Thread by @canokar

Following rampant inflation, the Turkish government is selling cheap vegetables direct to consumer and is about to move into cleaning products.

Long queues developing in both Ankara and Istanbul and there are limits to how much you can buy.

That does not scream prosperity.

Of course, the government can sell cheaper in the short term and at certain volumes because it can use existing infrastructure to provide logistics, doesn’t have a profit motive and presumably doesn’t pay tax on the sales.

But in a country of 80 million, it will be blindingly obvious to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with economics that this is not a long-term, scalable response to inflation. It may actually put out of business the modern logistics sector on which the economy is based.

It will be interesting to see how far this experiment with state-as-supermarket goes. Everything is eye-wateringly expensive so the hit list of potential products is long.

At what point do you start calling this system what it is (clue: Venezuela)?

What did they call it again when the state sells rationed goods to the populace without market forces or a profit motive? I’m sure it’s been tried in a few places before but I can’t recall if it worked...

I forgot to mention the funniest/most tragic part of the story. The official government narrative is that vegetable prices have gone up due to a concerted terror campaign that targets food prices.

The Cucumber Lobby? 🥒
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes? 🍅
PotaTÖ? 🥔