$37 for Coffee, $15 for Playboy: People Pay Price as Poland’s Economy Nose-Dives

The shoppers don’t have to stand in line, and the service is good. But for the thousands of Poles who flock to the flea market at SKRA sports stadium every Sunday, the prices do seem a tad high--like $15 for Playboy or $37 for two pounds of coffee.

Those running market stalls are usually speculators who are reselling goods they waited hours in line to buy up at the city’s state-run stores, or business-minded tourists with plenty to sell after trips to the Soviet Union, Hungary, East Germany and Western nations.

“The (state-run) shops are becoming more and more irritating because of the number and length of the lines,” a television commentator said recently. “About 15% of shops in Poland are closed every day for the delivery of goods or stock-taking.”

Prized Items

In many cases, store customers not only seek goods they need, but buy whatever else they can get their hands on as investments to hedge against galloping inflation.

Prized items include blue jeans, Western magazines, coffee, heaters, good Western-made hiking shoes, motor oil and a range of officially unobtainable luxury goods.

But even the SKRA flea market nowadays is feeling the pinch of hard times due to a shortage of foreign currency. The country has a foreign debt officially fixed at $33.4 billion and officially blamed on Western sanctions.

With foreign currency earned by most industrial plants being plowed back into repayment of the debt, the result has been an economic chain reaction of fewer imported materials available for production and a shortage of market supplies.

Reform Program

A Polish radio program on the economy said that was a violation of the principles of a much-advertised economic reform program to give more independence to industries.

“At present even the Communist Party is not the force which is defending economic reform,” the radio said.

An estimated 80,000 people pay an entrance fee equivalent to 50 cents every Sunday to do their shopping at SKRA.

Motorists who cannot get motor oil at gasoline stations are prepared to pay the equivalent of $2.50 per liter--twice the official price. Albums, dictionaries, encyclopedias, books for children and Western magazines are snapped up.

$3 Road Map

A road map of Poland--almost unobtainable in the book shops--goes for $3. The official price is $1.50. A Playboy magazine sells for the equivalent of $15 a copy.

Earlier in 1986, the government cut its coffee imports creating such a shortage that a two-pound pack of coffee from Hungary sells for the equivalent of $37. Tourists returning to the country are allowed to bring in 12 pounds of coffee, tax free.

Among the biggest profit-earners for the speculators are Soviet-made electric heaters. The reason: Polish industry does not manufacture enough to meet local demands.

A good pair of hiking shoes carrying an official price tag equivalent to $10 when available in the stores, goes for $22.50 at the flea market.