping sauces for chicken nuggets would go up
Yangmingshan National Park’s Qingtiangang (擎天崗) nature area has gone viral after a park livestream camera observed a couple in the throes of intimate congress, which was broadcast live on YouTube, drawing large late-night crowds and sparking a backlash over noise, bright lights and disruption to wildlife habitat. The area’s livestream footage appeared to show a couple engaging in sexual activity on a picnic table in the park on Friday last week, with the uncensored footage streamed publicly online. The footage quickly spread across social media, prompting a tide of visitors to travel to the site to “check in” and recreate the
GROUNDED: A KMT lawmaker proposed eliminating drone development programs and freezing funding for counterdrone systems, despite China’s adoption of the technology China has deployed attack drones at air bases near the Taiwan Strait in a strategy aimed at overwhelming Taiwan’s air defense systems through saturation attacks, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said. The council’s latest quarterly report on China said that satellite imagery and open-source intelligence indicate that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had converted retired J-6 fighter jets into J-6W drones, which the PLA has stationed at six air bases near Taiwan, five in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province. The report cited J. Michael Dahm, a senior fellow at the US-based Mitchell Institute, as saying that China has
Carrefour Taiwan is to begin using a new name from the start of July, but it cannot divulge the name until then, the chairman of the supermarket chain's parent company said today. President Chain Store Co chairman Lo Chih-hsien (羅智先) was asked by reporters after a shareholders' meeting to confirm whether the company has settled on a new name for the supermarket brand. In March, the government-registered name of two Carrefour Taiwan branches was quietly changed to "Le Chia Kang" (樂家康) in Chinese, raising speculation that has been selected as the name. Lo said that because of local regulations and contractual obligations, the
RSS