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The business can only thrive if its products or services have consumers.

It is therefore incumbent upon businesses to always strive to meet the needs of consumers. An astute businessperson will, before establishing a business, first identify his or her market. The market is in fact the consumers of the proposed business’ products or services. The next step is to establish among other things the quality of products or services the consumers want, the prices the consumers can afford and the quantities required at any given time.

The long and the short of it is that the business is there to service the consumer. These are the basics which we want the National Bakers’ Association of Zimbabwe (NBAZ) to take note of. The association has announced that it might be forced to increase the price of bread from $1 to $1,20 in response to what it described as astronomical tariffs and high local flour prices.

The NBAZ president, Mr Dumisani Moyo, said unless the Government reduces the import duty on flour from 20 to five percent, the bakers will be left with no option but to pass on the increase in tariffs and high local flour prices to the consumers. He said the price of flour went up from $680 to between $710 and $740 per tonne. The Government has however said it will not allow the proposed increase in the price of bread because there was no justification for the increase. Minister of Finance Tendai Biti said there were no fundamental changes in the price and tariffs to warrant the proposed increase.

The Grain Millers’ Association chairman, Mr Tafadzwa Musarara, said the bakers should not use flour prices as an excuse to increase bread prices. “The price of flour has not gone up. So, there is no need to increase the price of bread except if there are other reasons,” said Mr Musarara.

Minister Biti and Mr Musarara are both agreed that there is no justification to increase the price of bread and we hope reason will prevail so that bakers continue supplying us bread at the present price which we again feel is already too high given the global price of the standard loaf of bread. We have already stated that among the fundamentals that businesses should strive to achieve is to make their products or services affordable to their market.

What this entails is that businesses should each and every day be seeking new ways to reduce production costs so that their products or services remain affordable to the majority of consumers. It is reckless on the part of business to resort to just passing costs to the consumer as doing so makes the products expensive and therefore not affordable to the majority of consumers.

The grain millers have said they decided to absorb some of their production costs and we see no reason why the bakers cannot do the same so that they continue to enjoy good bread sales. We want to warn the bakers not to compromise the quality and size of a standard loaf of bread now that the Government has rejected its proposal to increase the price of bread as doing so will be detrimental to their business.

The consumers have just one weapon and that is to reject a product which is either of poor quality or overpriced. The businesses that decide to shortchange their consumers therefore do so at their own peril. We want to once again remind the bakers that it is only those businesses that strive to meet customers’ satisfaction that are guaranteed survival and growth.