Piles of pencils are seen in a stationery shop in Istanbul, Türkiye, on Sept. 6, 2023. (Photo by Omer Kuscu/Xinhua)
by Zeynep Cermen
ISTANBUL, Sept. 8 (Xinhua) -- Two girls, one in primary school and the other in kindergarten, could not withhold their excitement when they saw the colorful school supplies at a store in Istanbul.
After hesitating between many varieties, they asked their parents to buy them two fancy pencil holders.
Apparently deterred by the price tag, the father gasped out to the seller, "is there anything cheaper?"
Amid the rising cost of living, Turkish families have been struggling to pay for the required school supplies to meet their children's aspirations.
This year, however, prices increased by more than 50 percent compared to last year, making it uneasy for families to make ends meet, especially those living on minimum wages.
Even stationery shops in Istanbul's old Tahtakale neighborhood, where school supplies used to be sold at the lowest prices, have had no choice but to raise their prices due to rising costs.
"A pen holder, two files, and two notebooks cost 640 Turkish liras (about 23.8 U.S. dollars) ... How can we afford all the required basic items?" lamented Seymanur Arslan, the mother of the girls, adding she will also have to pay 2,000-2,500 liras for shoes and school uniforms, in addition to another 2,000 liras for the coats.
The stallholder, meanwhile, was not happy with the sales. "This is the cheapest place to buy stationery in Türkiye," he said without giving his name.
"The school supplies used to be selling like crazy at this time of the year, but the streets are empty now," he complained.
A wholesaler of stationery products in the shop next door said that "the shoppers used to come with a lorry to purchase, now they do their shopping only with a nylon bag."
Ferruh Buyukoglu, the owner of another stationery called "Bargain Market," said the prices of all his items increased by at least 50 to 100 percent.
"As households' purchasing power is diminishing, people resort to credit cards and take on debt at the cost of blowing a hole in the budget," Buyukoglu told Xinhua.
At Buyukoglu's shop, a family of three was buying school supplies for their daughter, who is in her second year of primary school.
"All is very expensive this year. Look, a pencil sharpener is 30 liras, which we used to buy at 2.5 liras or even 1.5 liras," the mother, Nurdan Bulut, said.
"To avoid paying for notebooks, I saved the unused parts of my older son's notebooks for my daughter," she added.
The government has long been trying to solve the rising inflation, which hit 58.94 percent in August, through a series of measures.
The minimum wages of millions of workers increased by 34 percent for the second half of 2023, from 8,506 liras to 11,402 liras. However, the increase has failed to ease the burden on the households.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has recently said the fight against inflation could be long and uphill.
"The rise in annual inflation requires us to fight harder against the cost of living," Erdogan stated, particularly highlighting the surge in prices of raw materials, energy, and labor, as well as rents.
However, the president vowed that his government is determined to lower inflation. ■
