Tag Archives | price increase

Tarboush price increased to 500 L.L

gandour tarboush price tag

I never believed that the price of Gandour’s Tarboush has increased from 250L.L to 500L.L until I saw it at one of the supermarkets a few days ago.

This was a bit hard to believe since Gandour are best known for fixing their products prices at 250L.L each for more than 20 years now, but I think the increase is totally justified since the cost of raw material have been increasing over the years too, so it would only make sense for Gandour to do as others do and increase their prices as well.

However, and while people might keep buying Tarboush despite the price increase, I highly doubt their other products will keep selling if they increased their prices too. I mean let’s be honest, Gandour doesn’t produce the finest products, and at 500L.L, people and especially kids will have a lot of alternatives to choose from. Think about Unica at 500L.L for example, wouldn’t you prefer to get a Nouba mini bar instead of it?

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Mobile phone prices in Lebanon increasing already

mobile phones

As you all know, and in order to stop mobile phones smuggling in Lebanon, the ministry of telecommunications is now requiring all traders to register the IMEI (a unique ID assigned to each mobile device) of every legally imported mobile phone or tablet.

The collected IMEIs will then be used as of today June 1st to filter the devices that are allowed access to our mobile networks (alfa and touch). So typically speaking, a legally imported mobile phone with its due taxes paid will be allowed to connect to the mobile networks, while other smuggled ones will be denied access since their unique identifiers are not registered at the ministry.

The weakest ring in the process is of course the group of people who will be responsible of the data entry of the registered IMEIs. Since they will be easily able to register and IMEI of some untaxed mobile if there was not much control over them.

As a result, mobile phone prices ended up notably increasing over the last week. For instance, the guy who sold me my mobile was listing the iPhone 16 GB for around $650 since mid-May I guess, then he increased the price 2 days ago to $745. Logically due to the fact that the handsets he’s currently offering were legally imported and subject to some import tax.

Everybody is eventually complaining about all of this, especially that it gets a bit complicated when you buy some used handset from abroad. And I know it’s wrong to complain about a price increase when it’s a result of complying with the government taxation rules, but still, a $100 increase totally sucks!

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