How the crisis provokes us to buy with double force
November 28th of this year, on the official “Black Friday”, in Moscow, queues formed in the newly opened shopping center with an area of 230 thousand square meters. This area is about the size of about 37 football fields, where there are 80 restaurants, 17 cinema halls and 500 shops - they sell everything. For the dollar that day, they gave 47 rubles 66 kopecks, but the consumer panic did not extend to the exchange rate - the retailer, where they sold iPhones at old prices, over four hundred people staged a crush and turned over the stroller with the child. Iphone was not enough for everyone, some went hungry.
Although desperate consumption in Black Friday can be attributed to the hype, this does not explain consumerism in Russia at a time when official inflation for the year approaches ten percent. New iPhone is still not the most necessary product in difficult times. You can infinitely speculate about how much real inflation makes up; it’s enough to go to the store and "leave there a thousand rubles without buying anything" - surely many have heard this phrase in the last month and have felt for themselves. The laws of logic suggest that if money loses its value, and goods become more expensive, then we begin to buy less and spend less. However, people start shopping around with double strength, barbershops are still full of customers, and Sunday brunches are still a reality for residents of large cities, although they can’t be bought in Parmesan.
This feeling of rapid consumption is confirmed by statistics. According to Rosstat, last year the average Russian spent about 14 thousand rubles a month on consumer spending. They include "food expenses" (26.8% of the total amount), "food out of home" (3.3%), "purchase of alcoholic beverages" (1.6%), "purchase of non-food items "(41.4%) and for" payment for services "(26.9%). This year, although overall consumer spending per month decreased by almost a thousand rubles, people began to spend more on food (30.1%), still go to cafes (3.3%), spend more on alcohol (1, 8%), technicians buy a little less (36.6%) and use services more actively (28.2%) - this includes conditional hairdressing salons, beauty salons and even car washing, to speak in human terms. And all this with inflation. A conditional Russian would never save on food (famine during the war is still in the genes), new gadgets (the Russian technology market is far from saturation, although its prices are growing rapidly) and certainly will never give up cable television.
The current generation of Russians does not know how or does not want to engage in long-term investments, but spends money here and now.
If it is even simpler to say, the consumer behavior of a Russian is directly contrary to the law of demand, according to which the consumer buys the more goods, the lower their market price. Such an exception to the rule, when the population with rising prices buys more goods, and with decreasing - less, was described by the English economist Robert Giffen in the XIX century. He explored the period of famine in Ireland in 1846-1849, and found that with an increase in the price of potatoes, its consumption does not fall, but increases. The reason was that despite the rise in prices, the poor could not refuse potatoes - it was still cheaper and more satisfying than other products. But as the more expensive potatoes made low-income people refuse other, more expensive products, they began to buy more and more expensive potatoes so as not to die of starvation. The Giffen paradox manifests itself in Russia in times of crisis — during these periods, the demand for more expensive bread, pasta, and potatoes, with which people replace more expensive food in their diets, is steadily increasing.
But food expenses increase during any crisis period in Russia - in the 90s, when incomes fell almost twice, the share of food expenses increased by 14%. Why do people not stop buying appliances, do not stop going to cafes, do not begin to save on clothes? In general, consumption in these areas is indeed decreasing, but this decrease is not proportional to the increase in inflation. The reason, alas, is in the extremely low economic literacy of the population and in the paradoxical absence of cause-effect relationships. Although according to a poll by the Levada Center, 60% of the country's population agree that a crisis will begin in the near future, and 28% of those surveyed worsened their financial situation over the past year, but Russians believe that “the situation will soon improve,” "food prices and grow." The conditional crisis did not become official until it was announced on TV, therefore, despite the obvious, we will not stop buying while it is being sold.
It is also necessary to take into account the Soviet legacy, which formed the idea of a whole generation of the able-bodied population about what a good life is and, accordingly, not so much. According to Marina Krasilnikova, the head of the Levada Center Center for the Study of Income and Consumption, “by the end of the first decade of the 2000s, Russia had turned from a society“ fed up ”into a society“ dressed ”.” Since in the USSR, it was not the family council that was engaged in providing people with housing, education and health care at the time of budget planning, but the state and the Soviet person formed and rooted consumption patterns in which there is no connection between income and meeting the above needs.
In fact, the money earned could be spent only on food and clothing, and everything else was either free or subsidized by the state. This led to the fact that the current generation of Russians does not know how or does not want to engage in long-term investments (which are investments in education, health and real estate), but they spend money here and now. Relatively speaking, as long as there is money for food and clothing, you can not worry too much. The habit of “watching over one’s health, playing sports regularly, attending fitness clubs” is still not considered dependent on wealth, like getting quality education, and housing is inherited from the grandmother’s apartment in central Moscow.
In general, the Russian consumer believes that a normal life is a better life than the average family lives in a Russian city. In this average family, the apartment is by default furnished with modern appliances, and family members can afford to spend their holidays away from home. In a crisis, consumer habits intensify - and in ordinary times the Russian does not save on current expenditures for the sake of more expensive purchases (real estate), and in the moments of inflation, he doesn’t see any sense in this. Ideas about wealth and wealth are formed from the TV, even among those who can already be called rich. "As a result, representatives of today's mass high-income group continue to either reproduce consumption patterns of lower-income groups, or try to borrow the available lifestyle elements of those who are not one, but several steps higher -" rich people from the TV "(or, more precisely, , the next step is so high that in practice it is difficult to overcome). And more often it is both, "writes Marina Krasilnikova.
Desperate consumerism in times of crisis is also explained by the fact that the accumulation of capital in a period of inflation seems pointless. Spending ruble stocks now, while they are not even devalued, to buy a car now, before the price for it has risen due to the dollar, to make buckwheat stocks now and gut a roll for winter - this is an approximate train of thought during a panic. Such consumer habits are not exactly Russian. For example, during the economic crisis in Argentina in 2001-2002, the culmination of which was riots and a wave of looting, although the population began to buy less, more and more time was spent in stores in search of cheap and discounted goods.
What to do during a crisis? The universal advice, which is voiced from everywhere, became the “turn on your head” advice: not to do mindless spending, monitor prices, not to panic, but people give individual advice based on the income and expenses of a particular person. Articles with these tips, alas, are gaining a furious amount of views. The distinguished economist, columnist of The New York Times and Nobel Prize winner in economics Paul Krugman, once again defending the mechanisms of standard macroeconomics, which are ignored by many economists in favor of political views, once said that "it seems that we don’t need another economy how many other economists. "
Therefore, the best advice would be to go to a bookstore, buy a textbook on micro- and macroeconomics and try to figure out how everything works, by yourself. And be responsible for the actions and decisions taken during the economic crisis. After all, in the end, thinking about money only when you cannot buy anything from them is still a little late.
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