“Harga makin naik.” Prices keep going up. You hear it everywhere these days, at the office, at the kopitiam, in the family chat. Usually said with a sigh, and then we move on to the next topic.
For me it is butter. A 2kg tin of Golden Churn was $14 if I remember correctly. Now I see it at almost $40, which is nearly three times. You don’t need a spreadsheet to feel that.
Then I started thinking about everything else on the shelf. Cooking oil, rice, eggs, chillies, tomatoes. The things you can’t skip when there are mouths to feed. If one tin can nearly triple, I wonder what these rises do to a family that is already counting every dollar before payday.
And then there is petrol, the elephant in the room. We still pay far less at the pump than most people in the world, and we rarely talk about it because it has been that way all our lives. Shell’s V-Power petrol and diesel are unsubsidised, and their prices went up again in April. The regular grades are a different matter, and I don’t know what happens to them. Nobody has said anything about changing them, and I am not claiming anyone will. But I do wonder. If one day what we pay at the pump reflected the real cost, what would that do to a family that drives to work, to school and to the market every day? I would rather think about it now than be surprised later. Call it a reality check.
When people say “harga makin naik”, I don’t think they are complaining for the sake of it. For some households a few cents on a staple is the difference between a normal week and a tight one.
I don’t have a fix. I’m not an economist, and I won’t pretend a blog post changes the price of butter or petrol. But I think we should take it seriously when people say things are getting expensive. A bit of generosity helps too. Zakat, community food drives, checking on the neighbors, and not wasting food in front of our kids.
My children will grow up with these prices as normal. I’d like them to also grow up knowing that not every fridge is full.